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Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
composer, poet, critic, essayist

Friday 5 October 2012

Book Review: Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens - Rhiannon Mathias (Ashgate, 2012)

Rhiannon Mathias’s book aims to bring to wider attention three 20th Century composers who continue to suffer varying degrees of unjustifiable neglect. Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) have very little in common musically, but were contemporary, pioneering students at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s; each, however, going on to experience difficulties as a woman in gaining professional recognition despite their acknowledged talents. Mathias argues that, although ‘these women were rightly held in high esteem in the musical world’, they never quite got the opportunities or recognition they deserved, and her survey is intended to help end at last the continuing lack of public awareness of their music and their important contributions to British 20th Century musical life.

Clearly, their gender has been central to their neglect. Mathias points to crude and pervasive sexism from the ‘20s and later, typified by critic and composer Cecil Gray’s paraphrasing of Dr Johnson’s infamous dictum: ‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not done well but you are surprised to see it done at all’. Alas, such attitudes have been slow to change within the classical music establishment; as recently as the mid-1980s, I myself heard the then Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta Michael Vyner opining (not to mention whining) on national radio that ‘women can’t compose’. So - and despite her book striking a somewhat awkward balance between sociological study, biographical survey and musical analysis - Mathias is to be applauded for opening a wider debate by putting in plain terms gender issues that ultimately concern not just these three composers, but which go to the heart of musical culture well beyond the narrow enclaves of historical musicology.

Moreover, Mathias rightly contextualises the gender prejudices experienced by all three within a broader parochialism that largely prevailed throughout their lives (and, it could be argued, in many regards still exists today). She shows how attitudes within British musical institutions tended to reflect a cultural insecurity and snobbery, veering from a conservative horror of contemporary music on the one hand,  to a self-conscious obedience to fashion on the other - and taking in a sentimentalised nationalism along the way. Williams, for instance, lamented that ‘when people see my...folk song arrangements and Fantasias...it is so easy for them to forget that I also write full scale serious works’. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, Lutyens - an important pioneer of much-maligned and misunderstood serial techniques in Britain - was first perceived as too ‘advanced’, then too ‘behind’ vis-à-vis European compositional developments. Meanwhile, Maconchy simply suffered from a lack of  ‘modishness - for saying the right things to the right person, or for being in the right place at the right time’ , as the composer (and, coincidentally, her daughter) Nicola LeFanu put it.

This raises all sorts of important, still wider issues about how we decide - and, indeed, about who gets to decide - questions of what constitutes cultural and artistic value in society, and thence to shape the practice, distribution and history of art itself. Mathias steers well away from deeper probing of this kind and is careful even to avoid comparative musical judgements, writing in a very neutral prose and giving the three composers distinctly equal consideration. What she does do is manage to discuss a large amount of music amidst a wealth of background information, interlacing monographs of each composer within three historical periods; Part I 1926-1935 narrating student experiences, whilst Part II 1935-1955 and Part III 1955-1994 consider each composer in turn, surveying key works within their respective biographical frameworks. This approach serves well for the introduction she intended - so it is a pity that Ashgate’s ungenerous Index hardly does justice to her painstaking research and is, moreover, unforgivable in a volume priced for institutional libraries.

But there is a difficulty lurking within Mathias’s book, which no amount of diplomatic treading and balanced musical and biographical attention can circumvent, and which remains an issue for anyone daring to broach considerations of gender bias in music; and that is the thorny problem of how one gets away from the tiresome pidgeon-holing of women composers as ‘women composers’ when one has chosen to write a book that groups three composers together on the basis that they are...women composers - however sympathetic and sensitive the angle.

Of the three, arguably, the one who detested such pidgeon-holing the most - or, at any rate, the one who protested the loudest and in the ripest language to anyone who did it to her - was Lutyens; she who happened at her best - arguably again - to have composed by far the most interesting and influential music. However, what Lutyens would no doubt have appreciated about this book, is Mathias’s determination to discuss her music rather than her famously acid persona, which has hitherto inevitably proved the greater talking point. Notwithstanding feminist quibbles, for that reason alone, Mathias’s survey deserves to be widely read. Not only that, but she succeeds in placing Williams in a wider, British - as well as a Welsh - context and mounts a serious challenge of the music-historical ‘backwater’ category to which Maconchy in particular, but all three to varying extent, have unjustifiably been consigned for too long.

Published by Wales Arts Review 2/11/12

http://www.walesartsreview.org/lutyens,%20maconchy,%20williams%20and%20twentieth-century%20british%20music%20-%20a%20blest%20trio%20of%20sirens%20by%20rhiannon%20mathias.html



Interview with Composer Lynne Plowman

Composer Lynne Plowman’s operas have won critical acclaim. Her fourth premieres at the Brighton Festival next spring and she is a recipient of an Arts Council of Wales 2012-13 Creative Wales award. The following conversation will be published in Issue 1 of the new Cyfansoddwyr Cymru/Composers of Wales Quarterly of which I am Contributing Editor:

Can you tell me about your current, fourth operatic project?


It’s for Glyndebourne. We are creating an interactive pirates opera for a children’s and family audience [with Martin Riley, librettist of Lynne’s previous operas - Ed]. It’s very fast-paced, with sword fighting, slapstick and spoken theatre underscored by the band, who are on stage and in character; quite anarchic, with an ‘end-of-the-pier’ comedy and a dark edge. The audience dresses up as pirates and the performing space is a pub where they come for a drink; they take part, singing along in places and interacting with the characters. At one point children come up to conduct the band.

This opera is for a professional cast whereas the previous one was for young people to perform. That was The Face in the Mirror for Welsh National Opera Max and written for WNO’s Singing Club, a chorus of 10-15 year olds. But it was for an adult audience and probably the most serious piece of work Martin and I have made, being based on the Second World War.

Your music - including your concert music - is strikingly direct.


Yes, it’s really important for me that the music communicates directly to the audience. But I work so intuitively it takes me a long time so one of the things I’d like to do with the ACW Creative Wales award is to speed up my creative process.

Does that intuitiveness account for some of the freshness and vitality of your work? Your piece Hall of Mirrors, for Piano Circus, was described as “irrepressibly eclectic”. What do you think about that?

I like to use existing musical ideas. By using little moments of pastiche, you can instantly sum up a place or a time or an atmosphere which speaks beyond the music. That’s how music functions theatrically, so I suppose that comes into my concert music too. Six pianos is such a bonkers combination of instruments! So I came up with pianists from six different times and places, throwing them together in a melting pot of fragments. That’s how that piece patchwork-ed itself together.

Is that how you work - in patchwork - or do you develop ideas from a to b?


It depends on the piece. With opera the music has to serve the drama so in some ways it’s written from the beginning to the end although I’ll pick out certain moments to write the music for separately. Concert pieces are more of a jigsaw; I’ll create sections then play with the structure. I find it easier to write long pieces of music than short ones because it’s much freer somehow.

With Martin, do you work together, producing libretto and music simultaneously?

It starts with us together, coming up with the idea and the scenario, then he writes a first draft of the libretto. But section by section so I start writing the music before he’s finished. Once I start composing, I find there are sections where the music leads and I make decisions about what’s going to be spoken, what’s going to be sung, where there might be a song. Then I ask for re-writes so there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing!

We have a lot of joint experience of the audience we’re writing for. We understand how bright children are - that they don’t need to be written down for - and how, if a ten year old enjoys this piece, so will an adult. The music has to tell the story well and if it does that then it’s successful - and kids don’t have those musical prejudices that we acquire as grown-ups; if you get a scrunchy chord that’s fine, that’s the sound.

So how will you take this into your orchestral experiments?

Well this will be a challenge - the idea of Creative Wales is to take myself out of my comfort zone and gather techniques. I’m not intending to write a finished piece but to make orchestral sketches exploring different harmonic and orchestration sound-worlds. I’m not so concerned about structure

because I feel confident with that but I want to push my harmonic and textural languages. And that’s why I’ve chosen to use full symphony orchestra. I probably won’t use the whole orchestra for each of the sketches, but I’ve got that unlimited canvas to work with.

How will the project work?

There’ll be a closed workshop next September with BBCNoW. We’ll record the session, then I can use the material in a piece at a later stage. When I’ve finished the pirates opera, I’ll take some time to do some listening, thinking and reading, then the sketches will gradually emerge. I don’t know what musical direction that’s going to take me in! But if you stand still as a composer it stops being creative and starts becoming a production line, which I don’t want! I think it’s so important for artists to have that breathing space so I feel really lucky that we have this funding scheme in Wales.

Many thanks Lynne.
 www.lynneplowman.co.uk