A COMPOSER WHO WAS A WOMAN
HE death wads announced the other day of Dame Ethel Smyth, the famous British composer and writer. She was in her 87th year. It was customary to refer to Dame Smyth as the foremost woman composer, but there are those who would hold that she was not "a woman who was a composer," but "a composer who was a woman." She was not a "modern" composer, and her only. conspicuous contribution ta the eccentricities of 20th century music was a passage in her Concerto for. Violin, Horn and Orchestra, where she directed the horn player to produce chords from his instrument, a difficult but :feasible.trick, that had been known since the. 18th -century, anyway..On the other hand, the adventurous spirit
which shows in her writings was also in much of her music, and two very notable men were sufficiently excited by what they found in her "Mass in D" to praise it with very little reserve. One was Bernard Shaw, who said it would "stand up in the highest company"; the other was the late Sir Donald Tovey, who said it was "like Spinoza, God-intoxicated." Dame Ethel Smyth (her name, by the -way, rhymes with Smith) was a vigorous and bold personality, and her career might be called an epic of) pertinacity. Her fight for "recognition" as a composer was only one of various assaults which she kept up against the "male conspiracy," of which she felt herseif a victim. Her support for the women’s suffrage movement went beyond the mere composition of "The March of the Women." She was a militant suffragette herself, and spent two months in gaol for her pains, after breaking one of the windows at No. 10 Downing Street with a stone. In Holloway gaol, she defied authority to the extent of conducting her fellow prisoners in "The March of the Women" with a toothbrush waved rhythmically through the bars of her cell window. If imprisonment was all the official recognition she had in 1911, things had changed by 1922, when His Majesty’s Government bestowed on its former guest the female equivalent of knighthood. In later years, Dame Smyth turned from music to books, and her fame as a writer began to supersede her fame | as a composer. Her Impressions That Remained is gne of the best of musical biographies, © pe ae
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 257, 26 May 1944, Page 7
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393A COMPOSER WHO WAS A WOMAN New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 257, 26 May 1944, Page 7
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