TY - JOUR
AU - Siegel,, Erica
AB - When Vaughan Williams began teaching at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in 1919, he was determined not to follow in the footsteps of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, his erstwhile teacher there. His belief that his pupils, both male and female, should be treated equally and with respect stood in marked contrast to Stanford’s draconian methods. Stanford’s irascible temper and his fierce conviction concerning the inferiority of women composers have been well documented.1 Influenced by his studies with the kindly Max Bruch, Vaughan Williams reflected in “A Musical Autobiography” (1950): With my own pupils now I always try to remember the value of encouragement. Sometimes a callow youth appears who may be a fool or may be a genius, and I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius. A fool, after all, may find his own salvation in artistic self-expression even though it means nothing to anyone else.2 Jenny Doctor has noted that Vaughan Williams remained a strong advocate for his women pupils not only during their matriculation at RCM but also well after. In the case of Elizabeth Maconchy (1907−1994), he was a tireless advocate of her work and she continued to seek out his advice and guidance until his death in 1958.3 In her article “Vaughan Williams as a Teacher” (1959), Maconchy reflected: I find it difficult to describe his teaching, and his other pupils may feel the same difficulty. They would all agree, I think, that he was an inspiring teacher (by which I mean that he inspired them to write better music than they would otherwise have written) and that he set them a standard of absolute musical integrity. But he had little respect for the rules and conventional methods of teaching composition, and never followed a formal scheme. The reason for this apparent lack of method was his complete rejection of ready-made solutions. All through his life he chose the laborious method of “working out his own salvation”—his own phrase. And this is what he encouraged his pupils to do. His teaching, though he never said it in so many words—was always directed towards making his pupils think for themselves in their own musical language. He fully recognised the importance of an adequate technique, but for him the purpose of technique was how to give the clearest expression to the musical ideas of each individual composer in his own way.4 Encouraging his women students to think for themselves proved crucial to their later success, as many became respected and successful composers with careers beyond the shores of Great Britain. Of particular interest among Vaughan Williams’s pupils are Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Anna Claudia Russell-Brown or, as she is more commonly known, Anna Russell. Both achieved great acclaim in the United States. This fame was shaped by the invaluable advice proffered them by Vaughan Williams during their studies at RCM and after. Vaughan Williams as a Teacher Toward the end of a lecture delivered in 1955, titled “The Teaching of Parry and Stanford,” Vaughan Williams opined, “The value of lessons with a great teacher cannot be computed in terms of what he said, or what you did, but in terms of some intangible contact with his mind and character.”5 In developing his pedagogy, Vaughan Williams drew upon his own struggle to find his compositional voice as a means to guide his students. His recollections in “The Teaching of Parry and Stanford” and “A Musical Autobiography” are particularly revealing, as they offer not only an account of his musical training but a scrupulous assessment of the methods of his former teachers, written from his perspective as a teacher with decades of experience and insight. Vaughan Williams began his professional training with Herbert Parry at RCM in 1891. Having long admired and idolized Parry, Vaughan Williams admitted to having fallen “under his spell,” which clouded his ability to see his teacher’s faults: Parry was always on the look-out for what was “characteristic”—even if he disliked the music he would praise it if he saw that it had character. I remember once I showed him a piece in which, by pure carelessness, I had repeated a note in a scale passage; Parry, as his custom was, had kept the piece back to look at it in the week, and he said to me “I have been looking at that passage for a long time to see if it was just accident, or something characteristic …” It is fatal for a teacher to say, even mentally, to a pupil “well perhaps you are right after all.”6 Furthermore, Parry’s penchant for solving a problem for a student instead of guiding them toward the solution did little to foster personal growth.7 With his students, Vaughan Williams sought to achieve a balance between character and substance. Michael Mullinar, who studied with Vaughan Williams at RCM, clearly delineates the care with which Vaughan Williams addressed problems in a pupil’s composition in his 1926 account: If your harmony does not seem to be going well in a definite direction, he asks you what you want it to do; and then, after you have told him (if you can) what you are trying to work out, he shows where the progression is doubtful or weak. And if your part-writing has no character, or if your rhythms seem to get tired or change their shape without reason, he makes clear what is wrong. He queries all weak passages, and asks you to think over them for a few days, until you yourself arrive at the conclusion that they actually are weak. If after all you cannot realise that they are weak, and so cannot think his way, he does not wish them to be altered. If he considers that a work which falls short of being satisfactory could possibly be improved, he will offer his ideas, but only as suggestions, and he will not allow you to adopt them unless you really feel that way and can make the ideas your own.8 After a year of study with Parry, Vaughan Williams left for Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had lessons with Charles Wood in preparation for his Bachelor of Music degree. Though Wood was an assured technician who could turn out anthems and magnificats at the drop of a hat, he had little interest in aiding his students to further their artistic aims. After passing his exams, Vaughan Williams returned to RCM in 1895 to study with Stanford, which proved to be a dismal experience. He later recalled, “Everything he disapproved of had no quarter. It was ‘damnably ugly’ and that was the end of it. Once, when I was his pupil, I showed him what I considered was a world-shaking masterpiece; he looked at it and then said curtly: ‘All rot, my boy.’”9 In 1897, Vaughan Williams studied with Bruch for a period of six months. Bruch provided a much-needed contrast to Stanford: “I only know that I worked hard and enthusiastically and that Max Bruch encouraged me, and I had never had much encouragement before.”10 Though Bruch’s enthusiasm helped to bolster his confidence, he still found himself struggling, noting in 1907, “I came to the conclusion that I was lumpy and stodgy; had come to a dead-end and that a little French polish would be of use to me. So I went to Paris armed with an introduction to Maurice Ravel.”11 His lessons with Ravel proved to be a turning point: “He showed me how to orchestrate in points of colour rather than in lines. It was an invigorating experience to find all artistic problems looked at from what was to me an entirely new angle.”12 As Byron Adams discusses in “Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship,” it was the studies with Ravel that fortified Vaughan Williams’s belief in the fundamental importance of technique as means to develop one’s ideas.13 In lessons, Ravel would use passages in his own compositions as examples, and often repeated a remark attributed to Massenet: “In order to know one’s own craft, one must study the craft of others.”14 For Ravel, learning to imitate the works of other composers was fundamental to understanding the ways to solve musical problems through technical means. Composer Alexis Roland-Manuel recalled that Ravel would sometimes ask the student, “what would Debussy have done?”15 and offer the following advice: If you have nothing to say, you can not do better … than say again what has already been well said. If you have something to say, that something will never emerge more distinctly than when you are being unwittingly unfaithful to your model.16 At Vaughan Williams’s first lesson, Ravel requested that he “écrire un petit menuet dans le style de Mozart.”17 Though he would later claim to have resisted, at the time he did exactly what Ravel asked.18 And he would give Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, one of his first pupils at RCM, a nearly identical assignment: to write a movement of a piano sonata in the style of Mozart.19 Like Ravel, he also would frequently use his own compositions as examples during lessons. Though the French composer receives only a brief mention in “A Musical Autobiography,” his influence shaped Vaughan Williams’s aesthetics substantially, and as Adams has observed, many of the statements in “A Musical Autobiography” show a striking resemblance to the philosophy of his teacher: Why should music be “original”? The object of art is to stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment. If it is not the right thing to say, however unheard of it may be, it is of no artistic value. Music which is unoriginal is so, not simply because it has been said before but because the composer has not taken the trouble to make sure that this was the right thing to say at the right moment.20 By combining the encouragement he received from Bruch and Ravel’s high standards and technical mastery with a hint of Parry’s willingness to consider “characteristic” elements in a student’s composition, Vaughan Williams sought to impart something of greater significance than mere technical instruction. In the words of his student Ruth Gipps, “What he taught was not a style of music but an attitude towards composition.”21 Making It in America Until the 1950s when Britten’s music became popular in the States, it was not easy for any British composer, even Vaughan Williams, to gain a foothold in America. It was even more difficult for a British composer who happened to be a woman. Discouraging obstacles included the geographical isolation of major musical centers, the lack of a national radio service, and the absence of comprehensive coverage of the arts in the national press.22 To succeed in America, a foreign composer needed aggressive publicity and promotion, as well as connections. For many British composers, patronage provided an entry into North American music circles. The most prominent U.S. patron to promote British musicians and composers was Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. In addition to hiring musicians from Britain and programming works by British composers at her annual Berkshire Festival, she commissioned works by composers such as Arthur Bliss, Frank Bridge, Benjamin Britten, Rebecca Clarke, and Eugene Goossens, among others.23 Coolidge’s patronage, however, was almost entirely reserved for male composers, with Clarke being the only woman to receive a commission from the Coolidge Foundation. This disproportion was not due to any lack of knowledge about women composers and their works; rather, it was the result of Coolidge’s prejudices.24 Even if one had the advantages of patronage, fame was hard-won and precarious for any modern composer, as the case of Prokofiev demonstrated all too well.25 Though a single performance or broadcast might open a few doors, it was not enough to secure widespread notoriety. Despite such impediments, the music of male British composers was broadcast over American commercial airwaves, a privilege often denied to the scores of their female peers. Men also had the advantage of promotional support from publishers such as Boosey & Hawkes, who vigorously advertised their music and scheduled concerts and tours in the United States. In the article “‘An English Composer Sees America’: Benjamin Britten and the North American Press, 1939 –42,” Suzanne Robinson shows the degree to which Boosey & Hawkes proved a vital force in securing the widespread performances and press Britten’s music garnered between 1939 and 1942.26 For women composers, the promotional power of Boosey & Hawkes remained off limits, as Maconchy discovered in the early 1930s when Leslie Boosey refused to accept anything other than songs from a woman composer.27 There were other avenues, however, to greater recognition. One of the strongest advocates of British music in America was Bernard Herrmann. A composer, conductor, and staunch Anglophile, Herrmann was a fervent admirer of Vaughan Williams. During his time as a conductor for CBS radio, Herrmann made an extended effort to promote British music through broadcast performances of music not only from Vaughan Williams but also Elgar, Britten, Gerald Finzi, and Edmund Rubbra, among others. Between 1940 and 1952, Herrmann would conduct 160 works by forty British composers with the Columbia Broadcast Symphony Orchestra. Yet women composers are conspicuously absent from this list. Of the 160 works Herrmann conducted, only one was by a woman, Phyllis Tate’s “Occasional Overture.”28 It would not be until his final concert in London on 21 April 1974 that Herrmann conducted a work by Vaughan Williams’s favorite pupil, Elizabeth Maconchy, when he presided over the premiere of her choral work Isles of Greece.29 Herrmann’s neglect of Maconchy’s music is rendered all the more curious by a letter in Herrmann’s papers. This letter, from Alan Frank at Oxford University Press and posted in April 1938, reveals that Herrmann was aware of Maconchy’s music and had expressed some interest in her works, asking for the manuscripts of her Piano Concerto and Divertissement for 12 Instruments.30 Unfortunately, there is little surviving correspondence to reveal if he ever received copies.31 That Herrmann was interested in Maconchy’s music is further indicated by a remark by music critic Irving Kolodin, one of Herrmann’s longtime acquaintances and the author of Herrmann’s obituary for The Saturday Review. Kolodin noted that Maconchy had been one of Herrmann’s “enthusiasms.”32 The exclusion of Maconchy’s music in particular, and women composers in general, illustrates the complex structure of radio programming in America. In his 1932 article for The Musical Times, American music critic B. H. Haggin elaborates on the radically different approaches to classical music programming in Britain and in America. The BBC gave ample time to contemporary works, but classical music on American radio stations received little airtime. During the week of 2 November 1930, the BBC devoted thirteen hours and five minutes to classical music. In comparison, NBC broadcast two hours of classical music that week, Columbia three hours and fifteen minutes, WOR two hours, and WNYC scheduled a mere hour and a half.33 As a commercial system, American broadcasting made programming decisions based on potential revenue and what kind of musical product could be produced for the least expenditure. The system was bitterly criticized by Herrmann as one that sold products rather than furthered culture.34 With the power of programming decisions held by advertisers seeking to reach the widest audience possible, compounded by the conviction that listeners were simply not interested in classical music—a bias reinforced by low audience figures for classical programs that often were scheduled in the least desirable time slots—many American composers found that they received more substantial exposure in the UK through BBC broadcasts.35 Though conditions gradually improved as conductors such as Herrmann, Leopold Stokowski, and Arturo Toscanini became popular enough to draw large audiences to radio regardless of the works they chose to conduct, the casual exclusion accorded most women composers continued unabated. During his seventeen years at NBC, Toscanini did not conduct a single work by a woman, and though Herrmann and Stokowski did not completely exclude women composers, they were marginally represented at best. American composers such as Marion Bauer were moderately successful,36 but the thought of performing the works of women from abroad was usually dismissed out of hand, as Rebecca Clarke learned.37 As Virgil Thomson observed in 1967, “America welcomes [women composers] … but does not promote their works.”38 Peggy Glanville-Hicks One of Vaughan Williams’s students who succeeded in breaking through many of the barriers was Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912−1990). Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, she studied with Fritz Hart39 at the Albert Street Conservatorium before moving to London in 1932 with the hope of working with Vaughan Williams at RCM. Prior to her departure, Louise Dyer, a prominent figure in Melbourne musical circles, sent several of Glanville-Hicks’s manuscripts to RCM in an attempt to secure a scholarship for the young composer. Dyer’s efforts, however, came to no avail.40 Never one to take no for an answer, Glanville-Hicks set off for London determined to prove her worth, delivering manuscripts of her compositions and a letter of introduction to the office of Sir Hugh Allen, the RCM director, soon after her arrival on 21 July 1932.41 According to Wendy Beckett, Glanville-Hicks’s biographer, this is how she recounted her arrival at the college: Peggy said that she pushed herself to the front counter of the Royal College of Music, addressing the director Sir Hugh Allen who happened to be there at the time. At the first opportunity she interjected, “I’ve come on a one-way ticket from Australia and I’ve enough money to live for about three months. What scholarships might there be?”  Sir Hugh Allen, looking a little taken aback, enquired, “And what is your name, young lady?”  “Peggy,” she replied.  “You mean Margaret, I take it?” Sir Hugh asked.  “No, I mean Peggy,” she said.  “Oh dear,” said Sir Hugh. “It’s not a proper name. You’ll never get a Christian burial!”  “I’m not interested in burials,” said Peggy, “I’m interested in scholarships, what do you have, um, sir?”  He laughed grimly, then softened. “Well actually we do have a scholarship, left us by a lady composer, Carlotta Rowe.”  Peggy grinned a full wide smile, handed over her musical scores and waited. Sir Hugh went into the next room to read her work, leaving Peggy on a seat at the counter. He returned within an hour, ready to make her the offer of a scholarship. But before he could speak Peggy said, “I accept.”42 Glenville-Hicks eventually did receive the Carlotta Rowe Scholarship which funded her studies at RCM through 1936, but it was certainly not offered on the spot; rather, she had to wait until September to receive the official offer.43 She would also discover that Vaughan Williams, the teacher for whom she had traveled so far, would be on leave from the conservatory that autumn. Scheduled to deliver the Mary Flexner Lectures on the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Vaughan Williams would be in residence there for several months. The exact nature of Glanville-Hicks’s interactions with Vaughan Williams is unclear: according to her own account, it was a close pedagogical relationship. After getting news of Vaughan Williams’s death, Glanville-Hicks wrote fondly of her teacher in a letter to John Butler on 5 September 1958: He was an old friend, and a great and deep one. For two years, as a student, I lived and worked in his house as an apprentice, learning far more than just the technique of my own art. In those years he wrote his ballet Job, after William Blake, and the Fourth F-Minor Symphony wherein, to amuse me he used a theme from one of my student exercises. He always called it Peggy’s Symphony. He gave me the original MSS of his Fantasia of [sic] a Theme of Thomas Tallis, because I said I thought it was at once the most austere and the most beautiful piece of “English” music. I still think so.44 Many of Glanville-Hicks’s assertions are exaggerations, and, in some instances, outright lies. Her penchant for stretching the truth was apparent during her student days, resulting in the nickname “Baroness Munchausen.”45 However, not everything retailed in this letter is inaccurate. Although she most certainly did not live and work in the Vaughan Williams household—Ursula Vaughan Williams asserted to James Murdoch that Glanville-Hicks had “possibly stayed overnight once”46—her vivid accounts of her visits to Dorking, supported by detailed entries in her appointment diaries, indicate that she made several visits. During her years at RCM, Glanville-Hicks became well acquainted with the compositions of her teacher, who at the time was working on his Fourth Symphony as well as on revisions to his opera The Poisoned Kiss and a new cantata, Dona Nobis Pacem. She also attended the premieres of his Piano Concerto in 1933 and Fourth Symphony in 1935, and it is likely that she was familiar with his opera Riders to the Sea, which was completed in 1932 and received its premiere at RCM in November 1937.47 Of his pedagogy, Glanville-Hicks recalled in later years that he said, “I’m here to wait and watch. I don’t teach composition. I help you to get there.”48 A large part of this was through encouragement, and it was this praise that she remembered most, saying in later years that he once told her, “I’ve had a lot of students, dozens of them, but very few from whom I expect a distinguished result.”49 After securing an Octavia Travelling Scholarship in 1936, Glanville-Hicks, on Vaughan Williams’s advice, went to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz. In 1930, Vaughan Williams had sent another pupil to Wellesz, Grace Williams, who had found these lessons extremely helpful: [Wellesz] was marvellous, and had so different an approach from Vaughan Williams, who was the sort of personality to whom you could only take your best music. Vaughan Williams knew his limitations as a teacher though; he would say, “I know there’s something wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it,” but Egon Wellesz could. He had a way of saying “It begins to get weak at this point, so you will scrap from here onwards and re-write.”50 Glanville-Hicks arrived in Vienna in October 1936 and over the course of six weeks had five lessons with Wellesz.51 Unlike Williams, she was unimpressed and believed that Nadia Boulanger would be a teacher better suited to her needs. According to her biographer, Glanville-Hicks had wanted to study with her all along, but Boulanger had been unwilling to take her on as a pupil.52 On 11 January 1937, Glanville-Hicks set off for Paris, meeting up with Vaughan Williams on 25 January for lunch, who subsequently wrote a letter to Boulanger on his student’s behalf.53 Despite his efforts, Boulanger remained unwilling to accept Glanville-Hicks as a pupil. Another intervention by Vaughan Williams was more successful. In February, Stanley Bate, who had also received an Octavia Travelling Scholarship and with whom Glanville-Hicks was infatuated, moved to Paris tired of his studies with Paul Hindemith in Berlin.54 Like Glanville-Hicks, Bate wanted to study with Boulanger, and reluctantly, Vaughan Williams wrote another letter. Boulanger accepted Bate, and less than a month after his studies began, Boulanger agreed to give Glanville-Hicks her first lesson on 10 March.55 Throughout her time in Paris, Glanville-Hicks continued to correspond with Vaughan Williams and made several trips to London and Dorking to meet with him.56 At the time, her tumultuous relationship with Stanley Bate—they married in November 1938—was a matter of great concern to her friends and to Vaughan Williams as well, who thought that Glanville-Hicks was investing more time in Bate’s career than her own. In an interview with James Murdoch, Ursula Vaughan Williams later recalled that her husband believed that Glanville-Hicks had made a mistake getting involved with Bate: “Ralph was very worried about them—he called them the Babes in the Woods, they were in a muddle and they weren’t getting the right things going… . He also felt that Peggy had made a great mistake and he told her.”57 Vaughan Williams was right. In 1941, she and Bate moved to New York but the move did not improve the tensions between them. It would be several more years, however, before Glanville-Hicks was able to dissolve her marriage. Between 1939 and 1944, she did not finish any of her own compositions, having devoted her life to promoting Bate’s career, as Vaughan Williams had feared. After the couple’s separation, Vaughan Williams wrote to Glanville-Hicks, “Difficult as it [is] for you, dear Peggy, [but] if it enables you to compose again that is good.”58 A hard worker and fierce networker, Glanville-Hicks was a brilliant strategist when navigating the commercialized business of classical music in America. Recognizing the importance of establishing relationships, she took full advantage of her connection to Boulanger, and was quick to align herself with Boulanger pupils such as Virgil Thomson.59 Glanville-Hicks also became active in the New York Composers’ Forum and forged powerful friendships with Carleton Sprague Smith and Oliver Daniel, who, at various points in his career, served as the musical director of educational programming for CBS radio and vice president of Broadcast Music Inc.60 She also had a keen understanding of what would sell in America and sought to align herself with male composers on concert programs that promised greater exposure for her work on both the concert stage and in recordings.61 In 1948, Glanville-Hicks became an American citizen, which allowed her to receive grants and fellowships, such as a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim fellowships, a Fulbright fellowship, and a Rockefeller grant. Initially, Glanville-Hicks was determined not to make her gender an issue, but after George Antheil stated in an article that prior to hearing her music, he had doubted the capability of women composers to produce great work, she began to rethink her position and looked for ways in which to use her gender and the rarity of women composers to her advantage.62 As Deborah Hayes has observed in her extensive work on Glanville-Hicks, her attitude toward the title “woman composer” changed dramatically. This change of heart is evident in the liner notes for her recordings of the mid-1950s, the majority of which she wrote herself or assisted in writing, which often began with a paraphrased blurb drawn from Antheil’s article proclaiming, “Peggy Glanville-Hicks is an exception to the rule that women composers do not measure up to the standards set in the field by men.”63 Further evidence of the care with which she sought to promote herself can be found in the ninety-eight articles on American composers she contributed to Eric Blom’s fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Among those entries, only two were of women composers: Marion Bauer, who was already in her seventies, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, who had died in 1953.64 Despite a long list of accomplishments, her steely determination, and her abilities as a composer, Glanville-Hicks never achieved the level of success and financial security enjoyed by her male colleagues. She received work as a part-time music critic at the New York Herald Tribune, but she was never offered a full-time position, as preference was given to her male colleagues. In 1950, she embarked on a successful lecture tour, in which she spoke at several universities. Though her talks were well received and the experience rewarding, she was nevertheless hesitant to commit to an academic appointment, which she feared would take time away from composing.65 Her personality and ambitions may have been partly to blame, but other snubs, notably the Composers’ Forum’s choice to meet at the Harvard Club, which at that time only allowed men, speak to the sexism prevalent in society, the musical establishment, and among composers themselves.66 Throughout her career, Glanville-Hicks spoke highly of her mentor and teacher Vaughan Williams, who often went out of his way to help her career. Though he may not have had the connections to assist her in America, he sought to do as much as he could for her in Britain. In 1950, he asked her for some songs to forward to Oxford University Press.67 After the songs were turned down, Vaughan Williams sent them to Lengnick Publishing. Sadly, Vaughan Williams did not have good news for Glanville-Hicks, writing in a letter dated 7 February 1951, “I am sorry to say that Lengnick has also turned down your songs. What do you think we had better do next about it. Will you let me know? I am so sorry about it. I hope it is not the outside cover which puts them off!”68 In 1954, Glanville-Hicks met with Vaughan Williams during his last visit to America, and then again in Mallorca in 1956. The latter meeting, which would be their final, was particularly memorable for Glanville-Hicks, who had recently received a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Proud of her accomplishments, Vaughan Williams allegedly told his pupil, “I always thought you were the one that would make it!”69 Though one might be quick to jump to the conclusion that this was merely another example of Glanville-Hicks’s penchant for embellishing the truth, Vaughan Williams’s letters do reflect not only the concerns of a devoted teacher but also that he did in fact think highly of her as a composer. Prior to Vaughan Williams’s trip to America in 1954, Glanville-Hicks had arranged for him to receive a score and recording of her opera The Transposed Heads (1953). The opera includes the theme that Glanville-Hicks claimed Vaughan Williams had taken from her Sinfonietta (1935). As Victoria Rogers has pointed out, Glanville-Hicks’s claim could not be true, as Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony had been completed and premiered well before Glanville-Hicks had completed her Sinfonietta.70 Nevertheless, Glanville-Hicks relished rehashing this tale, telling Wendy Beckett, for example, that Vaughan Williams had said, “One should always borrow from the little people; if you steal from the big people it shows.” Glanville-Hicks responded, “Good, then I shall borrow it back when I am a bigger person.”71 In 1983, she would tell a version of this incident in an interview with George Daniel for the Sydney Morning Herald: “He borrowed it from me and told me that the secret of musical borrowing was boldness. The bolder the borrower the better. So I went ahead and borrowed my own theme back from him when I came to write the final scene of my opera, The Transposed Heads.”72 Though Glanville-Hicks might have been the one to borrow, her comments about Vaughan Williams were perspicacious. By his own account, Vaughan Williams was a prolific cribber as Herbert Howells wrote in 1958, “he liked to be thought a simple kleptomaniac let loose harmlessly among his creative peers—or inferiors.”73 Vaughan Williams certainly took delight in pointing out this facet of his musical personality, and devoted substantial space to the topic in “A Musical Autobiography”: Cribbing is, to my mind, a legitimate and praiseworthy practice, but one ought to know where one has cribbed … the funny thing is that what is most deliberately cribbed sounds the most original, but the more subtle, unconscious cribbing is, I admit, dangerous … . I have never had any conscience about cribbing. I cribbed Satan’s dance in Job deliberately from the Scherzo of Beethoven’s last quartet; the opening of the F minor Symphony deliberately from the finale of the Ninth Symphony, and the last two bars of the Scherzo to my Sea Symphony from the Mass in D. (I expect Beethoven knew that he was cribbing the last movement of the “Appassionata” Sonata from one of Cramer’s pianoforte studies.)74 Vaughan Williams’s musical influence is most readily apparent in Glanville-Hicks’s early compositions, but it begins to fade after her studies with Boulanger and subsequent move to the United States.75 In the early 1950s—a period in which Glanville-Hicks began to find her distinctive compositional voice—traces of Vaughan Williams’s idiom reemerge in direct allusions and in her treatment of modal harmony and modal inflections. In addition to “borrowing back” the theme from Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony for The Transposed Heads, she briefly alludes to another Vaughan Williams work in her opera Nausicaa. In 1958, Glanville-Hicks began composing that opera, based on Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daughter (1954), and completed it in 1960. Though Rogers has argued that the opera is “stylistically retrospective, looking back to the modal and tonal usage of Glanville-Hicks’s early works and more specifically to the English pastoral influence,”76 the conclusion to the first interlude (Example 1) is far more than “strongly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams”77—it directly alludes to a motive from his “Dirge for Two Veterans,”78 from Dona Nobis Pacem (Example 2). Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Glanville-Hicks, Nausicaa, Interlude I, three measures before rehearsal number 106. Copyright © 1959 (Renewed) Franco Columbo, Inc. All rights administered by Alfred Music. All right reserved. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Glanville-Hicks, Nausicaa, Interlude I, three measures before rehearsal number 106. Copyright © 1959 (Renewed) Franco Columbo, Inc. All rights administered by Alfred Music. All right reserved. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, “Dirge for Two Veterans,” four measures before rehearsal number 24. © Oxford University Press 1936. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, “Dirge for Two Veterans,” four measures before rehearsal number 24. © Oxford University Press 1936. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. While finishing the score to Nausicaa, Glanville-Hicks began provisional work on her next opera, Sappho (1963),79 which she based upon Lawrence Durrell’s 1950 play of the same name. She contacted Durrell in 1960 to inquire about the use of his text for her libretto, but she did not begin composing until she had secured funding through a Ford Foundation grant in March 1963 and a subsequent commission from the San Francisco Opera. Glanville-Hicks completed the opera in only seven months,80 and submitted it to San Francisco Opera’s director, Kurt Adler, who rejected the work, writing to Glanville-Hicks, “An all-important drawback is your abundant use of modal tonality which causes lack of contrasts and even monotony. Furthermore, interludes between sentences are altogether missing… . Your approach does not conceive the visual and practical necessities of a stage performance.”81 Deeply disappointed, Glanville-Hicks would later revise Sappho, which was rejected by Adler again in 1965.82 The first section to be completed was Sappho’s final aria. In a departure from Durrell’s play, Glanville-Hicks chose to end the opera with Sappho’s exile from Lesbos, as opposed to her return fifteen years later.83 Though Durrell’s text is used for Sappho’s recitative, Glanville-Hicks selected the text for her aria, “How soon will all my lovely days be over,” from the words of Sappho herself.84 With the slight adjustments made by the composer, the verse paints a bleak picture: How soon will all my lovely days be over And I no more be seen beneath the Sun. Neither beside the many murmuring Sea Nor where the Plain wind whispers to the reeds, Nor in the tall beech woods Where roam the bright-tipped Oreads, Nor along the pasture sides where berry-pickers stray And harmless Shepherds pipe their sheep to fold. For I am eager and the flame of life Burns swiftly in this fragile lamp of clay. Passion and love and longing and hot tears Consume this mortal Sappho, And too soon, a sable wind from the dark will blow upon me, And I be no more found in this fair world, For all the search of the revolving Moon And patient shine of Everlasting Stars.85 As in Nausicaa, Glanville-Hicks turns to Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem once again. Instead of the brief, fleeting allusion in Nausicaa, Sappho’s aria (Example 3) includes a more substantial reference to a theme from the third movement of Vaughan Williams’s cantata (Example 4a). The theme’s second appearance in the oboe in measure 15 (Example 4b), augmented by the baritone solo set to the text of Walt Whitman’s eponymous poem in Leaves of Grass (1855)—“That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soiled world”—adds a thematic layer that is too similar to be mere coincidence, as both works address the process of coming to terms with war, conflict, and death. Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Glanville-Hicks, Sappho, “How soon will all my lovely days be over,” rehearsal number 512. Copyright © G. Schirmer Australia Pty Limited. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used with permission of Music Sales Pty Ltd. Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Glanville-Hicks, Sappho, “How soon will all my lovely days be over,” rehearsal number 512. Copyright © G. Schirmer Australia Pty Limited. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used with permission of Music Sales Pty Ltd. Example 4a. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, “Reconciliation,” four measures before rehearsal number 10. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 4a. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, “Reconciliation,” four measures before rehearsal number 10. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 4b. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, “Reconciliation,” six measures after rehearsal number 10. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 4b. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, Dona Nobis Pacem, “Reconciliation,” six measures after rehearsal number 10. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. The challenges Glanville-Hicks faced as a woman trying to succeed in a male-dominated field undoubtedly influenced her work, as Hayes remarks: In the operas, as in the composer’s life, one sees women, denied the status of men, develop strategies of influence for pursuing their desires and accomplishing their artistic goals… . Glanville-Hicks was obviously attracted to these stories of how creative women fared in the public world… . The characters of Nausicaa and Sappho may be seen to represent two phases or aspects of Glanville-Hicks’s own professional experience and expressive “voice,” the first hopeful and triumphant, the second much less so.86 It is in her operas that Glanville-Hicks’s music is at its most inventive and original, and it is within this context that her musical borrowings need to be considered. As Vaughan Williams wrote, “The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment.”87 Glanville-Hicks’s allusions to her teacher’s music provided a means to further her own musical ideas—a practice Vaughan Williams approved of wholeheartedly, as he wrote to his former pupil after receiving a score of The Transposed Heads, “I quite agree that you have evidently learned how to write music, but I fear that I had very little to do with it.”88 Anna Russell The student who would prove to have the most publicly celebrated career in America, although not primarily as a composer, was Anna Russell (1911−2006). Born in London, Anna Claudia Russell-Brown began her studies at RCM in 1931 with the hope of becoming an opera singer. Unfortunately, her voice lessons with Editha Grepe proved disastrous. Despite her best efforts, Russell’s performances were often debacles. As she elaborates in her autobiography: This is what used to annoy Sir Hugh [Allen] so much. He was at all the concerts, sitting in the front row. I would go on each time praying that no one would laugh, but they always did, because the yodeling had become a running gag. He would put his head in his hands, which would make me paralytic with tension. I would then not only yodel but go off key. Finally one day he walked out in the middle of it, and I was summoned to his study. He was enraged. “When I first heard you I had hopes for you,” he said. “What is the matter with you ever since you have put on these idiotic performances? It may amuse the students, but it doesn’t amuse me. If you think you are as funny as all that, you can do it at the Palladium, but it’s the last time you’re going to do it here.”89 Russell was devastated by Allen’s scathing critique. A further blow came from her composition lessons with Herbert Howells, who “had nothing but contempt for my considerable output of compositions. He said they would be all right for variety shows and ladies’ afternoon tea parties, but hardly deserving of serious consideration.”90 Discouraged, Russell decided to study with Vaughan Williams instead, and her lessons with him proved more encouraging: He was a great big countrified-looking old gentleman who was kind and charming. He said my compositions weren’t bad, but very derivative. “For instance,” he said, “that one is quite a credible piece of Debussy.” This got to be rather a joke: “Who are we going to be today,” he’d ask, “Mozart or Wagner?” One day he asked me to please restrain the urge to be Gilbert and Sullivan, as he found himself humming my pieces, which interfered with his own musical thinking. After that he always referred to me as “Gilbert and Sullivan Russell-Brown.” This was another portent of what I was to become, although nothing was further from my mind at the time.91 During her RCM studies, Russell was able to find employment with the BBC, singing folksongs. Students were required to obtain permission from Allen for auditions but Russell was convinced that Allen would refuse her request. She found a convenient loophole: she applied as a Canadian, which did not require written permission from RCM.92 Allen of course found out: “He was still very grumpy with me and said it was all most unethical, but since it was a fait accompli, perhaps now I would knuckle down and do some work and stop acting the fool all the time. I promised I would and really meant it, which I suppose were more famous last words.”93 After the outbreak of war, and at the urging of her family, Russell left England and moved to Canada. Already married to John Denison, a former lawyer turned French horn player who had recently enlisted with the Somerset Light Infantry, Russell’s decision to leave was rendered easier when Denison “requested that I not join him, as he was too busy with his career to bother about me.”94 After finding a doctor willing to declare her pregnant, Russell was able to obtain the necessary exit permit and soon after set sail on her transatlantic journey. An aunt traveling with her distracted Customs from questioning the pregnancy upon their arrival.95 After settling in Toronto, Russell found employment with the CBC, which hired her to sing “hey nonny-nos” and a handful of smaller voice roles in soap operas. After a series of successful concerts for the Active Service Canteen in which Russell departed from her usual repertoire in favor of comic songs, she was approached by CFRB radio to sing music hall songs for the program Round the Marble Arch. The work was not always consistent, however. A new opportunity arrived when her roommate, who worked for the North American Artist’s Bureau, failed to book an entertainment act for the Canadian Federation of Music Teachers convention, and asked Russell to step in. With two weeks to plan, Russell recalled: I suddenly remembered my Gilbert and Sullivan Russell-Brown period with Dr. Vaughan Williams, and wondered if it was still possible to write some derivative music. So I went to work and came up with an aria, “I Wish I Were a Dickybird,” after Bellini; “Je ne veux pas faire l’amour, j’aimerais mieux manger,” after Debussy; “Schlumph ist mein Gesitzenbaum,” after Schubert; an eccentric rendition of “Liebestraum” on the piano; “The Tragedy of Lord Ernest,” a dramatic poem with a musical background; and to start it off I polished up the radio script of The Lady President.96 Russell’s routine was a smashing success. Among the audience was the conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Sir Ernest MacMillan, who invited her to perform the routine with the TSO. MacMillan proved to be one of Russell’s biggest supporters, whom she would credit with helping her to establish her career.97 In 1946, Denison flew to Canada with what Russell assumed was the intention to join his wife and settle in Canada. (Russell had already convinced MacMillan to hire Denison to play in the TSO.) Denison, however, had other plans. He had come to fetch his wife and take her back to London where he had obtained work with the British Council. After devoting years to establishing her career, Russell was unwilling to throw it all away and filed for divorce.98 In 1947, Russell moved to New York to see if she could match the success she had achieved in Toronto. Her early years in New York proved dismal, as she failed to secure performances and management. A chance encounter with Arthur Judson, president of Columbia Artists Management, offered a glimmer of hope when he suggested that she hire a venue to promote herself. Russell took his advice and rented Town Hall. Her performance was well received by the public, but even more important, it was lauded in the press. The reviews came from music critics, however, and as a friend told her, “notices from music critics won’t mean a thing on Broadway.”99 Sadly, the friend was right: “No one was any more interested than they had been before, and I was right back where I had started.”100 After securing a lecture tour that paid little and failed to further her career in New York, she decided to return to Canada. Russell’s career picked up again in Toronto, and before long, she was ready to return to New York. Better prepared the second time around, she now quickly secured management with Eastman Boomer, who proved vital to handling the promotional aspects of her career. On 27 November 1951, she returned to Town Hall, and delivered a performance that received a glowing review in the New York Herald Tribune from none other than her former classmate, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: Intellectual humour of the most devastating kind ran high at Town Hall last night, when a capacity audience rocked and shouted with laughter at the recital of comic singer Anna Russell… . Only a tremendously thorough musical training in all directions can make humour of this caliber; both as performer (and the lady has a real voice, highly trained), and as composer of these unbelievable lyrics and music the sheer talent here is formidable.101 Russell’s famous “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera”, a farcical story about a New York upper-crust family replete with mistaken identities, seems to be not only a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore but also of the Gilbert and Sullivanesque operetta Vaughan Williams had been composing while Russell was studying at RCM, The Poisoned Kiss (1936). Two sections, though not direct quotations, are decidedly reminiscent of the Vaughan Williams work. The melody of Dandelion’s aria, in which she reveals her past as a nurse (Example 5) à la Sullivan’s Pinafore, is notably similar to the Third Medium’s opening phrase in the trio, “If you want to escape,” from Act 2 of The Poisoned Kiss (Example 6). The second passage appears in the finale chorus (Example 7), which recalls the finale to Act 3 of The Poisoned Kiss, with the difference that the fanfare enters before the chorus (Example 8). Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Russell, The Anna Russell Song Book, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera,” mm. 70-78. Copyright © Citadel Press 1960. Copyright not renewed. Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Russell, The Anna Russell Song Book, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera,” mm. 70-78. Copyright © Citadel Press 1960. Copyright not renewed. Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, The Poisoned Kiss, “If you want to escape,” mm. 1-11. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, The Poisoned Kiss, “If you want to escape,” mm. 1-11. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Russell, The Anna Russell Song Book, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera,” mm. 319-329. Copyright © Citadel Press 1960. Copyright not renewed. Example 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Russell, The Anna Russell Song Book, “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera,” mm. 319-329. Copyright © Citadel Press 1960. Copyright not renewed. Example 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, The Poisoned Kiss, “Love Has Conquered,” rehearsal letter A. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Example 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Vaughan Williams, The Poisoned Kiss, “Love Has Conquered,” rehearsal letter A. Copyright © Oxford University Press 1936. Extract reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Hailed as “The Queen of Musical Parody,” Russell garnered fame and fortune with her parody of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. In 1953, her album Anna Russell Sings? rose to number 2 on the Billboard classical charts, and remained in the top five for fifteen consecutive weeks.102 In addition to performing her musical comedy routines around the country and recording several albums, Russell recorded the role of the Witch for a stop-motion adaptation of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, rebranded as Hansel and Gretel: An Operatic Fantasy (1954), and in 1955, she published a self-help book titled The Power of Being a Positive Stinker. As a performer and entertainer, Russell had made it big, but she was much more than that, as Glanville-Hicks pointed out: she was a highly skilled musician and composer. Despite her qualifications, Russell was not immune to prejudice. In an interview for Chatelaine: The Canadian Women’s Magazine in 1947, she recounts bringing parts to the musicians for a rehearsal the previous fall: “Who transposed this?” the trumpeter demanded. “I did. Why?” Anna Russell responded. “It’s in D. My trumpet’s C.” “I know,” said Anna, puzzled. “Why there isn’t one singer in a thousand who knows a C trumpet transposes in D,” the man shrieked, in disbelief. “You must be a musician!” “Of course I am,” Anna Russell shrugged. “The comedy’s a mistake. I don’t know why people think I’m funny. I don’t look funny, do I?”103 Though many recognized her talents as a diseuse, she was frequently referred to as a musician in the press, with emphasis placed on her “proper” and “respectable” training. With only rare exceptions was the title “composer” affixed to her name. In most instances, the extent of the credit she received only acknowledged that she had written her own material. “Material” often referred to her spoken routines and not the numerous songs she had composed. Despite the differences between Glanville-Hicks and Russell, Vaughan Williams’s approach to teaching provided both of them with the tools they needed to carve out their careers. Though Glanville-Hicks’s talent had been readily apparent during her early years at RCM, Russell’s development as a composer would take longer to materialize. In 1954, Russell returned to England for a series of concerts, and among her admirers was one of her former RCM teachers, the composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin. Russell was dumbfounded: This I simply couldn’t believe. He had taught me piano for one term at the Royal College, when my regular professor was sick. In those days he was a brilliant young man with a future and not much patience, who liked good students but hated the hopeless ones, like me, with a passion… . An expression of agonized boredom would come over his face each time I appeared. He would stand by the window and look at his watch every two minutes, which made me paralytic with nerves, and would shoo me out on the dot after the allotted half hour. Even when I met him in the corridor, he would get a pained expression as if he couldn’t bear even to look at me. So naturally, his newfound admiration came as a very odd piece of news… . On the appointed day, off I went in a taxi, and there was Arthur on his front doorstep to welcome me. When he saw who it was, his expression changed to one of horror. “Claudia Russell-Brown! Oh, my God, not you again?” he said.  “I’m sorry, Arthur,” I said humbly.  “Well in that case,” he said, “there’s got to be hope for everybody.”104 Even though others at times considered her a fool, Vaughan Williams was willing to teach Russell with care, for, as he declared, “I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius.”105 In the case of Anna Russell, Vaughan Williams’s patient encouragement allowed her the best laugh of all—the last. Notes " Erica Siegel completed her PhD in musicology at the University of California, Riverside, in 2016. Her research focuses on twentieth-century British music in relation to aspects of modernism, nationalism, and gender. She is currently at work on a monograph of Elizabeth Maconchy. E-mail: erica.j.siegel@gmail.com. " An earlier version of this article was read at the North American British Music Studies Association Biennial Conference (Urbana-Champaign, 27 July 2012), where it was awarded the Temperley Student Paper Prize. I would especially like to thank Hugh Cobbe, the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust, and the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers’ Trust for their kind permission to reproduce excerpts of correspondence. Sappho is reproduced by kind permission of G. Schirmer. 1 " Byron Adams, “A Lovable Mind? Stanford as Teacher,” keynote address, Eighth Biennial Conference for Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Belfast, UK, 23 July 2011. 2 " Ralph Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” in National Music and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 187. 3 " See Jenny Doctor, “‘Working for Her Own Salvation’: Vaughan Williams as Teacher of Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, and Ina Boyle,” in Vaughan Williams in Perspective, ed. Lewis Foreman (London: Albion Press, 1998), 181–201; and Doctor, “Intersecting Circles: The Early Careers of Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens, and Grace Williams,” Women & Music 2 (1998): 96. 4 " Elizabeth Maconchy, “Vaughan Williams as a Teacher,” Composer 2 (1959): 18–19. 5 " Ralph Vaughan Williams, “The Teaching of Parry and Stanford,” in Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. David Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 321. 6 " Ibid., 316, 320. 7 " In “A Musical Autobiography,” Vaughan Williams writes, “the last two bars of my early part song ‘The Willow Song’ were almost certainly composed by Parry” (182). 8 " Michael Mullinar, “Dr. Vaughan Williams as Teacher,” The Midland Musician 1, no. 1 (1926): 8–9. 9 " Vaughan Williams, “Charles Villiers Stanford,” in National Music and Other Essays, 197. 10 " Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” 187. 11 " Ibid., 191. 12 " Ibid. In “A Musical Autobiography,” Vaughan Williams incorrectly states that he began his studies with Ravel in 1908 when in fact they took place 1907. See Byron Adams, “Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, eds. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 40. 13 " See Byron Adams, “Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship,” 29–55. 14 " Arbie Orenstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: Dover, 1991), 118. 15 " Ibid., 119–20. 16 " Quoted in ibid., 119. 17 " Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” 191. 18 " Adams, “Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship,” 41. 19 " Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Common Time (unpublished autobiography), MS GBS, Britten-Pears Archive, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. 20 " Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” 189–90. Also see Adams, “Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship,” 44. 21 " Ruth Gipps, “Dr. Ralph Vaughan Williams, O.M.,” The RCM Magazine 55, no. 1 (1959): 50. 22 " See Iain Hamilton, “Reflections of a British Composer in America,” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (1966): 134–38; and B. H. Haggin, “The Music that is Broadcast in America: A Study of the American Wireless Mind,” Musical Times 73, no. 1070 (1932): 305–8. 23 " See Stephen Banfield, “‘Too Much of Albion’? Mrs. Coolidge and Her British Connections,” American Music 4, no. 1 (1986): 59–88; and Cyrilla Barr, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge: American Patron of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998). 24 " See Barr, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, xvii−xviii, 243–45. 25 " See Stephen D. Press, “‘I Came Too Soon’: Prokofiev’s Early Career in America,” in Sergey Prokofiev and His World, ed. Simon Morrison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 334–75. 26 " See Suzanne Robinson, “‘An English Composer Sees America’: Benjamin Britten and the North American Press, 1939–42,” American Music 15, no. 3 (1997): 321–51. 27 " Hugo Cole, “Why Can’t a Woman? Hugo Cole Meets Composer Elizabeth Maconchy, 70 Today,” The Guardian, 19 March 1977. 28 " Bernard Herrmann Papers, Box 4, University of California, Santa Barbara. 29 " Steven Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 337. 30 " Alan Frank to Bernard Herrmann, 25 April 1938, Bernard Herrmann Papers, Box 9, University of California, Santa Barbara. 31 " Though it remains unclear whether Maconchy and Herrmann had any direct correspondence during the 1930s, Maconchy indicated in a note that she had sent revisions of her opera The Sofa to Herrmann in 1967. Elizabeth Maconchy Archive, Box D.I.2, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. 32 " Irving Kolodin, “The Wide Screen World of Bernard Herrmann,” The Saturday Review, 6 March 1976. 33 " Haggin, “The Music that is Broadcast in America,” 306. 34 " Joe Cohen, “One-Shot Tradition in Radio Decried by CBC Maestro Who Points to BBC,” Variety, 4 December 1946. 35 " Julie Dunbar, “Art Music on the Radio, 1927–37: Conflicting Views of Composers and Educators,” Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education 19, no. 3 (1998): 175. 36 " David Ewen, “Bauer, Marion Eugenie,” in American Composers: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982), 41–42. 37 " See Liane Curtis, “A Case of Identity,” Musical Times 137, no. 1839 (1996): 20–21. 38 " Virgil Thomson, “Music,” in Quality: Its Image in the Arts, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Balance House, 1967), 30. Also quoted in Deborah Hayes, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 240. 39 " Fritz Hart (1874–1949) was a British composer, conductor, and teacher. During his studies at RCM (1893−96), he developed what would become a lifelong friendship with Vaughan Williams. In 1909, Hart moved to Australia after accepting an extended conducting engagement. He began teaching at the Albert Street Conservatorium in Melbourne in 1913, and was appointed its director the following year. Though Hart was a prolific composer, he is chiefly remembered for his conducting career with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (1927−37). Thérèse Radic, “Hart, Fritz Bennicke (1874–1949),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hart-fritz-bennicke-6589/text11341. 40 " Hayes, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 3. 41 " Victoria Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 12–15. 42 " Wendy Beckett, Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Pymble, Australia: Angus & Robertson, 1992), 1. 43 " James Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 14. See also Suzanne Robinson, “On the Auto/Biography of Peggy Glanville-Hicks: Telling a Life—Or Lies?” Australasian Music Research 4 (1999): 97. 44 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 156. Beckett cites this period as lasting three months: “Peggy was employed by Vaughan Williams as a copyist for a three-month stint. She lived and worked at Dorking with the composer and his family, copying parts of a work for strings, a piece he based on some music of Thomas Tallis. She also completed copying a solo violin piece for him.” Beckett, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 29–30. 45 " Suzanne Robinson, “Unmasking Peggy Glanville-Hicks,” Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music 2, no. 2 (1996): 5. 46 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 16. 47 " Ibid., 16–17. 48 " Quoted in Beckett, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 29. 49 " Ibid. 50 " Grace Williams, in an interview by Rees, “Views and Revisions,” Welsh Music 5, no. 4 (1976−1977): 8. Also quoted in Doctor, “Intersecting Circles,” 98. 51 " Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 34. 52 " Beckett, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 36–37. 53 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 23. 54 " James Murdoch writes that Vaughan Williams sent Bate to Hindemith because he had “realized [Bate] needed a firm hand … but [Stanley] hated his demand for discipline.” Ibid., 21. 55 " Ibid., 24–25. 56 " Ibid., 26–27. 57 " Quoted in ibid., 38. 58 " Ralph Vaughan Williams to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, n.d., Peggy Glanville-Hicks—professional correspondence, MLMSS 6394/9, State Library of New South Wales. 59 " Robinson, “An English Composer Sees America,” 342. 60 " “Oliver Daniel, 79, A Radio Producer and a Musicologist,” Obituary, New York Times, 2 January 1991. 61 " Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 163. 62 " See George Antheil, “Peggy Glanville-Hicks,” American Composers Alliance Bulletin 4, no. 1 (1954): 2–9. 63 " Quoted in Hayes, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 26–27. 64 " Ibid., 17. 65 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 77–81. 66 " Robinson, “On the Auto/Biography of Peggy Glanville-Hicks: Telling a Life—Or Lies?” 108. Also see Catherine Parsons Smith, “‘A Distinguished Virility’: Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music,” in Cecilia Reclaimed, eds. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 90–106. 67 " Ralph Vaughan Williams to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 3 May 1950, Papers of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, MS 13547/3, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria. 68 " Ralph Vaughan Williams to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 7 February 1951, Peggy Glanville-Hicks—professional correspondence, MLMSS 6394/9, State Library of New South Wales. 69 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 149. 70 " Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 30. 71 " Beckett, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 30. 72 " George Daniel, “Our Greatest Woman Composer Receives Little Recognition Here,” Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 1983. 73 " Herbert Howells, “Dr. Ralph Vaughan Williams,” Sunday Times (London), 31 August 1958. 74 " Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” 188–90. 75 " See Rogers, “Rethinking Peggy Glanville-Hicks,” 74, for an overview of Glanville-Hicks’s evolving compositional style. 76 " Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 213. 77 " Ibid. 78 " “Dirge for Two Veterans” was composed prior to the outbreak of the First World War, and Vaughan Williams later made the decision to include the work in Dona Nobis Pacem. See Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 210. 79 " Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 226. 80 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 218. 81 " Quoted in Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 227–28. 82 " Murdoch, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life, 221. 83 " Hayes, “‘A Poem by a Woman’s Hand’: The Greek Operas of Peggy Glanville-Hicks,” 60. 84 " Bliss Carman, Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (Toronto: Musson Book Company, 1930), 67. 85 " Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Sappho, manuscript piano-vocal score, 134–36. Also quoted in Hayes, “A Poem by a Woman’s Hand,” 60. 86 " Hayes, “A Poem by a Woman’s Hand,” 57. 87 " Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” 189–90. 88 " Ralph Vaughan Williams to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, 31 May 1954, Papers of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, MS 13547/3, State Library of Victoria. 89 " Anna Russell, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know”: The Autobiography of the Queen of Musical Parody (New York: Continuum, 1985), 75. 90 " Ibid. 91 " Ibid. 92 " Ibid., 78. 93 " Ibid., 80. 94 " Ibid., 88. 95 " Ibid., 90–91. 96 " Ibid., 99. 97 " Ibid., 100. 98 " Ibid., 104. 99 " Ibid., 112–13. 100 " Ibid. 101 " Peggy Glanville-Hicks, “Concert and Recital: Anna Russell,” New York Herald Tribune, 28 November 1951. 102 " Russell’s album made its debut in the top five of the Billboard classical charts for the week ending 3 January 1953, and spent seven consecutive weeks at number 2 from the week ending 7 February to 21 March 1953. The album remained in the top five through the week ending 11 April 1953. See “Classical Records,” Billboard, 10 January 1953 to 18 April 1953. 103 " “She Makes ‘em Laugh,” Chatelaine: The Canadian Women’s Magazine, March 1947. 104 " Russell, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know,” 162–63. 105 " Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography,” 187. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - “I’m not making this up, you know!”: The Success of Two of Vaughan Williams’s Students in America
JO - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdx008
DA - 2017-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/i-m-not-making-this-up-you-know-the-success-of-two-of-vaughan-williams-MNFGbjko0I
SP - 356
VL - 99
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
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