Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark

As musicologists work to reconstruct the role of women composers in shaping twentieth-century musical life, two new monographs—on Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy, respectively, each a pioneer of musical modernism and gender equality in music—enrich our understanding considerably. Despite the composers’ shared commitment to modernism and their acquaintance at the Royal College of Music in the mid-1920s, their compositional languages soon diverged. Maconchy maintained a connection to English pastoralism, creating a distinctive neoclassical style. In contrast, Lutyens dismissed this pastoralism as “cow-pat music” (Forkert, p. 128), having turned toward serialism beginning with her Chamber Concerto, no. 1 (1939), the first serial work written in the United Kingdom.Annika Forkert’s Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark presents a multifaceted and critical examination of the role of Elisabeth Lutyens in British musical life. Forkert commences her study with Lutyens’s early works and continues through to the composer’s avant-garde serialism as well as her pioneering compositions for horror films at Hammer Film Productions. Forkert’s monograph is well balanced. In addition to the composer’s music, Forkert accounts for the darker side of Lutyens’s complex career and attitudes by discussing the implications of homophobic and antisemitic remarks made by the composer (p. 10) alongside her forward-looking advocacy for socialism and feminism.From the outset, Forkert argues for Lutyens’s central position in British music between English pastoralism, postwar continental modernism (noting the composer’s connection to Luigi Dallapiccola), and works that foreshadow the radical Manchester School of Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, and Peter Maxwell Davies (p. 217). Throughout, Forkert integrates reception studies with score analysis, employing a variety of music-theoretical tools, especially post-tonal analysis, to support the broader contextual narrative.To explore Lutyens’s stylistic trajectory, Forkert synthesizes aspects of literary theory, music theory, and music-historical primary sources in order to illustrate musical influence and to situate Lutyens among modernist composers more broadly. Forkert takes Joseph Straus’s theory of modernist influence, based on Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), as her starting point in this regard. Bloom’s theory of influence centers on the idea of “misreadings,” according to which authors deliberately obscure or manipulate elements from their predecessors to clear creative space for themselves. Forkert argues that this theory of “misreadings” requires a feminist reworking, due to an “anxiety of authorship” that stems from the general discouragement of women composers and “lack of female predecessors” in the art-music field that results in a “hindrance to female writers’ engagement with Bloomian anxiety” (p. 17). Nonetheless, Forkert points to Lutyens’s purposeful “misreading[s] of repertoire from Bach to Webern and Stravinsky” as means by which Lutyens distinguished herself from the work of others (p. 18). For example, Forkert connects Lutyens’s String Quartet, no. 2 (1938) with Béla Bartók’s String Quartet, no. 4, arguing that Lutyens’s “misreading” of Bartók’s chromatic hexachords represents a “centralization” technique which Straus defines as the way “musical elements that are peripheral to the structure of the earlier work . . . move to the structural center of the new one.”1 Notably, Forkert’s comparison with Bartók aligns with Lutyens’s own commentary on the prominence of Bartók’s music in Britain in the 1930s.2Forkert adopts a similar approach when analyzing Lutyens’s Chamber Concerto, no. 1 (1939). By relating the work to Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments (1934), Forkert challenges Lutyens’s claim that “I had at the time seen NO score of Webern” (p. 81). Forkert portrays Lutyens’s “misreading” of Webern as a “fragmentation of a precursor’s central idea” (p. 85). Despite Lutyens’s defensive claim to originality, there are overt textural parallels between the two composers, which can be readily perceived. Forkert explores Lutyens’s fraught relationship with the Second Viennese School still further in the text, as Lutyens sought to distance herself from the Germanness associated with serialism in postwar Britain.Forkert discusses Lutyens’s rejection of the label “woman composer,” quoting Lutyens’s statement that “whether a composer is a man, woman, homosexual or lesbian is their private life and nothing to do with the music” (p. 19), with Lutyens seemingly arguing for musical autonomy from her personal identity. Forkert suggests that this refusal to be defined by gender was a tactic to avoid misogyny that was shared by other women composers of the time––including Maconchy. Comparing Lutyens to Ruth Crawford Seeger, Forkert notes that Lutyens “did not have a particularly large or strong female network” (p. 20). Given this context of relative isolation, Forkert argues that Lutyens’s creative partnership with her husband, Edward Clark, a noted conductor of modernist music, was particularly significant for Lutyens, resulting in “a biography of . . . a man less well-known than this wife” (p. xv). Forkert shows that Clark assumed a supporting role with respect to his wife’s compositions and provided a direct link to the Second Viennese School that assisted her professionally (pp. 7–8). In chapter 1, Forkert looks at Clark in his own right, examining the largely forgotten but notable impact of his premieres of new European works in Britain, fueled by his personal acquaintance with Bartók and Stravinsky as well as his work as an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg (p. 57).While Forkert concentrates on key works and flashpoint events, Erica Siegel’s The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy constitutes a comprehensive and chronologically organized biography. Siegel focuses on uncovering and interpreting the reception of Maconchy thorough examination of primary sources, especially letters and newspaper reviews. In the process, Siegel surveys an impressively large number of Maconchy’s compositions, providing an overview of the genesis of each work and discussion of its initial reception. Throughout, Siegel attempts to unearth Maconchy’s elusive personality (she was known to be shy) to enhance our understanding of her life and music. In addition, Siegel considers Maconchy’s complicated dual Irish-British national identity, noting her support for the Irish “republican cause” despite her Anglo-Irish unionist background (p. 14), as well as her advocacy for socialism and feminism.Siegel employs an analytical approach to illustrate Maconchy’s stylistic progression, including insightful musical commentary that builds on the work of Donald Francis Tovey, an early supporter of Maconchy’s music (p. 278). In her analyses, Siegel compares Maconchy’s works to that of other composers, examining motivic and harmonic similarities. Maconchy’s early style is likened to the English pastoralism of Gustav Holst (another of Maconchy’s supporters) and to the work of her composition teacher Ralph Vaughan Williams (pp. 56–59). Yet Maconchy soon departed from that style and adopted an idiom closer to that of Bartók; the prominent use of tritones in her String Quartet, no. 1 (1933) led the press to dub her the “English Bartók” (p. 62). Additionally, Siegel discusses Stravinskian influence, as Vaughan Williams called Maconchy’s ballet Great Agrippa (1933) “stravynskyesque” in light of the “percussive and repetitive rhythm that permeates much of the score” (p. 71).However, despite her radical approach to harmony in the 1930s, Maconchy’s music was viewed as relatively “tame” by the 1960s and “lumped . . . into the broad category of ‘tonal’ music” (p. 189). Siegel attributes this change to Maconchy’s lack of interest in the avant-garde trends of serialism and electronic music as well as to the increasing prominence of the Manchester School (p. 189). Thus, changes in the musical avant-garde contributed to the marginalization of Maconchy’s work.Siegel argues that a pivotal event in Maconchy’s life was the premiere of The Land (1929), an orchestral suite based on the georgic poem by Vita Sackville-West, at the Proms in 1930. However, Siegel writes that, “while the critical success of The Land seemed destined to catapult Maconchy to stardom, what she encountered was quite the opposite” (p. 43). In fact, Maconchy maligned that she received not a single “commission,” “grant,” “chatty interview,” or “another performance” (p. 43) following this premiere. Furthermore, Boosey & Hawkes refused to publish the work; as Maconchy explained, the publisher “couldn’t take anything except little songs from a woman” (p. 43). Siegel supports this view, arguing that the company’s refusal was due to widespread “prejudice against women” that was exacerbated by the conditions of the Great Depression and which severely affected the livelihoods of musicians (p. 43).By the early 1970s, Maconchy had gained wider-spread recognition as a composer: she became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1973; she was included in the BBC’s Women as Composers program in the same year; and she was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1987. And her works were programmed with increasing frequency. Siegel attributes this increased recognition to Maconchy’s perseverance, her accessible musical style, and improvement in gender equality from “the second wave of the women’s movement” (p. 245).The monographs by Forkert and Siegel present contrasting yet equally insightful approaches to two women composers of twentieth-century Britain. Beyond a critical examination of the composers’ historical contexts and the reception of their music, both books offer new insight into the composers’ musical styles. Forkert’s methodology is particularly significant for its linking of musical influence, reception, and context. Ultimately these volumes allow for a more nuanced and complete picture of Lutyens and Maconchy within twentieth-century British musical life

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