Doreen Carwithen

Despite gender discrimination, Doreen Carwithen became a significant composer of orchestral music, chamber music, and film music in the middle of the 20th century. Married in later life to composer William Alwyn, she also used the name, Mary Alwyn. Carwithen was born in Haddenham in England's Buckinghamshire region on November 15, 1922. Her father was a grocer and baker. Her mother was a music teacher who had been an aspiring concert pianist. Carwithen took up the piano and violin at age four, and for much of her life, she would play duos with her sister Barbara, who also became a composer. Both girls studied with their mother, and Doreen was good enough to play the cello in local string quartets and orchestras. She was 16 when she completed her first composition, a setting of a William Wordsworth poem. During World War II, Carwithen gave herself a basic education in orchestration by following along with scores as she heard BBC broadcasts. She enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, studying cello but also taking composition classes with William Alwyn. In 1947, her overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another, the title coming from a novel by John Masefield) was premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Adrian Boult. The previous year, Carwithen had received the Royal Academy's J. Arthur Rank Film Scholarship, and she became one of the first British composers specifically trained in film music. She was active as a film composer during the golden age of English cinema. One of her first film scores was for Harvest from the Wilderness (1948), and she went on to write scores for some 35 films. Several times she successfully demanded pay equal to that given to male composers. These included Elizabeth is Queen (1953), the official film made of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. Carwithen also wrote concert music, including a concerto for piano and strings, orchestral overtures, and a pair of string quartets that won the A.J. Clements Prize (1948) and the Cobbett Award (1952). The first quartet was praised by Vaughan Williams, but her efforts to find a publisher were rejected on the grounds of her being a female composer. In 1961, she took a job as secretary to William Alwyn, and the pair married in 1975. She began using the name Mary Alwyn; Mary was her middle name, and she had never liked the name Doreen. In later years, she promoted William's work and edited his second piano concerto. After William's death in 1985, she taught at the Royal Academy of Music and continued to tend to William's legacy. She also took up her own music, which had been largely forgotten. She suffered a stroke in 1999 and died in Forncett St Peter, near Norwich, England, on January 5, 2003. A Doreen Carwithen Music Festival was organized in the village of Haddenham for her 100th birthday, and this spawned several recordings of her work. However, much of her music, including the two string quartets, still awaits premiere recordings.
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