Elizabeth Maconchy (1907 - 1994)

[Serial_Apologist]

Monday 13 - Friday 17 May

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001yzms

"Elizabeth Maconchy explodes onto Britain's musical landscape..." etc. etc.

Just mega exaggeration from infantile liner writers. As is the "thought to be the finest composer of string quartets ever to emerge in the British Isles" in today's RT entry. Ten-year olds have taken over mass media back-up publicity. All I want to know is, does one pronounce the ch as a k, as one has heard in the past?

[Pulcinella]

Monday 13 - Friday 17 May

...

"Elizabeth Maconchy explodes onto Britain's musical landscape..." etc. etc.

Just mega exaggeration from infantile liner writers. As is the "thought to be the finest composer of string quartets ever to emerge in the British Isles" in today's RT entry. Ten-year olds have taken over mass media back-up publicity. All I want to know is, does one pronounce the ch as a k, as one has heard in the past?

Not name-dropping, SA, but I'll be seeing her daughter Nicola LeFanu at a York Festival of Ideas event in a few weeks' time and can ask her then if you still want to know.

[Serial_Apologist]

Not name-dropping, SA, but I'll be seeing her daughter Nicola LeFanu at a York Festival of Ideas event in a few weeks' time and can ask her then if you still want to know.

No need, I think - all being well we'll be finding out this week! You're a very lucky man to have a chance to meet Nicola, who has been a featured COTW, I see.

[smittims]

I think Maconchy has been composer of the week before, but not with the current presenter. I remember her daughter being interviewed then and she surprised me by claiming that her mother's music shows no influence of that of Vaughan Williams , her teacher, and sometime friend and supporter, as his letters show.

The first time I heard one of her works I had switched on in the middle of it and didn't know who had composed it, nor did I know, then, that Maconchy had been a pupil of VW. Yet my first thought was 'this sounds like someone who'd been taught by Vaughan Williams' as I find nearly all his pupils show his influence. I don't think there should be any need to deny this.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think Maconchy has been composer of the week before, but not with the current presenter. I remember her daughter being interviewed then and she surprised me by claiming that her mother's music shows no influence of that of Vaughan Williams , her teacher, and sometime friend and supporter, as his letters show.

The first time I heard one of her works I had switched on in the middle of it and didn't know who had composed it, nor did I know, then, that Maconchy had been a pupil of VW. Yet my first thought was 'this sounds like someone who'd been taught by Vaughan Williams' as I find nearly all his pupils show his influence. I don't think there should be any need to deny this.

The harmonic language was what has been called chromatic modal, and so has certain aspects in common with middle-period and later Vaughan Williams, as demonstrated by Anthony Payne's analysis of Vaughan Williams's Sancta Civitas, showing rigorous use of "composed modes" (drawing on eastern and near-Eastern scales) to build a powerful sense of spiritual irresolution. Holst - Machonchy's teacher/mentor - also used these. I would think Bartok too - for VW a feeling of kinship born of common interest in folk music; for Maconchy an alternative way to major-minor tonic-dominant-conditioning conventions to shape melody and harmony against a flexibly ambiguous sense of rooting without resorting to atonality entirely*, another lesson from Bartok, along with the "organic" developmental methods of Beethoven she speaks of in the first programme.

*(But it could be a way to atonality, or at any rate musics freely based or not around root centres not necessarily defined by dualistic tension/resolution desiderata or idealised final solutions).