A Review-Essay by Kathleen McGowan, a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation focusses on women’s musicking in 19th and early 20th century Britain. She is the Blogger-in-Chief from Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy.

The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy. by Erica Siegel. Boydell & Brewer, 352 pp., £95, 2023, ISBN 9781837650514

 

Not many women composers have a chance to be both young rising stars and then seasoned professionals over a long career, especially when the styles and artistic fashions of their youth change in favor of other competing aesthetics. Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994) is one such composer, and her work over a lifetime of composing is a testament to the strength of her musical style and the sincerity of her compositional voice. She was neither a radical serialist nor a nostalgic pastoralist. Over the course of her career she composed music in genres large and small, including chamber music, concertos and instrumental solos, orchestral works, songs, ballets and operas.

Erica Siegel has written The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy—the first full-length biographical study of composer Elizabeth Maconchy—which uses a number of her important works to tell the story of her life and career. Siegel digs deeply into Maconchy’s work without aggrandizing her or trotting out the “great composer” narrative, and I suspect that this is how Maconchy would have wanted her own story told. This book is a monument to the value of archival research, particularly when it comes to women in music. Siegel keeps Maconchy’s music in dialogue with the composer’s letters, personal papers, and previously-uninvestigated documents: a tireless task for the archive researcher. In addition to its being both well-done history and high-quality biography that does much more than relay the facts, the book is gratifying to read as well—not a guarantee in academic writing.

Siegel’s archival work is impressive because Maconchy was not overly famous during her life. The author writes that, “she never sought out the limelight and remained a deeply private person and modest to a fault,” though she was not a recluse and did have various public-facing roles. (Siegel, 2) She also did not keep a particularly consistent journal, nor did she curate her personal papers for posterity—the usual sources for scholars conducting archival work, and often the first port of call for scholars trying to piece together the lives of composers from marginalized groups. In addition to this book, her letters to the BBC (which contain a trove of information about her work with them as well as the music they broadcast) and substantial runs of letters between her and fellow composer Grace Williams are thankfully accessible. These letters can be read in Music, Life, and Changing Times: Selected Correspondence between British Composers Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, 1922–77 (Routledge, 2020), edited by Jenny Doctor and Sophie Fuller.

Maconchy was born in 1907 in Hertfordshire to Irish parents, and her family moved to the greater Dublin area after the First World War. Her musical education in piano, and later harmony and counterpoint continued uninterrupted, in spite of her parents’ move—a little surprising, perhaps, since she described her family as not being particularly musical. Also remarkable is that her family did not limit her musical education, nor do they seem to have discouraged her ambitions to become a composer. Not only did she have consistent instruction, but she had it from excellent male and female teachers. Her opportunities to hear orchestral music and other large-scale works were limited in Dublin. Sophie Fuller has remarked that the only orchestral music Maconchy heard during her life in Ireland was a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony given by the Hallé orchestra when they visited in 1922.

One of the things that makes this biography so refreshing is that Maconchy’s life doesn’t fit a lot of the typical roles for composers in musical biographies, and Siegel hasn’t tried to cast her in any. She had a family supportive of her music, so she’s not an artist blazing a new trail against family expectations, but she’s also not a new generation of composer inheriting the “family business” in the style of Bach or Mozart. With her musical upbringing she was also neither a prodigy nor an underdog.

Like many British composers, Maconchy’s music shows influences from her formative teachers at the Royal College of Music: Charles Wood, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Gordon Jacob (1895-1984). All three were important to her musical development as well as encouraging her to face the difficulties of making a life as a woman composer. What Siegel draws out is that because of her teachers Maconchy was really supported and set up for compositional success. Wood was a technician who had no time for lofty artistic ideals, and who made sure she had a thorough foundation in harmony and counterpoint. Following Wood she studied with Vaughan Williams, who believed that technique should be the servant of expression—and thanks to Wood she had plenty of techniques to put to expressive use. This foundation resulted in music that is unmistakably hers.

Maconchy for Orchestra

Siegel’s biography includes a chronological list of Maconchy’s works in its appendices—one of my favorite features of books like these, because they make it possible to see trends in a composer’s writing over a long career. It would be reductive to say that Maconchy had an orchestra “period” or a chamber music “period”; she wrote music for ensembles large and small in many different genres at all stages of her career. The early 1950s were particularly bright era for her orchestral compositions.

Nocturne (1951) – Chamber Music for Orchestra

Maconchy’s Nocturne for orchestra, which she began composing in 1950 and premiered in 1951, is an atmospheric and evocative sound portrait of a landscape in the moonlight. It takes inspiration from the 1817 text of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, evoking “the journeying Moon and the stars” and the movement of the sea in both Maconchy’s writing and the inscription of the poet’s original words on the score. Her writing blends her years of writing chamber music with all of the lushness and grand textures that a full orchestra offers. Maconchy is most often remembered as a composer of chamber music. Her string quartets (1932–1984) are some of her “best and most deeply-felt works” because the quartet came the closest to her musical ideal—a debate between four balanced voices, each individual and assertive in its passion but in total part of a larger conversation. Her orchestral writing regularly aspires to this kind of balance also — she often has made careful  allowances for the number of musicians and instrumental timbres in play at any time. 

Based on her choices in Nocturne, Maconchy seems to prefer French and Russian influences over German ones in her orchestral writing, similar to her orchestration teacher, Gordon Jacob. Jacob was a student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s; when he returned to the school to teach, RVW heavily encouraged his students to take their orchestration lessons with him. The influence of his craftsmanship on Maconchy’s writing is clear. Each instrument (or grouping of the same) has a clear purpose in her orchestration, and her textures and melodies are much clearer and lighter on their feet than either historical or contemporary German music. There’s little that’s muddy or lost, even in her thickest textures.

Recording of the Nocturne for Orchestra from the Ulster Orchestra 2022 International Women’s Day performance, conducted by Sinéad Hayes. Intro by Rosalee Curlett (cello); recording begins at [0:53]

Proud Thames (1953) – For the Wind Players

One of Maconchy’s better-known works for orchestra, Siegel writes that the Proud Thames coronation overture (1952–3) “demonstrates Maconchy’s scoring for large forces at its finest.” It contains some of the best examples of the breadth of her writing for wind instruments. In this selection, the strings play a noticeably supporting role while their wind colleagues take the spotlight. Appropriately, the piece opens with a solo trumpet call—alluding to all the instrument’s military and royal associations without explicitly quoting a signal used in combat or ceremony. It states the musical material that forms the basis of the entire overture. From the initial trumpet call the piece unfurls in thematic layers, adding new timbres and larger instrument groupings to every re-statement of the first theme, and letting the musical idea gradually accumulate and discard material as it develops.

 

Maconchy’s Orchestra Works from the Late-1940s and 1950s
Symphony (1945–8)
Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1949)
Nocturne for Orchestra (1950–1)
Concerto for Bassoon and String Orchestra (1952)
Proud Thames (1952–3)
Symphony for Double String Orchestra (1952–3)
Suite on Irish Airs (for small orchestra) (1953, arr. 1954)
Toombeola (1954)
Concerto for Oboe, Bassoon, and String Orchestra (1955–6)

Siegel’s biography is a celebration of a composer who has for a long time been left to the footnotes of music history. This volume offers a wonderful opportunity to read her back into her own story.