By Deborah Hayes
Published in the ILWC Journal [International League of Women Composers, forerunner of the IAWM], September 1991, p.12-13.
Peggy Glanville-Hicks was a composer and critic with international interests and international audiences. Born in Australia, near Melbourne, on December 29, 1912, she studied piano and composition at the Albert Street Conservatorium in Melbourne and then at the Royal College of Music in London. In the 1940s she came to the U.S. with her husband, the English pianist and composer Stanley Bate (1913-1959). When they divorced about eight years later, he left the country. She stayed on, became a U.S. citizen, and was a major figure in American musical life from the late 1940s through the 1960s.
Peggy Glanville-Hicks was primarily a dramatic composer. Ballet, film music, and opera were important genres for her, especially opera. The Transposed Heads (premiered in 1954), on a story by Thomas Mann, is the first opera of her "mature" phase when she established an individual style. Two later operas are about famous women of ancient Greece. Nausicaa (premiered in 1961) is based on Robert Graves's novel Homer's Daughter, and Sappho (1963, so far unperformed) is based on the play by Lawrence Durrell. Almost all her other music was likewise stimulated by an extra-musical idea such as a text, an image, or a location.
Her training, first in Melbourne with Fritz Hart (1874-1949), conductor and composer of over twenty operas, and then with Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) in London, reinforced her affinity for dramatic music and for tonal music, consonant, often non-diatonic harmonies, modal melodies, especially traditional or folk melodies, strong rhythms, and a variety of percussion instruments. She used melodies and rhythms of many traditions: Spain (in the Sonata for Harp, 1950-51), India (The Transposed Heads, 1954), North Africa (Letters from Morocco, 1952), Black Africa (Sonata for Piano and Percussion, 1951), South America (Prelude and Presto for Ancient American Instruments, 1957), the ancient Italian peninsula (Concertino Antico, 1957, Etruscan Concerto, 1954), and, in her mind the most authentic of all, ancient Greece (Nausicaa, Sappho). Among American composers she identified with what she called the "musical explorers" or "exotics" -- Paul Bowles, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, Colin McPhee, and Edgard Varèse.
After 1954 she adopted a more "romantic" or personally expressive style, filling in the sparse melody-rhythm texture with unison melodic imitation and occasional vertically conceived blocks. The Concerto Romantico (1956) for viola and orchestra, recently performed with great success by the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic, and elsewhere, is romantic in its orchestration as well as its title.
Glanville-Hicks had a strong instinct for publicizing her work to attract audiences. In 1958, on the occasion of the New York production of The Transposed Heads, she described herself as "a good organizer because I never overlook anything or leave things to chance." People in the arts fall into two groups, she explained: those who say "if we don't do it someone else will," and those (like her) who say, "if we don't do it, no one else will." She was active in support of other musicians, first through the League of Composers and then, in the 1950s, with the American Composers Alliance (ACA). As executive director of the Composers Forum, she raised funds, including her own salary, reviewed new scores for the reading committee, organized music for performances, hired performers, booked the hall, saw to the printing of the programs, and produced a radio program using tapes of Forum performances. She organized other concerts and recordings of new music as well, usually including a work of her own.
For at least eight seasons beginning in October 1947, Glanville-Hicks was a New York Herald Tribune critic for Virgil Thomson (1896-1989), head of the paper's music department, and published over 500 concert reviews. She also published reviews and essays in Musical America, Music and Letters, Musical Courier, Musical Quarterly, ACA Bulletin, Hi-Fi Music at Home, and Vogue. She was in charge of updating the American material in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edition, published in 1954; she herself contributed 98 entries on current American composers and eight articles on Danish composers.
In her busy life, she valued most of all the silence and time necessary for a spiritual journey inward to the source of musical inspiration. In her 1958 essay "Technique and Inspiration" published in the Juilliard Review she explained how a "composer-artist" manages to integrate an emerged "technique" (materials and analytical factors) and a submerged "inspiration" (expression and instinctive factors) and synthesize them into an organic form. The composer-artist is distinct from the "craftsman" [or craftswoman; there is no inclusive language in her writings] who concentrates only on technique, and from the "talented amateur" who may have inner awareness but has not acquired technique or intellectual discipline.
Glanville-Hicks's search for spiritual and musical authenticity led her to settle in Athens from about 1959. She wanted to absorb the melodies and rhythms of Greek demotic or folk music, as a clue to music's most ancient forms, and she sought the silence and time necessary for composing music of her own. In 1961 she saw her opera Nausicaa produced at the Athens Festival to international acclaim. She continued to travel -- to New York, Washington D.C., London, various European centers, India, Melbourne, and Sydney.
In 1967, while in New York for a premiere of a ballet commissioned by the Harkness Ballet company, A Season in Hell, she was found to have a brain tumor that required surgical removal. She recovered, but composed little after that. In the 1970s, several prominent Australian musicians persuaded her to return to Sydney to live. As a returned "Australian composer," she was frequently the subject of journalists' interviews, and her works continued to have many performances, especially in Australia and the U.S. Although she continued to plan new works, the only music she completed after 1967 was the three-minute Girondelle for Giraffes written for a 1978 art exhibition.
In 1987, I contracted with Greenwood Press to compile a bio-bibliography of Glanville-Hicks. (As many readers know, Greenwood originally planned a series of ten volumes about ten women composers of international renown, and the series has grown to almost 100 volumes about women and men.) I had been attracted to the project by her music, known to me mainly from recordings in the University of Colorado music library. As an American musicologist, trained in the U.S. and teaching in a traditional academic setting where only certain "masterpieces" (by men) were considered worthy of study or performance, I was intrigued by Glanville-Hicks's world view, musical courage, and spiritual integrity. My colleagues were tolerant of my latest interest. Most of my students, though, were quite reluctant to "waste" time on this renegade.
I loved reading her old concert reviews with their literate analyses, vivid and sometimes comic descriptions, and (in the case of debut performers and composers) firm advice. The reviews made me wish I had heard the concerts. I was impressed that so many concerts "back then" included music by women and men both. Over the years Glanville-Hicks reviewed performances of music by Marion Bauer, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Miriam Gideon, Louise Talma, Germaine Tailleferre, Gena Branscome, Julia Smith, Beatrice Laufer, Ludmilla Ulehla, Priaulx Rainier, Marga Richter, Judith Dvorkin, and Elizabeth Lutyens. What a shame, I thought, that Glanville-Hicks did not include more American women in the 1954 Grove's besides Bauer and Ruth Crawford Seeger, especially some who were still living.
I was uncomfortable with the interviews, continuing well into the 1980s, in which Glanville-Hicks proclaimed that she was the only woman composer who had ever "made the grade" -- this in spite of the fact that she had heard much music by other women and had praised it in her reviews. She often said (and rightly) that the only criterion is "quality," regardless of the composer's color, sex, or age. But then she would add: "If we start separating categories, women will automatically get in a bunch and be excluded from the main line." She said that, as the only women of any merit, she had been singled out as some sort of musical freak and her work was not assessed fairly, alongside men's. "I'm anti-feminist," she was quoted as saying. Surely (we can say now), some willingness to accept the music of women as well as men would have helped alleviate some of her professional loneliness and bitterness.
To her credit, she spent little time arguing over gender and musical quality. Instead, she evidently assessed the problem as political and looked for political solutions. She allied herself with people who had power. She supported other musicians and had some support for her own work in return. She found (at all those concerts) some leading performers and conductors to perform her music whose styles and interests suited her own. She used writings of famous, preferably fashionable authors as sources of her librettos. She wisely cultivated people with money and a commitment to music, or to literature by famous authors, to fund her productions. Although she once said that "in America they handed me fame and fortune on a platter," in reality she worked very hard, valuing musical and spiritual growth more than physical health and comfort.
In 1988 I wrote to Glanville-Hicks in Sydney but received no answer. I telephoned her to say I was coming to Sydney as part of my research, and she sounded most cordial. When I visited her in July 1988 she was in fairly good health though somewhat frail and rather forgetful, especially about the present. She told me that "an American" was writing a book about her. "I'm the American," I said.
In May 1990, when I received my first copies of the published book I rushed to the post office and sent her one. By that time I had heard that she was failing noticeably. About a month later, the night of June 25, 1990, she had two rather unexpected heart attacks and died. She had seen my book, one of her composer-friends reported to me, and had said that it made her life seem worthwhile.
I was in Sydney again this last June. Glanville-Hicks intended that her estate would be used to benefit young composers, and now the trustees of the estate are determined to carry out her wishes. On June 26, 1991, just a year and a day after her death, I was able to return to her house and talk to the Sydney sculptor who took on most of the responsibility for looking after her during the last months of her life and now has agreed to live in the house and keep it up until it becomes a "composer's house." I learned that Glanville-Hicks's funeral in Sydney was the occasion of some splendid performances of her music, and that the ABC (Australian national television) has produced a wonderful video about her life and work and is distributing it overseas (about which more in a later issue of this Journal). Peggy Glanville-Hicks is buried near Sydney in the Field of Mars. Her friends say that she would just love that address.