Biography
Elizabeth Maconchy ranked among the foremost women composers active during the twentieth century, as her output earned widespread performances and critical recognition. Her thirteen string quartets stand out in particular as some of the strongest contemporary chamber works to emerge from the British Isles.
Born March 19, 1907, in Broxbourne in England’s Hertfordshire region and pronounced muh-CONG-kee, she grew up in a family without musical interests and without owning either a radio or a record player. She nevertheless chose a composer’s path at an early age. Raised and given her first musical instruction in Ireland, where her father practiced law, she later enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London. The school’s director opposed granting her a scholarship on the grounds that she would simply marry and cease composing, yet faculty member Ralph Vaughan Williams championed her from the outset, even though her style bore little resemblance to his own. Drawn to the music of Janáček and above all Bartók, she followed Vaughan Williams’ recommendation and continued her studies in Prague, where Erwin Schulhoff—who later perished in a Nazi concentration camp—performed her piano concerto. Opportunities also began to appear in England, only to be curtailed when tuberculosis struck in 1932.
While living apart from her husband, historian William LeFanu, in a house on England’s southern coast, she forged a personal idiom that echoed Bartók’s economical handling of rhythm and intervallic material rather than any folk-music orientation. Her scores test the outer limits of tonality yet never relinquish it. After recovering, she composed at a steady pace, balancing her creative work with the responsibilities of marriage and raising children; at intervals she left the family home temporarily, though she and her husband never divorced. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s her music received frequent hearings in Britain. The thirteen string quartets—one left unnumbered because she avoided the number thirteen—span her entire career from 1932 to 1983 and remain among her most admired achievements; she stayed productive well into advanced age.
She also produced a substantial body of orchestral, choral, and vocal music together with three one-act operas, among them The Sofa, derived from an eighteenth-century erotic poem. More than sixty of her compositions have been recorded; the Bingham Quartet released the complete string quartets on the Forum Records label in 2013. A broader resurgence of interest in music by women has generated additional recordings and performances in the twenty-first century. In 1959 she was elected chair of the Composers Guild of Great Britain. Maconchy died in Norwich, England, on November 11, 1994.
Born March 19, 1907, in Broxbourne in England’s Hertfordshire region and pronounced muh-CONG-kee, she grew up in a family without musical interests and without owning either a radio or a record player. She nevertheless chose a composer’s path at an early age. Raised and given her first musical instruction in Ireland, where her father practiced law, she later enrolled at the Royal College of Music in London. The school’s director opposed granting her a scholarship on the grounds that she would simply marry and cease composing, yet faculty member Ralph Vaughan Williams championed her from the outset, even though her style bore little resemblance to his own. Drawn to the music of Janáček and above all Bartók, she followed Vaughan Williams’ recommendation and continued her studies in Prague, where Erwin Schulhoff—who later perished in a Nazi concentration camp—performed her piano concerto. Opportunities also began to appear in England, only to be curtailed when tuberculosis struck in 1932.
While living apart from her husband, historian William LeFanu, in a house on England’s southern coast, she forged a personal idiom that echoed Bartók’s economical handling of rhythm and intervallic material rather than any folk-music orientation. Her scores test the outer limits of tonality yet never relinquish it. After recovering, she composed at a steady pace, balancing her creative work with the responsibilities of marriage and raising children; at intervals she left the family home temporarily, though she and her husband never divorced. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s her music received frequent hearings in Britain. The thirteen string quartets—one left unnumbered because she avoided the number thirteen—span her entire career from 1932 to 1983 and remain among her most admired achievements; she stayed productive well into advanced age.
She also produced a substantial body of orchestral, choral, and vocal music together with three one-act operas, among them The Sofa, derived from an eighteenth-century erotic poem. More than sixty of her compositions have been recorded; the Bingham Quartet released the complete string quartets on the Forum Records label in 2013. A broader resurgence of interest in music by women has generated additional recordings and performances in the twenty-first century. In 1959 she was elected chair of the Composers Guild of Great Britain. Maconchy died in Norwich, England, on November 11, 1994.