Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens

Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1977), Elizabeth Maconchy (1906-1983) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music, 1926-1930. Together with their fellow students such as Britten and Rawsthorne, all three had their works performed in the Macnaughten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s. These concerts were founded with the express purpose of showcasing the music of young British composers, especially important in the days before Arts Council grants or commissions.In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to attain status and prominent positions within the British music scene, challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by woman composers. By the early 1940s, all three had made remarkable advances in their work. Lutyens had written her Chamber Concerto for nine instruments (1939/40) in a serial idiom; Maconchy had composed three string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won wide-spread recognition with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Rhymes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). The three composers' commitments to the musical community was evident in Lutyens' founding of the Composers' Concourse in 1954, Maconchy's chairmanship of the Composers' Guild (1959-60) and long association with the S.P.N.M., and Williams' associations with the BBC Education Department and the Arts Council of Wales.Here, selected works are analyzed and compared for insights into aesthetics, compositional techniques and influences leading to an appraisal of the musical development of the three composers. The book draws upon personal radio and television interviews as well as with people who knew them. The book therefore provides a re-evaluation of the composers' respective positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history, and will also be important for cultural studies and gender studies.