Rebecca Clarke

Rebecca Clarke was a pioneering female composer and performer in the early 20th century. As a composer, she specialized in chamber music, performing much of it herself as a violist. Clarke was born on August 27, 1886, in Harrow, England. Her father forced Clarke and her three siblings to learn and perform chamber music he wanted to hear. Clarke became interested in composition and copied out scores on her own to increase her knowledge. Her father withdrew her from the Royal Academy of Music when one of her teachers proposed marriage to her. Clarke's father discouraged her compositional efforts but agreed to send her songs to Charles Villiers Stanford, who accepted her application to the Royal College of Music. She was his first female student. At Stanford's suggestion, she switched from violin to viola so that she would gain a greater understanding of instrumental part-writing. She became a formidable violist after studying with Lionel Tertis, and she also sang works by Palestrina in a student choir directed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Clarke's early compositional efforts date to her student years. Her father threw her out of the house when she was 24 after she built a house of cards from some letters he had written to his mistress. She joined the Norah Clench String Quartet, and in 1912, she was hired as a violist in the Queen's Hall Orchestra, becoming that group's first female player. Clarke lived in the U.S. from 1916 to 1918 and then toured the world with cellist May Muklé. Many of Clarke's compositions date from the late '10s and early '20s. One of her best-known works is the Viola Sonata, written in 1919 for a U.S. chamber music competition organized by arts patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. After the regular hearings, where works were played without revealing the composer, Clarke's sonata was tied for first place, but Coolidge broke the tie in favor of a work by Ernest Bloch. Still, the exposure boosted Clarke's career; many hearers thought her sonata was by Ravel. Clarke's Piano Trio of 1921 was also written for the Coolidge competition. Clarke wrote much chamber music (sometimes using the pen name Anthony Trent), often performing it herself, but she also wrote songs and choral pieces. She frequently performed in the 1920s and '30s, forming the all-female English Ensemble with Muklé. Arthritis slowed her performing career, but she continued to compose, earning money on the side as a nanny and as a host on New York classical radio station WQXR. She moved to the U.S. for good at the beginning of World War II. In 1944, she married Julliard School faculty member James Friskin, whereupon she gave up composing, saying that she couldn't work while she was in love. WQXR mounted a radio retrospective of her works in 1976, and she has received more frequent performances as interest in music by women has grown; as of the early 2020s, more than 70 of her works had been recorded. Clarke died in New York on October 13, 1979.
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