Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Today is the birthday of the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks, who died in 1990. She would have been 95 today. (The Australian Music Centre has informative space about her on their web site.)

Her music seems to have become largely forgotten, which is a pity. I've heard some of it--her opera The Transposed Heads (for which no less than Thomas Mann furnished the libretto) and a piece for tenor and chamber orchestra called Letters from Morocco (the letters are by Paul Bowles, her friend).

Letters from Morocco is one of my favorite pieces. I can think of no composition that sets English words more naturally or musically, following the inflection of the language and deriving its rhythms from the words, rather than trying to impose a musical structure upon them.

Her music on CD is hard to find. Letters from Morocco I own on an old LP from MGM's series of 20th century compositions, with MGM's orchestra conducted by Carlos Surinach; The Transposed Heads I borrowed from the Princeton Music Library twenty-some-odd years ago, a Louisville Sympony recording if I remember correctly. (You can sample her music by going to UbuWeb's collection of short films by Shirley Clarke--she wrote the score for the Unicef-funded "A Scary Time.")

Musicians, orchestras, opera companies: Please consider performing the music of this wonderful and unfairly neglected composer!