IX.
Contemporary British Composers
During the early years of the twentieth century an unusual number of British women composers were born. The first decade alone saw the births of Priaulx Rainier, Elizabeth Poston, Grace Williams, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, Imogen Holst, and Phyllis Tate. Most of these composers attended the Royal College of Music (RCM) in the twenties, and many were students of Ralph Vaughan Williams or Gustav Holst. They reacted to and were affected by the English Musical Renaissance and seemed more open than many in their generation to musical currents from the Continent. All struggled with their careers, not only because they were forward-looking composers but also because they were women. None felt she had experienced discrimination at the RCM. However, once out in the professional world, many felt the need to band together and to organize performances where their works could be heard. Anne Macnaghten, in collaboration with conductor Iris Lemare and composer Elisabeth Lutyens, established the recently disbanded Macnaghten-Lemare series as a platform for performances of modern British music.1 Distinguished soloists were approached for help; voices were solicited for a chorus; and Lemare conducted a chamber orchestra made up of amateurs and students.2 By the 1960s, when a favorable musical climate in London and the momentum of their past efforts and successes came together, these women had become well known. In fact, the Society of Women Musicians, an organization founded in 1911 to deal with the problems of invisibility among women composers and performers, disbanded in the early 1970s, believing it had met its objectives.
Thea Musgrave (b. 1928) stands alone in the next generation of composers. Not until the 1960s and early 1970s, when London emerged as one of the international centers of new music, did the RCM and the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) see another generation quite like the one nearer to the beginning of the century. Women composers, including Nicola LeFanu, Erika Fox, Judith Bingham, Diana Burrell, Eleanor Alberga, Rhian Samuel, Sally Beamish, and Judith Weir have benefited from the groundbreaking work of their predecessors. Yet Nicola LeFanu, the daughter of Elizabeth Maconchy, strongly believes that the 1980s saw a rapid decline in opportunities for women in music because of the growing conservative political climate.3 As a result, in 1987 musicians organized Women in Music to address many of the problems created by that decline. The goals of the new organization were to raise the profile of women working in music, alert the media of discrimination against women in all aspects of musical life, organize performances, list upcoming events, review recent triumphs, educate, inform, and network with other women musicians. This organization continues to support women composers to attain their goals.
THE FIRST GENERATION
Elisabeth Lutyens
Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983) was born in London, the fourth of five children of the distinguished architect Edwin Lutyens and Lady Emily Lytton. Though theirs was not a musical family, they did not actively disapprove of their daughter's interest in music. Lutyens studied both piano and violin, practiced many hours a day, and began to compose in secret. Strongly impressed by “the exciting flavor of new music from France—Debussy and Ravel—that was beginning to filter through the fog of English programmes,”4 she persuaded her parents to let her go to Paris to study at the École Normale. She then entered London's Royal College of Music and was assigned to Harold Darke—though she might have been placed with Ralph Vaughan Williams or John Ireland, composers whom, in retrospect, she relegated to “the cowpat school of composition.”5 Darke's encouragement was central to the eventual development of her own highly individual compositional style.
In the 1930s Lutyens had two experiences that influenced her greatly: she was introduced to Purcell's contrapuntal string fantasias, which, she said, led her to discover serial composition; and she heard a performance of Webern's “Das Augenlicht,” which she found unforgettable. Lutyens turned permanently to serial technique with her Concerto for Nine Instruments (1940). Her new musical language developed naturally out of the rigor of her compositional attitudes, and her fascination with mathematical relationships placed her outside Britain's musical mainstream. Life for Lutyens was extremely difficult during and after World War II. In 1933 she married Ian Glennie, with whom she had three children, but she later left him for Edward Clark, a well-known champion of contemporary music. Though Clark played many roles in her life, he did not provide financial support. At first Lutyens made a meager living copying music, but writing music for documentary films eventually became a major source of her income, and she produced more than one hundred such scores.
O Saisons, O Châteaux! (1946) for soprano, mandolin, guitar, harp, solo violin, and strings presages Lutyens's mature style. Setting a poem from Rimbaud's Les Illuminations, Lutyens creates an extraordinary atmosphere, expressed directly in beautiful, highly articulate melodic writing. Another side of Lutyens can be seen in her Stevie Smith songs of 1948; light and humorous, these cabaret songs capture the essence of Smith's poetry. During the 1950s Lutyens solidified elements in her compositional style and emerged a mature composer in such works as her Concertante for Five Players (1950) and String Quartet No. 6 (1952). Marks of her style included the use of palindromic structures and a progressive paring down of materials and gestures. Her harmonic language became consistent, her musical structures more tightly organized. Despite her rigorous approach to composition, she had an instinct for keeping the music varied.
Her vocal music is most impressive—both solo and choral works are characterized by a wide-ranging choice of texts and sensitive musical reactions to the words themselves. Motet (Excerpta Tractati-Logico-Philosophici), Op. 27 (1953), is one of Lutyens's most remarkable compositions. For her text she selected a series of statements from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Logischphilosophische Abhandlung (1912), a tract that poses the questions: How is language possible? How can a person, by uttering a sequence of words, say something? And how can another person understand? The formal, abstract nature of the text freed Lutyens from any necessity to interpret words. Hence her motet is not a setting of words so much as a realization of Wittgenstein's philosophical ideas through her technique of musical composition. Though the motet uses twelve-tone aggregates, combinations, and serial techniques, it is not dodecaphonic in the strict sense of the word. This taut, complex, lyrical work, full of choice and craft, is not without the performance difficulties typical of all Lutyens's works.
Two important works from the 1960s are And Suddenly It's Evening (1966) and Essence of Our Happinesses (1968). The earlier work is scored for tenor voice and eleven instrumentalists: an ensemble of brass instruments as well as two trios: one of harp, celesta, and percussion; the other of violin, horn, and cello. Lutyens creates a universe of sound in her distilled and economic use of material in this twenty-five-minute work. Essence of Our Happinesses, whose title is taken from Donne's Devotion XIV, is built on texts by three different poets from different periods, nationalities, and traditions. The central movement, “Their Criticall Dayes,” is the spiritual core of the work. The opening uses four-part SATB choir; thereafter the choir alternates with the tenor soloist. Simple vertical sonorities are employed, and the texture is sparse. The work achieves a timeless effect through the subtlety of its musical events, the sparseness in the layout of the melodic and harmonic incidents, and the repetition of musical material.
In the 1970s, after focusing on dramatic and vocal works, Lutyens wrote a series of instrumental pieces entitled Plenum (Plenum I: piano; Plenum II: solo oboe and thirteen instrumentalists; Plenum III: string quartet; and Plenum IV: organ). In them Lutyens increased the flexibility of her notation and continued to reduce musical events. Plenum I (CAMW, p. 179) represents a departure in Lutyens's piano compositions, indicated by such immediately visible features as the lack of bar lines, many pauses, and phrase markings followed by commas for breaths. The tone rows stated in the first half of the piece are restated in retrograde from the work's central point, an example of the palindrome form Lutyens frequently uses.
Lutyens always had a loyal following, and during the last decade of her life her closest friends were avant-garde musicians younger than she. These were the people who appreciated her work, her uncompromising spirit, her fearlessness, and her commitment to new music.
Elizabeth Maconchy
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994) was born in Broxbourne, Hereford, north of London. Although both her parents were Irish, the family lived in Buckinghamshire for several years before moving to Dublin after World War I. When her father died, the family returned to England. In the same year, when she was sixteen years old, Maconchy was accepted into the Royal College of Music, where she studied composition with Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams. She worked with the latter for many years and acknowledged the central influence on her music of both Vaughan Williams and the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.
During her six years at the RCM, Maconchy won the Blumenthal and Sullivan scholarships. In 1929, on being awarded the Octavia Traveling Scholarship, she visited Vienna and Paris and then spent two months in Prague studying with Karel Jirák. Her music aroused much interest, and she returned in 1930 when her piano concerto was premiered by the Prague Philharmonic. Maconchy later (1935) traveled to Prague, Cracow, and Warsaw (1939) for performances of her works by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Her first major performance in London had already occurred in 1930, when Sir Henry Wood conducted her suite, The Land, at the Prom Concerts. Yet despite favorable press notices and recognition from people in important places, her early career did not flourish as one might have expected. Maconchy remained a private person, with a strong, quiet nature, and her hard-fought struggle with tuberculosis restricted her activities. However, in her solitude she was able to develop her own way of thinking, and she never stopped composing. She focused on chamber music, concentrating specifically on the string quartets that form the core of her output.
Between 1933 and 1984 Elizabeth Maconchy wrote thirteen string quartets, thus becoming the modern English composer most closely associated with this medium. Like the quartets of Bartók, Maconchy's reveal highly contrapuntal textures, short chromatic motives, and canonic procedures. However, her compositions are not derived from folk music, as are those of Bartók, Vaughan Williams, and Janácek—composers with whom she is constantly compared. For Maconchy, the string quartet is the perfect vehicle for dramatic expression, as if four characters were engaged in statement and comment: “the clash of their ideas and the way in which they react upon each other.”6 Her early quartets, those most often compared to Bartók's, follow a classic multimovement format, but the later ones tend to be more compact, often in one continuous movement, with a very economical use of material.
In the mid-1950s, after having experienced what she called a creative block, Maconchy began to write operas, and she produced three one-act works in a ten-year period (1957–1967). She also wrote several pieces for children's voices: operas, extravaganzas, scenas, and musical theatre works. Her interest and enthusiasm for setting text also led to a rich outpouring of choral music and music for solo voice and instrumental ensemble, including Ariadne (1970), for soprano and orchestra, and The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1978), for mixed chorus, alto flute, viola, and harp. Her integrity as a composer came from knowing current trends, supporting other musicians, participating in contemporary music organizations, and quietly writing because she had to. Maconchy achieved a balance of craft and control with insight. She was named Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1977. The Arts Council of Great Britain sponsored a film in 1984 documenting her lengthy and prolific career, examining the struggles she had to endure as a female composer in what until very recently was predominantly a male world. In 1987 Maconchy received the title Dame of the British Empire, only the second woman composer to be recognized with this honor. The music which Maconchy continued to produce until she was in her late seventies showed an untiring determination to explore new ground without losing the lyricism and expressive qualities of her maturity.
Grace Williams
In the history of Welsh music, Grace Williams (1906–1977) occupies a position of first importance, and her reputation is undisputed. She came from a musical family and fondly remembered the days when she played violin in a family trio. After studying music at the University of Cardiff, she went on to the Royal College of Music, as did her friend Elizabeth Maconchy; there she studied composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams. Upon completing her degree, she traveled to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz. Back in London, Williams taught at the Camden School for Girls and composed music. She remained in London a total of twenty years (1926–1946) before returning to Wales, where she spent the rest of her life. Highly self-critical, she later purged many of her earliest, highly experimental pieces: her journal of May 10, 1951, reads, “DAY OF DESTRUCTION. Examined all my music manuscripts and destroyed nearly all which I considered not worth performing.” Yet this early period also saw the creation of two of her most frequently programmed works, the Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1941) and Sea Sketches (1947), a suite of five pieces inspired by the coastline near her home. Fantasia, which quotes eight traditional melodies, immediately became popular and was soon recorded. The work did much to make Grace Williams known, and for this it occupies an important position in her output.
The years between 1955 and 1961 were richly creative and productive. Penillion (1955), a suite for orchestra, is closely related to an indigenous, improvisational form of singing in Wales known as cerdd dant; it retains the recurring form ABAB, the narrative style, and the rhythmic and melodic characteristics of the traditional penillion. Most of Williams's compositions written in the last ten years of her creative life involved voice in some way. At the age of sixty she wrote an opera, The Parlour (1966), adapting her own libretto from Guy de Maupassant's short story En famille. In Missa Cambrenisis (1971) she incorporated nonliturgical material into the Latin rite. The sound of bells and the interval of the tritone color the score, and the work as a whole shows the influence of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem.
The Marian hymn Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea, 1973) for unaccompanied mixed chorus is perhaps her most impressive work. The first three words of the hymn form a refrain that opens every stanza, and the plastic rhythms reflect the ebb and flow of the sea, as do the undulating melodic lines and the skillful changes in vocal color. Williams was a communicator whose command of orchestral writing and skilled handling of voices made her contribution to Welsh music inestimable.
Priaulx Rainier
Priaulx Rainier (1903–1986), born in South Africa, was largely a self-taught composer. Her musical language combines twentieth-century forms with the sounds she heard on the borders of Natal and Zululand during her childhood. In 1920 Rainier was awarded a Cape University Overseas Scholarship to study violin at the Royal Academy of Music. After graduation she remained in London, where she taught and performed. While recovering from a serious car accident she composed her first work, a duo for piano and violin, which was performed at Wigmore Hall in 1936. This successful premiere was followed by Three Greek Epigrams for soprano and piano (1937) and a string quartet (1939). Trademarks of Rainier's early style are apparent here: a wide variety of textural contrasts and ostinato-like rhythmic structures reminiscent of African music and dance.
In the autumn of 1937 Rainier studied for several months with Nadia Boulanger; these were her only formal composition lessons. Though composing did not come easily to Rainier, she found her own way and was able to forge a refined, disciplined, meticulously crafted, highly personal idiom. By the mid-1940s she had become a professor of composition at the RAM.
In 1953 Peter Pears commissioned the first of two works from Priaulx Rainier: Cycle for Declamation for unaccompanied tenor voice on fragments from John Donne's Devotions. Pears's second commission produced Bee Oracles (1970), Rainier's largest chamber work. This accessible and attractive piece, written for voice, flute, oboe, violin, cello, and harpsichord, is frequently performed; its text by Edith Sitwell draws on Indian philosophical thought. Rainier's only choral work is a powerful and prophetic Requiem (1955) for unaccompanied chorus and tenor solo. The text, by David Gascoyne, is a warning for future victims, a requiem for the ideals and hopes of the world. Rainier's choral writing is homophonic and stark in its rhythmic strength. The incantatory tenor solo acts at times as an integral part of the chorus, while at other times it provides a connection between choral sections and dramatic recitative.
The Requiem was the culmination of Rainier's early work. A change can be detected in her style during the early 1960s, when her compositions became more abstract, compressed, and chromatic, with many semitones and minor ninths. A strong rhythmic energy, employed with great sophistication, continued to pervade her music. Rainier's mature style can be heard in Pastoral Triptych (1960) for solo oboe, and Quanta (1962) for oboe and string trio. The title of Quanta, the first of her BBC commissions, refers to the quantum theory of energy existing in space, independent of matter. Though Priaulx Rainier's output is not large, it is meticulously crafted, and her music is complex, with highly charged dissonance and fragmented rhythms.
THE MIDDLE GENERATION
Thea Musgrave
Thea Musgrave was born in Barnton, Midlothian, near Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 27, 1928. Though music was an essential part of her childhood, not until she had begun a premedical course at Edinburgh University did she choose to make it her life's work. A postgraduate scholarship enabled her to work with Nadia Boulanger, from whom she learned the fundamental principles of discipline and economy and “the importance of every bar.”7 In 1952 Musgrave received the coveted Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize in composition, the first Scottish composer to be so honored. The next year she fulfilled her first commission—from the Scottish Festival at Braemar—with A Suite o' Bairnsangs for voice and piano. Her first major success came with Cantata for a Summer's Day (1954), a work commissioned by BBC Scotland and scored for chamber ensemble, narrator, and small chorus. Thereafter, Musgrave's works show a gradual movement toward serial technique. Her first fully serial piece is a setting for high voice and piano of “A Song for Christmas,” a declamatory scena written in 1958.
The period 1961–1965 marks a break in her development. Without commission or prospect of performance, Musgrave embarked on her first full-length opera, The Decision, and worked on it for two years to the virtual exclusion of everything else. Its successful world premiere in 1967 at Sadler's Wells in London led Musgrave in a new direction as a composer. She became preoccupied with an instrumental style she describes as dramatic-abstract: dramatic in the sense that certain instruments take on the character of dramatic personae; abstract because there is no program. In several of the twenty-seven instrumental compositions written between 1964 and 1972, soloists are required to stand and move around the stage, engaging in musical dialogue or confrontation with other performers. While all the parts are fully notated, they need not be exactly coordinated with other parts or with the conductor; such a piece is described as asynchronous music. The first of Musgrave's dramatic-abstract works is the Chamber Concerto No. 2 (1966). This piece in homage to Charles Ives uses the character of Rollo, represented by the viola, to disrupt the general calm with phrases from popular melodies.8 The concerto, in one uninterrupted movement divided into six short sections, is written for five players performing on a total of nine instruments.
A natural outgrowth of Musgrave's interest in the dramatic aspects of instrumental music was her return, in 1973, to operatic composition. In The Voice of Ariadne, a three-act chamber opera, the asynchronous techniques of the concerti are carried over into the vocal ensembles. During the late 1970s Musgrave wrote two operas, Mary Queen of Scots (1977), one of her most significant works to date, and A Christmas Carol (1979), her most frequently performed work. The musical idiom of Mary is accessible and often tonal. The orchestral textures are always inventive, and the chorus is used very resourcefully, on and off the stage. The title character's soliloquy (see HAMW, pp. 367–74) provides powerful insight into her strength and determination. A drama of conflict and confrontation, Mary highlights Musgrave's keen sense of dramatic timing and her rich theatrical imagination.
Musgrave's opera Harriet, the Woman Called Moses (1985) is based on the life of Harriet Tubman, whose exploits as a conductor on the nineteenth century's Underground Railroad, leading African-American slaves to freedom, made her a major heroine in American history. As the librettist, Musgrave embroidered the details of Harriet's life and utilized a flashback technique, unusual for opera, to portray Harriet as she plots her return to free other slaves. Musgrave uses authentic folk songs and spirituals as she tells of Harriet's escape from slavery and of the many people who helped her. The work opens and closes with a thundering chorus built around two chords that carry the “Freedom” motif of the opera, and the chorus is almost always on stage to observe, comment on, or participate in the action. Harriet was revised in 1986 as The Story of Harriet Tubman. While the original version was scored for full orchestra, the later edition uses only flute, clarinet, horn, piano (doubling on synthesizer), percussion, violin, viola, and cello. In addition to changes in the orchestration, there are significant changes in length (the new version, in one act, is one and one-half hours long, as opposed to the two-act original, which takes three hours in performance).
Simón Bolívar (1995) has proved to be the strongest of Musgrave's eight operas to date. Bolívar, an important nineteenth-century Venezuelan idealist and liberator, freed six Latin American countries from the yoke of colonialism. His story and the historical context of the struggle to unify South America provided the theatrical urgency necessary for Musgrave's dramatic presentation. Though the original libretto (by Musgrave) was written in English, the premiere run, in Richmond, Virginia, was sung in Spanish. In two acts, comprising fourteen scenes, Bolívar subtly combines twentieth-century style with folk material. To prepare the libretto, Musgrave read more than a dozen biographies of Bolívar—some strongly pro-Bolívar, others highly critical—and his letters, several of which became the bases for arias. She immersed herself in various indigenous musics of the Caribbean region and of Central and South America. Musgrave succeeds, as she did earlier in Mary and Harriet, in incorporating music borrowed from various sources into her own distinctive style with authenticity and integrity. Her scoring in Bolívar provides a palette of musically distinctive colors. Musgrave utilizes a prepared harp (a brown bag is threaded through the strings) to sound like a banjo, and a synthesizer to produce mandolin and guitar sounds. The chorus is engaging throughout.
In choosing Harriet Tubman and Simón Bolívar as operatic subjects, Musgrave has deliberately made historical connections from the nineteenth century to the final decades of the twentieth. She has chosen larger-than-life, charismatic figures: “Harriet is every woman who dared to defy injustice and tyranny; she is Joan of Arc, she is Susan B. Anthony, she is Anne Frank, she is Mother Theresa.”9 Writing about Bolívar, Musgrave adds:
Each generation needs its heroes: those people who can conceive of a new world and who also have the charisma, commitment and skill to bring it to reality. Thus Bolívar. Though in his own eyes he was not successful (those who serve a revolution only plough the sea), for us he is a source of insight and understanding of the difficulties of achieving the goals he aspired to. No struggle of this nature is in vain: we find renewal of his spirit in a few rare and wonderful people of our own time.10
Musgrave has not lost her fascination with the concerto-style works for which she was so well known in the sixties and seventies. Her most recent interest lies in two neglected instruments of the orchestra: the marimba, featured in Journey through a Japanese Landscape, and the bass clarinet, which plays protagonist in Autumn Sonata. In the earlier work the marimba is mixed in with a wind orchestra (rather than blended), and presents the four seasons through a connected series of haiku, each introduced by the soloist who produces evocative sounds of the seasons with glissandi on wind chimes made of different materials: bamboo, wood, metal, and glass for spring, summer, autumn, and winter, respectively. (This work is one of the many major percussion pieces inspired by the musicianship and virtuosity of Evelyn Glennie.)
In Autumn Sonata an extramusical inspiration is apparent. Musgrave, still haunted by the poetry of Austrian writer Georg Trakl, places fragments of his work at the beginnings of each of the five movements and the coda. The poetic lines serve to inspire and set the tone for the piece—they are not read but are only printed in the score for effect. In Wild Winter, the piece written just prior to this sonata, Musgrave used one of Trakl's poems in a setting for vocal quartet and viol consort. That earlier work, a moving protest against the horrors of war, was premiered by the British ensemble Fretwork. In this “autumnal dream landscape” Musgrave abandons one aspect of her earlier dramatic concerto style—solo players do not move around the stage to illustrate the dialogue visually or to project the role of protagonist. However, the solo bass clarinet is shadowed by an offstage orchestral bass clarinet. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (for piano, Op. 27, No. 2), hinted at early in this work, adds to the dark colors of her orchestral writing, especially in the concluding Adagio sostenuto. In a program note Musgrave writes of “the three musical elements that open this famous sonata (the dotted rhythm of the melody, the accompanying triplet figure, and the low resonant bass).” She concludes her comments with a statement that “neither Autumn Sonata nor Wild Winter are intended as direct descriptions of war, but rather a memory, alternating between dream and nightmare.”11
In addition to her accomplishments as a composer, Musgrave has become a welcomed lecturer and a respected conductor of her own works. She was the third woman to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra since its inception in 1900 and the first to conduct one of her own compositions, the Concerto for Orchestra, with that symphonic ensemble. She has directed the New York City Opera, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the San Diego and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Musgrave is fortunate to have had almost all of her works performed soon after they were written. She recognizes what a valuable lesson this is for any composer, for only then can the writer gain confidence and begin to explore new and individual paths.
THE NEW GENERATION
Nicola LeFanu
Nicola LeFanu, the daughter of Dame Elizabeth Maconchy, was born in Essex in 1947. She remembers that her mother would play the piano every evening and compose music; thus, “It never entered my head that to be a woman composer was unnatural.”12 LeFanu studied composition with Egon Wellesz at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, from which she graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts (and honors) degree in music. Her other teachers included Goffredo Petrassi, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Earl Kim.
The music of Nicola LeFanu covers a broad range of genres. She has written for orchestra, chamber ensemble with and without voice, solo voice, chorus, and solo voice accompanied by one instrument. Many people think of her as primarily a composer of vocal music, and indeed her works for solo voice are popular with singers. Since poetry, theatre, and opera have fascinated LeFanu since childhood, it is no surprise that during the last decade four of her operas have been premiered.
The Same Day Dawns (1974), one of LeFanu's most-performed works, is scored for soprano and five players and uses texts drawn from Tamil, Chinese, and Japanese poems. The work is a cycle of very short, atmospheric songs that reflect the moods and colors of the words with a conciseness reminiscent of Asian art. Though only eleven pieces are written, the set in fact includes fifteen, since four of the first five songs are repeated in reverse order toward the end of the cycle. The Old Woman of Beare (1981), a dramatic dialogue for soprano and thirteen instruments, is based on a medieval Irish poem in which a tenth-century retired Irish courtesan, who is ending her life in a convent, compares her current physical state with that of earlier years. The work was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the former Macnaghten Concerts (earlier called the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts). The score alternates highly dramatic, narrative lines with sung lines requiring a wide range and an agile singing voice. Shifting colors in the instruments support the texture and timbre of the old woman's story as it is presented in song (see CAMW, p. 130).
In 1989 the BBC broadcast The Story of Mary O'Neill, a commissioned radio opera with libretto by Sally McInerney. It tells of a young Irish woman who leaves her homeland during the potato famine of 1860 and heads for South America. There she marries an indigenous man and gives birth to twin sons. As adults, one son seeks his fortune in Buenos Aires and the other remains in touch with his native roots and environment. In old age, the two brothers reconnect and reflect on their fates. As in The Old Woman of Beare, LeFanu cleverly integrates speech and music; solo and ensemble passages alternate with lyrical and angular writing.
LeFanu collaborated with medieval scholar and poet Kevin Crossley-Holland for two operatic enterprises, The Green Children and The Wildman. The first retells one of Britain's oldest folk tales, dating from the twelfth century. The story, which at its premiere featured more than two hundred children, tells of the inexplicable appearance of two children from another—green—world. Though the setting is medieval, the opera addresses such issues as society's attitudes toward difference, color, acceptance, and rejection. These are universal themes that interest LeFanu and to which she would return.
For Blood Wedding (1992), LeFanu, Deborah Levy (librettist), and Anne Manson (conductor) were approached by Jules Wright (theatre director of the Woman's Playhouse Trust) to collaborate on an opera. The venture showcased the work of prominent artistic women working together on a single project. The plot, adapted from a play by Federico Garcia Lorca, provides strong roles for the women characters. Defying operatic conventions, the two main male characters in the opera die. Instead of a solitary prima donna role there are several roles of sustained depth and significance for women. Critic Claire Messud made this observation:
That the opera should close with all its women—full, human characters—singing together is a symbolic departure in a new direction. I don't think it's an accident that the composers Thea Musgrave, Judith Weir, and Ethel Smyth all felt that [opera] was a suitable form of expression for them. If there is some way in which women view the world differently, then perhaps it is a kind of overall, integrative view which might mean there is a connection between women and opera.13
Blood Wedding is the largest operatic commission ever undertaken in Britain outside the great opera houses. The work, in two acts, is scored for a seventeen-piece orchestra. Its premiere, though highly successful, received a lukewarm reception from much of the mainstream press.
LeFanu's most recent opera, Wildman (1995), not unlike the children's opera, deals with an outsider who both distracts and attracts—and sometimes liberates the townspeople he encounters. The libretto, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, derives from a twelfth-century Suffolk legend: the fishermen of Orrford capture a creature—half man, half beast—who terrifies them with his strangeness and lack of human speech. The townsfolk lock him away, but the local sheriff's wife and children learn to respond to his strangeness. As he regains his speech, he tells his story, then swims back to sea, leaving the people to ponder how he changed their lives. The cast consists of eight singers, with some doubling of roles. The orchestra, only twelve players strong, subtly captures the sound and mist-enveloped bleakness of the coastal marsh, and the dissonant writing for the winds is particularly evocative.
LeFanu's article “Master Musician: An Impregnable Taboo?” written in 1987, challenged and changed the discourse in Britain with regard to women composers. The staid music establishment and the press took notice of her well-documented inequities, but they have yet to make any tangible changes. Her plea for balance in programming and commissioning and for equal opportunities, while not having fallen on deaf ears, has fallen on resistant ones. At the conclusion of her introduction to the Contemporary Music Review's special issue on British women composers, LeFanu writes:
The bibliography which completes this volume does not try to be comprehensive…. It should provide a useful introduction; a first guidebook through territory which ought to be completely familiar, yet in fact is hardly ever visited. We all have received a view of West European music history from which the woman composer has been excluded…. Which is more unsatisfactory for a composer: to appear in a reference book which segregates by gender? Or not appear in a reference book at all? Very few artists know how passionately many of them have called out for rescue from it. Let us all make sure that the next generations of young women composers do not vanish like their predecessors.14
Judith Weir
Born in Cambridge in 1954, Judith Weir grew up believing that music was something spontaneous and homemade. Her family, originally from Scotland, included enthusiastic amateurs who often played Scottish folk music. Weir began composition lessons while still in high school, and her experience as an oboist in the National Youth Orchestra influenced and inspired her. Before going to Kings College, Cambridge, in 1973, she spent six months at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she sat in on computer music classes with Barry Vercoe. She also benefited from study with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood.
The catalogue of publicly performed works by Judith Weir begins in 1972, though she has already withdrawn pieces she feels are not up to standard. Until her extremely successful opera, A Night at the Chinese Opera, most of her compositions were for small forces, and almost half of them used voice. From the start of her career Weir has preferred to fashion her music for specific performers (often her friends), for she feels that this is a natural, organic way of working and thinking. She has found the music of Stravinsky and the ever-surprising elements in the music of Haydn to be rich sources of inspiration. Restrictions and parameters inspire her and set her going, as in King Harald's Saga (1979), composed for soprano Jane Manning. This unaccompanied, ten-minute scena is a colorful portrayal of the Norwegian king's unsuccessful invasion of Britain in 1066. Weir captures the essences of eight colorful characters, all depicted by the soprano, through economy, clarity of text setting, and a keen sense of the sung word.
The Consolations of Scholarship, a music-drama based on two Chinese or Yuan plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has received frequent performances. The work is for a mezzo-soprano, accompanied by nine instrumentalists who play all the characters in this drama about court intrigue, politics, and revenge. Again, clarity of text setting, light-textured harmony, sparse instrumental accompaniment, and an economy of gesture demonstrate Weir's inventiveness and musical wit.
Although Weir is thought of primarily as an opera composer, she always emphasizes the significance of her instrumental and orchestra works in her output. She calls her Airs from Another Planet (1993) a suite of traditional music from outer space. This chamber piece in four movements (“Strathspey and Reel,” “Traditional Air,” “Jig,” and “Bagpipe Air with Drones”) is playful, bright, and Pierrot-like. In Moon and Stars, for choir and orchestra, Weir sets Emily Dickinson's three-stanza poem “Ah, Moon and Star!/You are very far” about the wonders of the universe and the impossibility of comprehending them. Weir likens her use of the chorus in Moon and Stars to Debussy's in Nocturnes, where the voices add another layer of color to the instrumental palette.
Judith Weir catapulted to international prominence with A Night at the Chinese Opera (1986–1987), commissioned by the BBC for Kent Opera. Already intrigued by the Chinese music-dramas of the thirteenth century, she constructed her own libretto and created a three-act opera for eleven singers and a modest orchestra. The outer acts are fully scored, staged, and sung, whereas Act II is a fast-moving, musically stylized reconstruction of a Yuan play (The Orphan of the Chao Family). In the play Weir reduces her instrumentation to more or less authentic Yuan proportions. The plot traces the adventures of a young canal builder in Kubla Khan's China who sees his career mirrored in the play. The opera moves at a very rapid pace, for Weir has cut her text to a minimum. The orchestral forces in the central act are greatly reduced and the sound is starkly oriental, whereas the orchestral writing in the outer acts is vivid and striking. Weir makes use of minimalist techniques, and her thematic economy and precision illuminate the situation on stage.
For her third opera, Blond Ekbert, Weir again fashioned her own libretto, this time from a short story by nineteenth-century German writer Ludwig Tieck. Commissioned in 1993 by the English National Opera, Blond Ekbert presents a story within a story. The first act is the retelling by the protagonist's wife, Berthe, of the fairytale circumstances of her childhood. The psychotic Eckbert finds himself reliving these incidents in the second act, where he learns, after her death, that his wife was also his sister. When the truth is revealed, Eckbert is destroyed. Weir calls her work “a story of psychological discovery and a detective story.” The few characters are sketched skillfully, their moods and psychological complexities painted with fresh sounds and ever-changing orchestral doubling. Though the orchestra is substantial, Weir's lightness of touch and chamber-like approach are again evident in this work.
Weir believes that the labels “minimalist” and “eclectic” certainly capture some aspects of her work, although she believes the minimalist label is a “loaded” word these days. She does not rule out any musical device, and sees each piece as a fresh beginning. Her work is a diary of what happens to her, and she remarks, “Should I meet people I want to work with, I will. I don't like to get too scheduled up too long in advance, because you change.”15
Diana Burrell
Diana Burrell was born in 1948 in Norwich, and studied music at Cambridge University. There she concentrated more on viola performance than on composition. For a time after her studies she taught at an all-girls high school, where she gained practical experience writing music. Later she traveled as a freelance violist. Burrell has seen a steady stream of commissions since she gained recognition for her 1980 Missa Sancte Endeliente. Self-taught in composition, she has struggled to forge her own musical language.
Burrell feels challenged to create music that is bold, imaginative, and challenging. In her Arthur Batchelor lecture, “Open Wide the Windows, or Cower under the Duvet?” she argues that our visual sense is more developed than our aural sense. We have learned to assimilate a lot of visual stimuli, exercising our visual faculties more than our hearing. She posits that our aural abilities have not kept pace with film, pop-videos, and ballet images; hence much popular music strives to be inoffensive; it is ubiquitous; it is easy-listening and user-friendly. When asked what inspires her, she replies:
The combination of timeless and contemporary. The combination of forms that seem half human, half landscape or rock formation; and the sense that humanity is part of something much bigger. Above all, the constant vertical nature of the forms, humans striving to gain awareness of their place in the cosmos—creatures that look upwards and outwards beyond everyday experience.16
Since 1980 Burrell has seen a steady stream of commissions in all genres. In her music she combines both practical and imaginative elements, which sound new, fresh, and bold. Lately she has started to introduce her music to audiences immediately before performances in order to guide listeners through the landscapes of sounds that unfold in her works. She has accepted residencies, working in community with groups, and she maintains a close association with Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs. She is a composer in community, and the sounds of everyday life attract her:
I can truthfully say that church bells are my favorite sound in the universe! Steel pans and shrieking of seabirds are not far behind, and the clanging of metal in a building-site or scrapyard is slightly further down the list again.17
Resurrection (1992), a work for chamber orchestra, casts the English horn as the outsider who appears from within the music's texture and addresses the other players. It seems that the outsider is not accepted, as the listener hears an aural attack, swooping sounds in the instrumental lines that seem to silence the English horn. The metaphor here is not that of Christ's death and resurrection, but rather that of a representative of a new artistic or musical experience in our lives. Burrell's palette of percussion sonorities often drives the elemental energy of her rhythms. Wind chimes, marimba, bells, and rainstick add to the wailing brass and scampering strings, as if the whole ensemble is in conversation, argument, and resolution.
In Landscape (1988), steel drums, with their usual sonorous decay, and various metal objects find their way into the imaginative environment, part seaside and part cityscape. What might seem disparate sounds yield the curious, exciting, riveting character of Burrell's pieces. Having an appetite for unfamiliar sounds, she is always conscious of an underpinning of elemental energy.
In her Viola Concerto, composed in 1994, Burrell includes a subtitle, “…calling, leaping, crying, dancing,” to reveal the entire realm of human expression the music evokes through its physicality and strength. In one overarching movement she employs the concerto principle of solo instrument against group. She captures the “vertical nature of the forms” using expansive vertical sonorities, dark and dissonant, against the excitement and conversational lyricism of the viola. Other works for orchestra include Das Meer, das so gross und weit ist, da wimmelt's ohne Zahl, grosse und kleine Tiere (The Sea, that is so long and wide, where numberless large and small creatures swarm; 1992), Landscape with Procession (1988), and Symphonies of Flocks, Herds and Shoals (1995–1996). Her significant works for chorus range from the short Hymn to Wisdom to extended works like Missa Sancte Endeliente and Io Evoe. There are also works for chamber ensemble, along with duo and solo works. Burrell summarizes her aims:
I want my music's building-blocks to be the old ones of melody, harmony, and rhythm and I want (I imagine like many composers) to attempt the impossible, and find a musical language that works at all levels, and for all people, and is of today.18
Rhian Samuel
Rhian Samuel (b. 1944) was born in Aberdare, Wales, and was educated in Britain and the United States. She received her doctorate in composition from Washington University in St. Louis, where she taught from 1977 to 1983. Samuel's first large-scale published work was Elegy-Symphony (1981), written for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (Leonard Slatkin, conductor). Many of Samuel's pieces use or are inspired by texts. Some of her most successful works are written for female voices, where “women speak for themselves.” In White Amaryllis, for example, she sets three poems by May Sarton. Samuel says she likes to interact with the poet herself, and appreciates dramatic scenarios. Her assured command of compositional technique and her poetic sensitivity make her works for voice and instruments among her finest.
Samuel currently teaches at the City University, London, and recognizes that teaching has been an important part of her growth as a composer. When she was a student, female composition teachers were a rarity—women seldom received the experience she herself finds so valuable. Though Samuel was the sole female composition student in both her American and British universities, this situation has changed. She notices many more female students now and is aware of her role as a teacher to those young women, as well as to her male students. Samuel, along with Julie Anne Sadie, is coeditor of an invaluable, long-overdue resource, The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers.
Sally Beamish
Sally Beamish (b. 1956), born in London, now resides in Aberfoyle, Wales. She entered the Royal Northern College of Music as a violinist in 1974. Though she studied composition intermittently with Anthony Gilbert and Sir Lennox Berkeley, Beamish considers herself self-taught (she wrote notes at a young age before she wrote the alphabet). For practical reasons during her school years she moved her area of concentration from composition to viola in 1979. For the next ten years Beamish was a professional freelance violist in a variety of ensembles—she held the post of principal violist in the London Mozart String Players and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. She also performed in the Rachel Quartet, the London Sinfonietta, and Lontano. These performance experiences, especially in the latter two groups, have given her opportunities to hear and absorb influences from contemporary composers. The theft of her viola in 1989, however, caused her to slow down and reassess her life. She realized she was lacking solitude and time for her deep Christian faith. At this time Beamish's career as a composer began to flourish, and she moved to Scotland, where she and her husband, cellist Robert Irwin, founded the Chamber Group of Scotland.
The BBC commissioned in dreaming, a composition that Beamish wrote for a concert series celebrating both the Purcell tercentenary (1995) and Sir Michael Tippett's ninetieth birthday. Beamish used a text from Shakespeare's The Tempest and wrote for tenor and viol consort. The early-music group Fretwork was recording a series of pieces with specific limitations, and wanted to juxtapose the seventeenth-century Fantasias and In Nomines of Purcell with newly commissioned works for the ensemble. Beamish was one of several composers, and the only woman, invited to write for this project.
No, I Am Not Afraid (1988), written at about the time she was expecting her first child, is a setting of poems by Irina Ratushinskaya for spoken voice, strings, oboe, and harp. Ratushinskaya wrote the poetry on scraps of paper and had them smuggled out of a Russian prison during her incarceration for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. In Beamish's work the six poems alternate with five instrumental interludes. She insists that the movements are not meant to be in a Russian style, though they have references to Russian folk and church music, but are composed in a musical language that is strictly her own.
Commedia (1990), on scenes of the commedia dell'arte, is a theatre piece without actors, an imaginary Italian comedy of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. She composed this piece about the time her second child was born. The Viola Concerto (1995), described by Beamish as an impassioned response to the Apostle Peter's agonized denials after the arrest of Jesus, is intended also as a story with which her audience can identify: “It is a story of human weakness and betrayal in the face of the true cost of commitment, and the agonizing remorse of failure.”19 The work is a single, continuous sixteen-minute movement. The three denials are structural pillars, heard as quasi-cadenzas, in which the texture is thinned down to represent a single questioner (clarinet, cello, horn) and Peter (viola).
Poetry has played a part in many of Beamish's compositions. Her first Cello Concerto, subtitled River (1997), was inspired by natural landscapes and four poems about rivers by Ted Hughes; the titles of the poems correspond to the four movements of the work. Cellist Robert Cohen, a longtime friend, commissioned the piece, and he and Beamish chose the texts together. They agreed that “a stretch of river is in itself a variation form, the same but constantly changing.”20 Divided strings and a variety of colors from percussion instruments (rainstick, crotales, chocho, a Mexican bean shaker) add to the watery and transparent textures of the music.
Priti Paintal
Priti Paintal (b. 1960) was born in New Delhi, India, and received strong training in both Western and Indian classical music from her parents. At a young age she studied sitar and tabla, improvised at the piano, and wrote little pieces at the keyboard.
There was nothing wrong with listening to Indian music and then immediately playing through a Beethoven sonata. I was very lucky, as it all seemed so normal. I'd play Brahms by ear or fiddle around with a Chopin melody…. I hadn't thought at any stage I'd be able to live off this.21
Paintal studied anthropology at Delhi University, and followed up with a master's degree in ethnomusicology, doing fieldwork on the tribal and folk music of villages in the Himalayas. In 1982 she won a British Council scholarship to study composition at York University. After one year she transferred to the Royal Northern College of Music to study with Anthony Gilbert; there she received a master's degree in composition.
FIGURE 9.1. Priti Paintal. Photo by Judith Hurst. Printed by permission of ShivaNova.
Paintal's early works were performed in India, but more recently her compositions have had performances in Britain. An early piece, Gandharva Music I (Celestial Music I), based on secret mantras used by Brahmin priests, transports the performers and listeners into a state of exaltation. The song was premiered in 1984 at a concert of the Society for New Music at St. John's Smith Square. Paintal comments about this composition:
In India, the female sex is banned from either listening to or reciting these mantras which are exclusively used by male priests: thus I decided to use them…. This particular setting is of a mantra based on the phenomena of birth and growth, using the analogy of a cucumber (a phallic symbol, perhaps?) seed. Based on the gapped scale of a northern Indian raga and two derived harmonies, the song alternates very fast and very slow passages, each associated with one of two mantra-groups.22
In 1988 Paintal began to receive more frequent commissions. Survival Song, a chamber opera set in South Africa, with libretto by Richard Fawkes, was commissioned and performed by Garden Venture of the Royal Opera House. That year also saw the formation of Shiva Nova, an eclectic ensemble of Western and Asian musicians. In part, Paintal's aim was to create her own musical language using musicians from diverse traditions. Her works involve a certain degree of improvisation, and this group, after years of working together, has developed ways to make that language work. Shiva Nova features a vast array of world instruments to create new sound frontiers: sitar, santoor, cello, African kora, Chinese dulcimer, pipa, mbira, marimba, piano, and many more. Paintal observes:
My interest in working with instruments from different cultures, and the special experiences accumulated through my anthropological work in tribal and folk music of India, are the driving forces which inspire me to write the kind of music I do….23
Priti Paintal calls herself a music explorer rather than a composer.
Eleanor Alberga
Jamaica-born Eleanor Alberga's musical experiences and training are diverse. She studied classical piano from the age of five, taught herself to play the guitar, and composed her first music at the age of eight. She performed with the internationally acclaimed Jamaican Folk Singers while attending a convent school in Jamaica, and for three years she was a dancer with a semi-professional African dance company, Fonton From. Later she joined the London Contemporary Dance Company as its pianist. Alberga had formal training at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied piano and voice. Her music is characterized by exciting, driving rhythms, and her style is versatile and evolving still. She has received commissions from the Chard Festival of Women in Music, the European Woman's Symphony, Lontano, the London Mozart Players, and the Dahl Foundation. Often Alberga teams up in performance with her husband, Thomas Downes (viola), who has commissioned works from her.
Katherine Norman
Katherine Norman (b. 1960) studied composition at Bristol University, and later received a Fulbright Fellowship to complete a Ph.D. in composition at Princeton University. A composer of both instrumental and electronic music, Norman's recently commissioned works include Squeaky Reel and Transparent Things. She describes a CD of her works as a digital soundscape: recognizable sounds are juxtaposed, hidden, decontextualized, or colored by digital processing techniques and editing, but the sounds remain familiar and tell a tale. One work on the CD, London E17, features a recognizable London soundscape created out of such entertaining audio materials as the subway, cars in traffic, children playing, jackhammers, human voices in an open-air food market, trucks shifting gears, birds, clips of classical music, rain on a tin roof, and a weather report that chimes in as the rains clear away.
In another work, In Her Own Time, Norman uses taped interviews with her mother about early childhood experiences in World War II, and bases her piece on the words, emotions, and personality of her mother. The impetus for the work came during the Gulf War (1991), when Norman herself remembered her mother's tales as bedtime stories. The stories began to haunt her as she realized for the first time how life must have been during the second World War. The piece is about “the temporal nature of sound itself, and the important legacy that stories provide.”24 Norman teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Sadie Harrison and Diedre Gribbin
Sadie Harrison was born in South Australia in 1965 and now lives in South London. She graduated from the University of Surrey, continued studies at King's College, London, and completed doctoral work under the guidance of Nicola LeFanu. Recent compositions that were written on commission include Quintet for a Winter Solstice for the New Macnaghten Concerts, Hoploits and Anthems for string orchestra, and Architechtonia for cello and ensemble. Harrison is lecturer in composition at Goldsmith's College, London.
Diedre Gribbin (b. 1967) studied composition at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1992 she received awards from the Arts Councils of the Republic and of Northern Ireland that enabled her to complete a residency in Denmark. Five years later, in 1997, she was appointed Northern Arts Composing Fellow. Her most recent work, Hey Persephone (to a libretto by Sharman MacDonald), was commissioned by the Almedia Opera. Its premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival drew rave reviews. Gribbin is composer-in-residence at Pimlico School, London, and lecturer in composition at Bath College for Further Education.
Rebecca Clarke
Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) has a special place in this chapter because, though British by birth, she wrote her major works while a resident of the United States. She was born in Harrow, England, to an American father and a German mother. Her earliest training in composition came from 1903 to 1905, when she attended the Royal Academy of Music. Her studies there were cut short when her harmony teacher, Percy Miles, proposed marriage to the teen-aged Clarke. Her father, known to be abusive and dictatorial, withdrew her from the Academy when he learned of the proposal. In 1907 she returned to London and entered the Royal College of Music (RCM), where she became the first woman to study composition with Charles Stanford.
During her early years and up through her time at the RCM, Clarke composed songs and chamber music, primarily for strings. She also became a consummate violist and was in demand by ensembles specializing in contemporary music. She was one of the first women to play in Sir Henry J. Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra, and she played in an all-female string quartet with Nora Clench and in an all-female piano quartet called the English Ensemble. Her extensive concertizing took her to the United States, where she taught viola and harmony, coached and performed chamber music, and played frequently with cellist May Mukle. She continued to compose and won recognition for songs performed by Gervase Elwers in a New York recital. Another success was Morpheus for viola and piano, which she signed with her pseudonym, Anthony Trent.25
In 1916 she met the American arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Several years later, at Coolidge's urging, Clarke entered her Viola Sonata in a juried competition. The six members of the adjudication panel received seventy-three entries and found themselves unable to decide between the top two compositions; hence the sponsor, Coolidge, had to cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of Ernest Bloch's Suite for Viola and Piano. To the surprise of the jurists, the second place went to a woman, Rebecca Clarke. It was this work that established Clarke as a composer of the first rank. Influences of Debussy and Ravel as well as Bloch are heard in this expressive, lyrical, and passionate work. In 1921 her piano trio, another of Clarke's acclaimed compositions, won second place at America's Berkshire Festival. Performed in New York and London, the piece won immediate recognition as a great achievement in chamber music literature of the day. In 1923 the Rhapsody for Cello and Piano was commissioned by and dedicated to Elizabeth Coolidge. It was premiered by May Mukle and Myra Hess at the Berkshire Festival. Other works were forthcoming during the following years, especially 1939–1942, but her compositional output decreased partly due to the necessity for taking a job as a governess to support herself. In 1944 she married pianist James Friskin, whom she had met when a student at the RCM. The couple settled in New York, and Clarke, for reasons unknown, ceased composing and performing. She died there in 1979. Despite her relatively small compositional output, Clarke is considered one of the greatest British composers of the inter-war years.
NOTES
1. In spring of 1998 the last New Macnaghten Series Concerts took place at the British Music Information Centre, London.
2. Ernest Chapman, “The Macnaghten Concerts,” Composer (Spring 1976): 13–18.
3. Nicola LeFanu, “Master Musician: An Impregnable Taboo?” Contact 31 (Autumn 1987): 8.
4. Elisabeth Lutyens, A Goldfish Bowl (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1972), p. 9.
5. Elisabeth Lutyens, unpublished article, July 2, 1971.
6. Elizabeth Maconchy, “A Composer Speaks,” Composer 42 (Winter 1971–1972): 28. All thirteen quartets have been recorded by Unicorn Kanchana under the supervision of the composer.
7. Donald L. Hixon, Thea Musgrave: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 3.
8. Musgrave notes in the score: “Rollo was an imaginary character invented by Ives and represented the Victorian Conservative; ‘one of those white-livered weaklings’ unable to stand any dissonance.”
9. Allen Shaffer, “Harriet, the Woman Called Moses by Thea Musgrave,” The Opera Journal 18 (1985): 31–37.
10. Note by Musgrave in publicity from Chester Music Limited/Novello and Company Ltd. about the premiere of Simón Bolívar, British Music Information Centre, London, [1995].
11. Thea Musgrave, liner notes from the CD, Autumn Sonata [and other works], Cala Records CACD 1023, 1997.
12. Nicola LeFanu, interview with Catherine Roma, London, England, February 27, 1989.
13. Claire Messus, “New Blood,” Guardian, March 11, 1992.
14. Nicola LeFanu, “Introduction,” Reclaiming the Muses, whole issue of Contemporary Music Review 11 (1994).
15. Judith Weir, interview with Catherine Roma, London, March 8, 1989.
16. Quoted from “Open Wide the Windows, or Cower under the Duvet?” her Arthur Batchelor Lecture, University of East Anglia, February 15, 1994, British Music Information Centre, London.
17. “Diana Burrell,” Contemporary Music Review 11 (1994): 56.
18. Ibid., 57.
19. Sally Beamish, in a program note written about the Viola Concerto, British Music Information Centre, London.
20. Susan Nickalls, “Premiere of the Fortnight,” Classical Music, September 20, 1997, p. 11.
21. Karin Brookes, “They Thought I Was Pulling Their Legs,” Classical Music, June 9, 1990, p. 35.
22. Priti Paintal, in a program note written about Gandharva Music I, British Music Information Centre, London.
23. “Priti Paintal,” Contemporary Music Review 11 (1994): 229.
24. Katherine Norman, liner notes from London, Trilling Wire, NMC Recordings Ltd., NMC DO34.
25. She used the name in New York when, for a program, two of her works were to be performed.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
In addition to the items mentioned in the text or cited in the footnotes, the following sources provide information on contemporary British composers.
Baxter, Timothy. “Priaulx Rainier: Study of Her Musical Style.” Composer 60 (1977): 19–26.
———. “Priaulx Rainier.” Composer 76–77 (Summer–Winter 1982): 21–29.
Boyd, Malcom. Grace Williams. N.p.: University of Wales Press, 1980.
Bradshaw, Susan. “The Music of Elisabeth Lutyens.” Musical Times 112 (1971): 563–66.
———. “Thea Musgrave.” Musical Times 104 (1963): 866–68.
Carner, Mosco. “Phyllis Tate.” Musical Times 105 (1964): 20–21.
Doctor, Jennifer. “Intersecting Circles: The Early Careers of Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens, and Grace Williams.” Women & Music 2 (1998): 90–109.
Dreyer, Martin. “Judith Weir, Composer: A Talent to Amuse.” Musical Times 122 (1981): 593–96.
East, Leslie. “The Problem of Communication—Two Solutions: Thea Musgrave and Gordon Crosse.” In British Music Now, ed. L. Foreman, pp. 19–31. London: P. Elek, 1975.
Fuller, Sophie. The Pandora Guide to Women Composers—Britain and the United States 1629 to the Present. Hammersmith, London: Pandora, 1994.
———. “Calls of the Wild.” The Musical Times 138 (1997): 12–17.
Halstead, Jill. The Woman Composer—Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Press, 1997.
Kay, Norman. “Phyllis Tate.” Musical Times 116 (1975): 429–30.
Macnaghten, Anne. “Elizabeth Maconchy.” Musical Times 96 (1955): 298–302.
Opie, June. Priaulx Rainier: A Pictorial Biography. Penzance: Alison Hodge, 1988.
Pendle, Karin. “Thea Musgrave: The Singer and the Song.” Journal of the National Association of Teachers of Singing 43/2 (November–December 1986): 5–8, 13.
Roma, Catherine. “The Choral Music of Twentieth-Century Composers Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Thea Musgrave.” D.M.A. thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1989.
Routh, Francis. Contemporary British Music. London: Macdonald & Co., 1972.
Saxon, Robert. “Elisabeth Lutyens at 75.” Musical Times 122 (1981): 368–69.
Wright, David. “Weir to Now?” Musical Times 134 (1993): 432–36.