Elisabeth Lutyens String Quartet No 6

Daughter of the famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, Elisabeth Lutyens used her own method of serial (12-tone) composition to create individual, psychologically powerful music.
Determined to be a composer from the age of 9, Elisabeth Lutyens went to Paris in 1922 to study at the Ècole Normale de Musique in Paris. On her return to London, she studied composition and the viola at the Royal College of Music from 1926-30.
Critical of the "overblown" music of Mahler, Bruckner and Elgar, she collaborated with fellow RCM students Iris Lemare and Anne MacNaughton to mount a series of modern music concerts which featured first performances by new composers such as Benjamin Britten, Alan Rawsthorne and Elizabeth Maconchy. Some of Lutyens' own works were also performed, but she withdrew these later because they were "too conservative".
In 1933, Lutyens married the singer Ian Glennie, by whom she had 3 children, but in 1938 she left Glennie for the conductor, Edward Clark. For much of this period, Lutyens had been working in near isolation, since her music had little affinity with prevailing trends in Britain. For example, her Concerto for Nine Instruments (1939) employed a 14-note series which she had worked out for herself. These and other pieces have been described as "extraordinary achievements, demonstrating a completely personal serial style and very original structures".
However, at that time her work was not looked on favourably by the musical authorities at the BBC, although she was praised by the pioneering British serial composer Humphrey Searle, a former pupil of the Austrian serialist Anton Webern. In 1947, she scored a success among the avant garde with a setting of Rimbaud's poem O Saisons, O Chateaux, which had been turned down as "unsingable" by the BBC. Lutyens' bohemian lifestyle was equally unconventional, and there were many parties at Clark's flat in Fitzroy Street, where the alcoholic poet Dylan Thomas was briefly a lodger.
As the music of Webern and Alban Berg became better known in this country, recognition gradually came Lutyens' way with such works as the Wittgenstein Motet (1952) and Music for Orchestra 1 (1955). She nevertheless had to earn her bread and butter by writing film scores, which she did with characteristic energy and professionalism. Her film music career began in 1944 with an item in a 1944 RAF newsreel, and included feature films such as Don't Bother to Knock (1960). She also had a close association with Hammer films, which found her 12-tone system to their taste in numerous movies, including Dr Terror's House of Horrors, The Skull (1965) and The Terrornauts (1967) -- and of course, that deathless classic, "The Earth Dies Screaming."
Lutyens was known and respected as a creative artist for whom compromise was impossible. She was also a provocative and inspiring teacher who gave herself unstintingly to her pupils. Her output was large and varied, and the importance of her contribution to the country's musical life was recognised in 1969, when she was made a Commander of the British Empire.
"When I finally heard a piece by Webern I said, 'What marvelous music from the composer of Der Freischutz.'" (Elisabeth Lutyens)
"Do you want it to be good, or do you want it Wednesday?" (Elisabeth Lutyens)

[@robertfrankgill5962]

Lovely music. And what a great read at the top of the page. I love the two quotes at the end.

[@zacharydetrick7428]

Amazing!

[@tietjen666]

Great music.

[@barrydouglas4680]

One of my dearest friends is my upstairs neighbour, Conrad Clark. He is the soon of Elizabeth and Edward. He is now 77 years old Ann a great artist in his own right.

[@robkeeley804]

Wonderful. REAL modern music!

[@LendallPitts]

Agree!

[@SammyNeverEver]

What is FAKE modern music?

[@Nullifidian]

@@SammyNeverEver Michael Torke.

[@trees1]

Lutyens finished this quartet in a single twelve-hour sitting. I think the music reflects her flow of thoughts. She composed at least fourteen string quartets, all have been published but only this No.6 is recorded and commercialized.

[@zacharydetrick7428]

That's amazing!

[@sabaneyev]

so visceral and passionate. i love it

[@Gwailo54]

A very simple piece of music. Opening movement with repeated sections, a slower second movement followed by the opening movement repeated as the final movement. It’s a crying shame her other string quartet music is not better known or recorded, as is the case with Elizabeth Maconchy.

[@Poemsapennyeach]

Lovely !

[@eschiss1]

I see there've been at least? two recordings of the 6th quartet, one on LP with the Dartington Quartet, one on CD on the Troubadisc label more recently... (for recorded and commercialized I assume "recorded commercially"?... :D )

[@pilouetmissiou]

interssante.....sì potrebbe essere come il fluire della mente, dei pensieri....a volte caotico a volte più pacato svagato....ma perché non si suona di più questa musica oggi ? è del tutto godibile ! non esiste solo Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Mozart ! ecc.....anche i quartetti di Elisabeth Maconchy sono interessanti....

[@LendallPitts]

¡Estoy de acuerdo! También me gusta mucho Elsabeth Maconchy, en particular sus cuartetos de cuerda.

[@Poemsapennyeach]

@trees1 Shocking to think this is true still to this day !

[@gavinbullock6205]

I wish I could get to grips with serial music - I've been trying for 40 years without success. Elsabeth Lutyens was a tremendous character and there is a great book by Rhiannon Mathias entitled: Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams and Twentieth Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens - Ashgate, 2012. Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams were friends at the Royal College of Music in London in the late 1920s and the book traces their separate careers and the misogyny facing female composers at that time. The music of both Maconchy and Grace Williams is well worth exploring.

[@LendallPitts]

As a lover of both Lutyens and Maconchy I must read the Rhiannon Mathias book. It's odd how different people respond to serialism and atonality. When I was in my early teens I could barely tolerate Debussy -- nothing after Beethoven was of any interest to me --,then I started listening to Walter Gieseking's Debussy recordings and, more significantly, my father introduced me to Tristan. After that there was a gap during which I felt that Debussy, Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler had whetted my appetite for something new, but ultimately had not delivered. Chromaticism alone was not enough. And then, I discovered Schoenberg. And that has been my world ever since.

[@gavinbullock6205]

I envy you. Obviously, his true serial music (and there isn't all that much) is very highly regarded by many very musical people - perhaps my lack of appreciation is a bit like colour blindness, a neurological deficit of some kind in the auditory cortex of the brain. Although I can see the intellectual content of the music, my 'ear' does not recognise the tone rows, let alone their retrogrades and inversions - none seem remotely memorable and most just plain ugly. I have to say that Schoenberg's prediction that the paper boy would be whistling tone rows on his bicycle have not come about but maybe that's because of a shortage of paper boys these days.

[@egapnala65]

Lutyen's autobiography is well worth checking out as well.

[@joshuasussman4020]

Gavin, your messages about your attempt to get into serial music are most admirable. You have tried, but not succeeded yet. I urge you to not give up on especially Schoenberg, who I consider one of the greatest composers of all time. Some late Stravinsky as well. Along with Beethoven, Bach, Faure, Joaquin, Sibelius, etc., Schoenberg is simply an amazing composer. The melodies, harmony, orchestration and form, just like any other composer.

[@gavinbullock6205]

@@joshuasussman4020 Thanks for your message. I love Schoenberg's tonal pieces (and his most famous!) like Verklärte Nacht, the earlier string quartets, and even the intermediate atonal Five Orchestral Pieces - but strict serialism, no. Frankly, I have only so much time to listen and I'm still exploring the tonal/modal composers - Weinberg, Vagn Holmboe, Frank Martin. There is so much music I don't know but know I can appreciate. I'll leave the strict serialists to those with the neural equipment to make it sound good. I don't eschew serial methods totally - Britten, Alwyn , Rawsthorne and even Shostakovich have employed tone rows - but in an overall tonal context.

[@Poemsapennyeach]

@glaggaglagga I agree !

[@pjc1954]

Does anyone know which quartet is playing here?

[@sabaneyev]

im pretty sure this is the fanny mendelssohn quartet

[@pjc1954]

@@sabaneyev Thanks - I'll look them up.

[@actual-size]

Serial, but delightfully mellifluous -- compare with her father's architecture: classical, but delightfully asymmetrical progression of symmetrical spaces.

[@kultigin4695]

Doesn't sound good. I'm sorry...