By Deborah Hayes - posted 08/20/06


Peggy Glanville-Hicks 1912-1990

(b Melbourne, 29 Dec 1912; d Sydney, 25 June 1990). Australian composer. She was a major figure in American musical life as a New York City critic, composer, and concert organizer from the late 1940s into the 1960s. From about 1960 she spent increasing amounts of time outside the USA, especially in Greece. In 1967 she underwent surgery in New York to remove a brain tumour; she recovered but virtually ceased composing. In 1975 she moved from Greece to Australia, where her music attracted renewed attention from performers and audiences. In 1987 the University of Sydney awarded her the honorary DMus.

She received her first training from 1927 at the Melbourne Conservatorium, where she studied with the conductor and opera composer Fritz Hart. In 1931 she won a scholarship to the RCM, where she studied with Vaughan Williams (composition), Arthur Benjamin (piano), and Constant Lambert and Malcolm Sargent (conducting). The award of an Octavia Travelling Scholarship (1936–8) enabled her to further her studies with Wellesz in Vienna and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

In 1938 Glanville-Hicks married the English pianist and composer Stanley Bate and on occasion wrote as Peggy Bate until their divorce in 1949. In 1940 to 1941 she accompanied Bate on his concert tours to Melbourne and Sydney, then Boston and New York, where they decided to settle. In 1951 she married Rafael da Costa, an Austrian-Israeli critic, whom she divorced in 1953. She lived in the USA from 1941 to the early 1960s, taking American citizenship in 1948.

In 1947 she became a New York Herald Tribune critic; Virgil Thomson was her senior colleague. During the next eight concert seasons, October through April, the paper published over 500 of her reviews, mostly of new music. She also published reviews and essays in Musical America, Music & Letters, Musical Quarterly, the New York Times and other journals. She updated the American material in Grove’s Dictionary (5th edition, 1954) and herself contributed 98 entries on current American composers and eight articles on Danish composers.

She was active in support of other musicians, first through the League of Composers and then with the American Composers Alliance. She organized concerts and commercial recordings of new music, usually including a work of her own. She assisted Menuhin in presenting concerts of Indian music (1955). As a director of the New York Composers’ Forum, she organized concerts of new American music with discussion by the composers.

As a critic and writer she was as concerned with identifying a composer’s source of inspiration as with explaining compositional technique, including atonalism, serialism, neo-classicism, musique concrète, and the mid-century avant garde. She described the qualities of American inspiration in the music of Ives, Virgil Thomson, Copland, Douglas Moore, the young Bernstein and others. Yet her outlook was thoroughly international. She was most interested in the music of the ‘exotics’ or ‘musical explorers’ such as John Cage, Lou Harrison, Paul Bowles, Colin McPhee, Alan Hovhaness and Edgard Varèse. Like them, she found in various non-Western musical cultures more authentic, even mystical sources of inspiration.

After the concert season, from May to September, she had more time to write music and to gather inspiration. She travelled to other parts of the USA and to England, Germany, Italy, Greece, Jamaica, Morocco, India, Australia and elsewhere. Her work was supported by several major awards, including a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1953–4), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1956–8), a Fulbright Fellowship (1960) and a Rockefeller Grant (1961–3) for travel and research in the Middle East and East Asia.

As a composer she had an affinity, probably reinforced by her training with Hart and Vaughan Williams, for tonal music, consonant and often non-diatonic harmonies, and modal melodies such as are heard in traditional or folk musics. Her melodic writing is distinctive, as are her clear textures and rhythmic patterns, often reinforced by a variety of percussion instruments. She was inspired by the melodies and rhythms of several traditions: Spain (in the Sonata for Harp), India (The Transposed Heads), North Africa (Letters from Morocco), sub-Saharan Africa (Sonata for Piano and Percussion), South America (Prelude and Presto for Ancient American Instruments), the Italian peninsula (Concertino antico, Etruscan Concerto), and, in her mind the most authentic of all, ancient Greece (Nausicaa, Sappho).

The plots of her operas and ballets involve subjects close to her heart. The Transposed Heads explores the dilemma of a woman whose marriage to a high-born man enhances her social position, but who then falls in love with his best friend, a less ascetic type, and is unable to live without both of them. The plot of Nausicaa (produced at the 1961 Athens Festival) explores female authorship, specifically the female tradition in ancient Greek mythology. Indeed, Glanville-Hicks saw herself as the only woman who had ever written music of any merit, that is, as part of a male tradition.

She was a successful innovative artist in an essentially commercial system. She cultivated men and women with influence and money to sponsor her productions. She found leading performers, conductors and choreographers whose styles and interests suited her own. Her skills as a publicist, as well as the quality of her work, helped attract audiences. Although she once said that ‘in America they handed me fame and fortune on a platter’, in reality she worked very hard for her musical and spiritual values.


Works
Stage works (libretto by Glanville-Hicks unless otherwise stated): Hylas and the Nymphs, ballet, 1935; Caedmon (op, 7 scenes), 1935–6; Postman’s Knock, ballet, 1938; The Transposed Heads (op, 6 scenes, after T. Mann: Die vertauschten Köpfe), 1953, Louisville, KY, Columbia Auditorium, 3 April 1954; The Glittering Gate (op, 1, after Lord Dunsany), 1956, New York, 15 May 1959; The Masque of the Wild Man, ballet, 1958; Nausicaa (prol, 3, R. Graves and A. Reid, after Graves: Homer’s Daughter), 1960, Athens, Herodus Atticus, 19 Aug 1961; Carlos among the Candles (W. Stevens), 1962 [libretto only]; Saul and the Witch of Endor, TV ballet, 1964; Sappho (op, 3, after L. Durrell), 1965; A Season in Hell, ballet after A. Rimbaud, 1965; Tragic Celebration (Jephtha’s Daughter), ballet, 1966

Instrumental works: 3 Gymnopedie, ob, cel, hp, str, 1934 [rev. 1953]; Trio for Pipes, 3 rec, 1934; Sinfonietta, orch, 1935; Pastoral, pf, 1936; Prelude, orch, 1936; Prelude and Scherzo, orch, 1937; Sonatina, fl/rec, pf, 1939; Concertino da camera, fl, cl, bn, pf, 1945; Sonata, hp, 1951; Sonata for Piano and [4] Percussion, 1952; Sinfonia da Pacifica, 1953; Concertino antico, hp, str qt, 1955; Etruscan Conc., pf, chbr orch, 1956; Musica antiqua no.1, 2 fl, hp, mar, 2 perc, timp, 1957; Conc. romantico, va, orch, 1957; Prelude and Presto, ancient insts, 1957; Prelude for a Pensive Pupil, pf, 1963; Meditation, orch, 1964; Tapestry, orch, 1964; Drama, cl, tpt, pf, 3 perc, str, 1966

Vocal works: Ireland (D. McKee Wright), female chorus, 1931; Pastoral (R. Tagore), female chorus, eng hn, 1933; Be Still You Little Leaves (M. Webb), 1v, pf, 1934; Come Sleep (J. Fletcher), 1v, pf, 1934; Frolic (G. Russell), 1v, pf, 1934; Rest (Russell), 1v, pf, 1934; Choral Suite (Fletcher), female chorus, ob, str, 1937; Aria concertante (M. Monteforte-Toledo), T, female chorus, ob, pf, gong, 1945; Last Poems (A.E. Housman), 5 songs, 1v, pf, 1945; Profiles from China (E. Tietjens), 5 songs, T, pf/chbr orch, 1945; Ballade (P. Bowles), 3 songs, 1v, pf, 1945; Sidi Amar in Winter (Bowles), 1v, pf, 1946; Dance Cant. (Navaho text, arr. E. Hawkins), T, spkr, speaking chorus, orch, 1946; 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (W. Stevens), S, pf, 1947; Thomsoniana (V. Thomson), S/T, fl, hn, pf, str qt, 1949; Letters from Morocco (Bowles), 6 songs, T, chbr orch, 1952; Madrigals (Stevens), SATB, 1955: No.2 The Night is the Color of a Woman’s Arm, No.5 Not all the Knives of the Lamp Posts, No.6 Rationalists! Wearing Square Hats

Film scores: The Robot, 1936; Clouds, 1938; Glacier, 1938; Tulsa, 1949; Tel, 1950; The African Story, 1959; A Scary Time, 1960

MSS in AUS-Msl, Mitchell Library, AUS-Ssl, US-LOu

Principal publishers: Associated, Colfrank, Hargail, L’oiseau-lyre (Paris), Peters (New York), Schott (New York), Weintraub


Bibliography

G. Antheil: ‘Peggy Glanville-Hicks’, Bulletin of American Composers Alliance, 4/1 (1954), 2–9
P. Glanville-Hicks: ‘At the Source’, Opera News, 26/6 (1961–2), 8–13 [on Nausicaa]
J.W. LePage: ‘Peggy Glanville-Hicks’, Women Composers, Conductors and Musicians of the Twentieth Century: Selected Biographies, ii (Metuchen, NJ, 1983), 142–62
D. Hayes: Peggy Glanville-Hicks: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 1990)
D. Hayes: ‘Peggy Glanville-Hicks: a Voice from the Inner World’, The Musical Woman: an International Perspective, iii: 1986–90, ed. J.L. Zaimont and others (Westport, CT, 1991), 371–409
W. Beckett: Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Sydney, 1992)
D. Hayes: “ ‘A Poem by a Woman’s Hand”: the Greek Operas of Peggy Glanville-Hicks,” Musics and Feminisms, ed. S. Macarthur and C. Poynton (Sydney, 1999), 57–62, 171–4
J. Murdoch: Peggy Glanville-Hicks: a Transposed Life (New York, 2002).