HISTORY
Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990)
Peggy Glanville-Hicks won an international reputation as a composer, in particular for her operas, as well as providing an important voice as a critic in the mid-twentieth century.
Born in Melbourne on December 29th, 1912, Peggy Glanville-Hicks' creative gift was manifest from early childhood, and at the age of fifteen she began lessons in composition with Fritz Hart. In 1932 she won the Carlotta Rowe scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London, where for four years she studied with Vaughan Williams in composition, Arthur Benjamin for piano, and with Constant Lambert and later Sir Malcolm Sargent in conducting. In 1936, she was awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship for studies in Vienna with Egon Wellesz, and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.
In 1938 Sir Adrian Boult conducted her Choral Suite in the I.S.C.M. Festival in London, the first time Australia had been represented in this Festival. In 1941 she emigrated to the United States, and in 1948 again represented Australia in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival at Amsterdam, when members of the Amsterdamse Kamermuziekgezelschap performed her Concertino da Camera. Most of her works were written in America in the 1940s and 1950s, and most have been recorded, including four of the five operas. Her name built steadily through the appearance of works such as the Three Gymnopedies, the Sinfonia da Pacifica, Letters from Morocco, Etruscan Concerto and Concerto Romantico. But it was The Transposed Heads, based on the novella by Thomas Mann, premiered in Louisville in 1954, and in New York in 1958, which established her securely as a composer on the international scene.
Photograph courtesy of the Australian Music Centre.
In 1958, the composer was commissioned to write a ballet score for the first Spoleto Festival - The Masque of the Wild Man choreographed by John Butler. She subsequently wrote several ballet scores for this renowned choreographer, which were produced in New York or broadcast on US television. From 1960 to 1975, Glanville-Hicks made her home in Athens, where a Fulbright Research Fellowship and a Rockefeller Grant made possible a comparative study of the Demotic music of Greece and the music of India.
The outcome of these years was Nausicaa - an opera based on Greek Demotic musical materials, with libretto from the novel Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. The premiere, presented by the Greek Government in the Athens Festival of 1961, was a triumph, achieving international recognition and coverage. Following this success, the Ford Foundation commissioned a new opera for the San Francisco Opera House, and she composed Sappho, based on the play by Lawrence Durrell.
Peggy Glanville-Hicks, in a sense, enjoyed a double career, for her activities on behalf of contemporary music and musicians were an outstanding contribution to her era, and her trendsetting influence was felt in many musical directions. As early as during WWII, she was active with the League of Composers, the American Composers Alliance and the Contemporary Music Society. Resulting from her observation of the post-War plight of Europe's musicians, it was her ideas and initiative in collaboration with Dr Carleton Sprague Smith that sparked the creation of the International Music Fund and saw her involvement in its early activities.
As a member of the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art, she organised musical events of an avant garde nature for the Museum's Auditorium, notable among these being two concerts in 1952 - The Hispanic Influence in Modern Music and New Music for Percussion, which helped to introduce European composers to American audiences. For the Italian pianist Carlo Bussotti and American violist Walter Trampler she wrote her Etruscan Concerto and Concerto Romantico respectively, organising concerts where these premieres could create a concert debut for the young artists. The New Works for Chamber Orchestra concerts she helped organise in New York in 1956 and 1957 presented also for the first time in the U.S.A. young Scandinavian composers, Vagn Holmboe and Karl Birger Blomdahl, whose works she first heard at the Amsterdam festival.. Glanville-Hicks was also the author of most of the American entries of the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary.
With Yehudi Menuhin she was co-M.C. to the concerts of Indian Music given at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. From 1947 to 1955 Glanville-Hicks was one of the outstanding composer-critics working on the New York Herald Tribune, and her reviews, as well as articles appearing in many other publications, displayed penetrating writing on contemporary musical topics.
From 1951 to 1960 she was executive secretary and later executive director of the Composers Forum, organising a series of concerts annually in New York, for young composers, many of which led to recordings. She was also responsible for the performance, publication and recording of works by a number of composers, particularly those who used in some way the modes and methods of the Oriental or Antique world. In 1975, she returned to Australia and was a major figure in the national music scene until her death in June 1990. In her will she established a fund and residency for young Australian composers at her former home in the Sydney suburb of Paddington.
edited 2020, with thanks to Suzanne Robinson, University of Melbourne