![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drplaceboIt's (a slightly belated) Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
It might be surprising that Elinor Remick Warren (1900-1991) is a forgotten composer, considering how recently she was highly successful: between 1970 and 1980 American orchestras performed her music more frequently than any other female composer, but she faded from public view in the 1980s. Warren was the only woman to gain prominence among the generation of American neo-Romanticists that included Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Perhaps it was geography that later removed her from public attention. For most of her career, "serious" American composers gravitated toward New York and other major East Coast cities, while the West Coast was seen as the home of film composers. Warren lived almost her entire life in the Los Angeles area, and was even married to a film producer for 45 years, but was completely dedicated to art music and never composed for film or TV.
Warren was born into a family of amateur musicians in Los Angeles. Both of her parents had once aspired to careers in music, her mother as a pianist and her father as an operatic tenor. In addition to hearing music at home, she was exposed very early on to the full range of musical performance in Southern California: by the age of three she was being taken to Los Angeles Symphony (now Los Angeles Philharmonic) concerts and attending her father's choral concerts. She was improvising on the piano by the age of four and composed her first piece, a waltz, at 5 years and 9 months. She had compositions published by Schirmer and performed by Los Angeles area ensembles by the time she graduated from high school, yet when she went to Mills College in Oakland to study music she decided to train as a singer. Within a year, her teachers had convinced her to move to New York and study composition rather than vocal music. She stayed in New York for five years, studying composition privately and working as a recital accompanist, before returning to Los Angeles where she lived for the rest of her life.
Initially Warren composed mostly art songs and short choral pieces. Her preferred medium changed dramatically after her first attempt at orchestral composition, a setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem The Harp Weaver for chorus and orchestra, premiered in 1936 to great critical acclaim. A choral symphony titled The Legend of King Arthur followed in 1940 with similar success. From then on, virtually all of Warren's output was for orchestra or chorus with orchestra.
By the mid-1940s, Warren began to define herself as a California composer, writing a number of tone poems and orchestral suites inspired by her home state. Along the Western Shore, a suite for orchestra, is one of these pieces, composed intermittently between 1941 and 1954. The three movements are intended to evoke the Southern California coast: hills rising almost directly from the shore, a beach at night, and turbulent coastal waters.
Movements:
I. Dark Hills
II. Nocturne (4:20)
III. Sea Rhapsody (8:00)
It might be surprising that Elinor Remick Warren (1900-1991) is a forgotten composer, considering how recently she was highly successful: between 1970 and 1980 American orchestras performed her music more frequently than any other female composer, but she faded from public view in the 1980s. Warren was the only woman to gain prominence among the generation of American neo-Romanticists that included Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Perhaps it was geography that later removed her from public attention. For most of her career, "serious" American composers gravitated toward New York and other major East Coast cities, while the West Coast was seen as the home of film composers. Warren lived almost her entire life in the Los Angeles area, and was even married to a film producer for 45 years, but was completely dedicated to art music and never composed for film or TV.
Warren was born into a family of amateur musicians in Los Angeles. Both of her parents had once aspired to careers in music, her mother as a pianist and her father as an operatic tenor. In addition to hearing music at home, she was exposed very early on to the full range of musical performance in Southern California: by the age of three she was being taken to Los Angeles Symphony (now Los Angeles Philharmonic) concerts and attending her father's choral concerts. She was improvising on the piano by the age of four and composed her first piece, a waltz, at 5 years and 9 months. She had compositions published by Schirmer and performed by Los Angeles area ensembles by the time she graduated from high school, yet when she went to Mills College in Oakland to study music she decided to train as a singer. Within a year, her teachers had convinced her to move to New York and study composition rather than vocal music. She stayed in New York for five years, studying composition privately and working as a recital accompanist, before returning to Los Angeles where she lived for the rest of her life.
Initially Warren composed mostly art songs and short choral pieces. Her preferred medium changed dramatically after her first attempt at orchestral composition, a setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem The Harp Weaver for chorus and orchestra, premiered in 1936 to great critical acclaim. A choral symphony titled The Legend of King Arthur followed in 1940 with similar success. From then on, virtually all of Warren's output was for orchestra or chorus with orchestra.
By the mid-1940s, Warren began to define herself as a California composer, writing a number of tone poems and orchestral suites inspired by her home state. Along the Western Shore, a suite for orchestra, is one of these pieces, composed intermittently between 1941 and 1954. The three movements are intended to evoke the Southern California coast: hills rising almost directly from the shore, a beach at night, and turbulent coastal waters.
Movements:
I. Dark Hills
II. Nocturne (4:20)
III. Sea Rhapsody (8:00)