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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
This week's piece reflects the summer we've had -- or at least the title does.
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II involved music commissioned from many of the UK's leading composers; the list of composers reads like a who's-who of mid-20th-century British music, and pieces such as William Walton's Orb and Sceptre March have remained in the concert repertoire to this day. Among the composers commissioned for the event was exactly one woman, Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003). Carwithen was known mainly as a film composer; her music was commissioned not for the coronation itself but for the official film that was subsequently produced.
The daughter of a music teacher, Doreen Mary Carwithen started playing music at an early age. She began learning piano and violin under her mother's tutelage at four, switched to cello at school, and was playing in local orchestras while still in high school. Composing came later; she began teaching herself composition in her teens by following scores while listening to BBC music broadcasts, and produced her first compositions of any kind at 16. She won a scholarship to study cello performance at the Royal Academy of Music in 1941, and while there, changed her focus to composition and became the first woman accepted into the Royal Academy's newly-established film scoring program.
Carwithen's career took off rapidly beginning in 1947. That year the London Philharmonic formed a Music Advisory Committee whose express purpose was to select lesser-known pieces to premiere, and the committee's very first selection was Carwithen's concert overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another), which she had composed two years earlier. The piece premiered in March 1947 under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult. Thus, Doreen Carwithen had the highly unusual distinction of making her public debut as an orchestral composer with a world-renowned conductor leading a major orchestra. Not surprisingly, Carwithen composed the bulk of her music for films and only a few pieces for the concert hall.
Carwithen was all but forgotten, and then rediscovered, within her own lifetime. Like a number of other film composers of her generation, she was both frustrated with film studio deadlines and unsatisfied with being known only for her film scores, and in the 1960s she retired from film scoring in order to focus on art music. As both a woman and a composer regarded as "only" a film composer, she found opportunities for performance and publication hard to come by. After she married fellow composer William Alwyn in 1975, she stopped composing entirely and for many years devoted herself entirely to promoting her husband's work. It was only in the late 1990s, more than a decade after Alwyn's death, that Carwithen returned to composing. She composed most of what was intended to be her third string quartet, and began sketching a first symphony, but abandoned both after being paralyzed by a severe stroke in 1999. In her final years, though unable to continue composing, she was able to take an active role advising conductors in making recordings of most of her art music.
While not associated with any stage production, ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) was inspired by John Masefield's 1926 novel of the same acronymic name, which centers around an Englishman caught up in an ill-fated Central American revolution. The novel, in turn, derived its title from anarchist writer Elbert Hubbard's remark, "Life is just one damn thing after another." Carwithen's overture, while showing no sign of Latin American influence, foreshadows her career as a film composer in its bold cinematic gestures.
This week's piece reflects the summer we've had -- or at least the title does.
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II involved music commissioned from many of the UK's leading composers; the list of composers reads like a who's-who of mid-20th-century British music, and pieces such as William Walton's Orb and Sceptre March have remained in the concert repertoire to this day. Among the composers commissioned for the event was exactly one woman, Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003). Carwithen was known mainly as a film composer; her music was commissioned not for the coronation itself but for the official film that was subsequently produced.
The daughter of a music teacher, Doreen Mary Carwithen started playing music at an early age. She began learning piano and violin under her mother's tutelage at four, switched to cello at school, and was playing in local orchestras while still in high school. Composing came later; she began teaching herself composition in her teens by following scores while listening to BBC music broadcasts, and produced her first compositions of any kind at 16. She won a scholarship to study cello performance at the Royal Academy of Music in 1941, and while there, changed her focus to composition and became the first woman accepted into the Royal Academy's newly-established film scoring program.
Carwithen's career took off rapidly beginning in 1947. That year the London Philharmonic formed a Music Advisory Committee whose express purpose was to select lesser-known pieces to premiere, and the committee's very first selection was Carwithen's concert overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another), which she had composed two years earlier. The piece premiered in March 1947 under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult. Thus, Doreen Carwithen had the highly unusual distinction of making her public debut as an orchestral composer with a world-renowned conductor leading a major orchestra. Not surprisingly, Carwithen composed the bulk of her music for films and only a few pieces for the concert hall.
Carwithen was all but forgotten, and then rediscovered, within her own lifetime. Like a number of other film composers of her generation, she was both frustrated with film studio deadlines and unsatisfied with being known only for her film scores, and in the 1960s she retired from film scoring in order to focus on art music. As both a woman and a composer regarded as "only" a film composer, she found opportunities for performance and publication hard to come by. After she married fellow composer William Alwyn in 1975, she stopped composing entirely and for many years devoted herself entirely to promoting her husband's work. It was only in the late 1990s, more than a decade after Alwyn's death, that Carwithen returned to composing. She composed most of what was intended to be her third string quartet, and began sketching a first symphony, but abandoned both after being paralyzed by a severe stroke in 1999. In her final years, though unable to continue composing, she was able to take an active role advising conductors in making recordings of most of her art music.
While not associated with any stage production, ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) was inspired by John Masefield's 1926 novel of the same acronymic name, which centers around an Englishman caught up in an ill-fated Central American revolution. The novel, in turn, derived its title from anarchist writer Elbert Hubbard's remark, "Life is just one damn thing after another." Carwithen's overture, while showing no sign of Latin American influence, foreshadows her career as a film composer in its bold cinematic gestures.