Rebecca Clarke (Friskin) (August 27, 1886–October 13, 1979) was an English classical composer and violist who is best known for her chamber music featuring the viola. Though she wrote little, largely due to her ideas about the role of a female composer, and of those most of her works have yet to be published, her work was recognized for its compositional skill. Clarke's work was largely forgotten after she stopped composing until her ninetieth birthday in the late 1970s, which sparked revived scholarship and interest.

Contents

1 Life 2 Music 3 Selected works 4 References 5 External links

Life

Clarke was born in Harrow, England, and studied at London's Royal College of Music. The paths of her life and career were strongly affected by her gender. Beginning her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, she was pulled out by her father after being proposed to by a teacher (who left her his Stradivarius violin in his will); she then attended the Royal College of Music, becoming Sir Charles Stanford's first female composition student. She shifted her focus there from violin to viola, just as the latter was coming to be seen as a legitimate solo instrument. Later, when selected to play in the Queen's Hall Orchestra, she became one of the first female professional orchestral musicians.

Having been kicked out of the house by her abusive father, Clarke supported herself through her playing after leaving the Royal College, and moved to the United States in 1916 to perform. Her compositional career peaked in a short period, beginning with the viola sonata she entered in a 1919 competition sponsored by patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, tying for first prize in a field of 72 entrants with a piece by Ernest Bloch. (Though Coolidge later declared Bloch the winner, two judges of the contest remarked to Coolidge that though they had favored Clarke, it was good that she did not win, to avoid appearance of favoring her neighbor and friend and destroying the reputation of the then-new contest.) It was speculated by reporters that "Rebecca Clarke" was only a pseudonym for Bloch himself, or at least that it could not have been Clarke who wrote these pieces. In 1921 she again made an impressive showing with her piano trio. A 1923 rhapsody for cello and piano followed, sponsored by Coolidge. These three works represent the height of her compositional career. From then on her output was sporadic; she composed hardly at all throughout the 1930s, for example, nor did she write during her employment as a nanny.

1939 to 1942 was her last real creative period. By this point Clarke was living in the United States with her brothers, and extremely unhappy to see them turning out as badly as their father, though this period of unhappiness, like her early adulthood, proved a fertile one nonetheless. Clarke suffered from dysthymia, a low-grade, long-term form of depression, which often prevented her from writing; the lack of encouragement—sometimes outright discouragement—she received for her work also stayed her pen, but perhaps her greatest barrier to composition was her own idea of her proper role. She married Juilliard piano instructor James Friskin in 1944; her last composition, one of only three to follow her wedding, was a song entitled "God Made a Tree", which was published in 1954. Clarke did not consider herself able to balance family life and composition: "I can't do it unless it's the first thing I think of every morning when I wake and the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep." Clarke took the responsibilties of family life as more important than composition; she stopped writing, though she continued working on arrangements until shortly before her death. Her memoir, I Had a Father Too (or the Mustard Spoon), which she began writing after Friskin's death, was completed in 1973. In it she describes her early life, marked by frequent beatings from her father and strained family relations.

Music

Most of Clarke's music was written for herself and the all-female chamber ensembles she played in. As such, most of it features the viola, and takes advantage of the strengths of the instrument, as she was a professional performer for many years. Her works were strongly influenced by several trends in music of the 20th century. The impressionism of Debussy is often mentioned in connection with her work, with lush textures and modernistic harmonies; the Viola Sonata (published in the same year as the prizewinning Bloch and also of the Hindemith Viola Sonata) is a particular example, with its pentatonic opening theme, thick harmonies, emotionally intense nature, and dense, rhythmically complex texture. (Before learning the composer's identity, several judges of the Coolidge competition thought it was a Ravel.)

In addition to her chamber string music, Clarke wrote many songs. Her setting of "The Tiger", which she worked on for five years to the exclusion of other works during her tumultuous relationship with the married baritone John Goss, is dark and brooding, almost expressionist in nature; most, however, are lighter in nature. Her earliest works were parlor songs; she went on to build up a body of work primarily drawing from classic texts by Yeats, Masefield, and traditional Chinese writings.

During 1939 to 1942, her second major creative period, her style grew less dense and strongly developed, and more clear and contrapuntal, with emphasis on motivic elements and tonal structures, the influences of neoclassicism appearing in her works. Dumka (1941), a still-unpublished work for violin, viola, and piano, reflects the Eastern European folk styles of Bartók and Martinů. The "Passacaglia on an Old English Tune", also from 1941, is based on a theme attributed to Thomas Tallis which appears throughout the work, is modal in flavor, based on Dorian but venturing into the seldom-heard Phrygian mode. Dedicated to "BB", ostensibly Clarke's niece Magdalen, the piece is speculated by recent scholars to be more likely referring to Benjamin Britten, who organized a concert for the death of Clarke's friend and major influence Frank Bridge.

The vast majority of Clarke's work was in short forms. Her views on the her role, and the role of women in general as composers never permitted her ambition to realize itself in the larger forms; she never wrote a symphony, sticking to short chamber pieces and songs. Over half of her compositions remain unpublished, in the personal possession of her heirs, along with most of her writings. Several compositions, including a yet-unpublished short, lyrical piece for viola and piano entitled Morpheus, were composed under the pseudonym of "Anthony Trent", a pseudonym she invented for a recital to avoid having her name on the program so often. Her work was all but forgotten for a long period of time; it was revived in 1976 during a radio station celebration of her ninetieth birthday, and with recent scholarship, particularly works by the Rebecca Clarke Society, she has since begun coming back into public awareness.

Selected works

• "Shiv and the Grasshopper" (1904), vocal, text Rudyard Kipling
• "Shy One" (1912), vocal, text Yeats
• Morpheus (1917-18), viola and piano
• Sonata (1919), viola (or cello) and piano
• Piano Trio (1921), violin, viola, and piano
• He that dwelleth in the secret place (Psalm xci) (1921), SATB choir with S,A,T,B solo
• "The Seal Man" (1922), vocal, text John Masefield
• Rhapsody (1923), cello and piano
• "The Aspidistra" (1929), vocal, text Claude Flight
• "The Tiger" (1929–33), vocal, text William Blake
• Passacaglia on an Old English Tune (?1940–41), viola (or cello) and piano
• Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale (1941), viola and clarinet
• "God made a tree" (1954), vocal, text Katherine Kendall

References

• Liane Curtis, "Rebecca Clarke". Grove Music Online [(subscription access).
• Liane Curtis, "When Virginia Woolf met Rebecca Clarke". Newsletter of the Rebecca Clarke society, Fall 2003
• Liane Curtis, "A Case of Identity". Musical Times, May 1996.
• Ann M. Woodward, program notes to Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano, J. & W. Chester, Ltd., 1985.
• Liane Curtis, program notes to Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano, Hildegard Publishing Company, 2000.
• Martha Furman Schleifer, program notes to "Passacaglia on an Old English Tune", Hildegard Publishing Company, 1999.

External links

• The Rebecca Clarke Society Homepage