Rebecca Clarke

Rebecca Clarke's complete entry in the 1980 edition of the New Groves reads, simply, Clarke, Rebecca (b Harrow, 27 Aug 1886). English viola player and composer, wife of JAMES FRISKIN. And that's your lot!! It's rather shocking that as late as 1980, a female composer could be dismissed so lightly as merely the wife of someone else, but there you go.

The later editions (specifically, the 2001 one) are better: her name is given in full as Clarke [Friskin], Rebecca (Thacher) [Helferich], with brackets indicating married surname and highly optional middle names. Plain 'Rebecca Clarke' it is, then!

She was born in 1886 in Harrow, England to a German mother and an American father, who was physically abusive to her (smacking her hands with a steel ruler for biting her nails, for example). Her interest in music was encouraged, however, and in 1903 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied the violin. She was abruptly withdrawn from that institution, however, in 1905 when her harmony teacher proposed marriage to her. She began a composition course at the Royal College of Music in 1907, becoming Charles Villiers Stanford's only female student. She had, however, to again abandon her studies early in 1910 when her criticism of her father's extra-marital affairs led to her being cut off and kicked out of the family home. Thereafter, she made her own living by playing the viola in various professional settings. Clarke moved to the United States to continue her performing career and during the next few years, she achieved fame as a composer with her Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921), both runners up in competitions that were part of the Berkshire (Massachusetts) Festival of Chamber Music, sponsored by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Coolidge went on to commission the Rhapsody for Cello and Piano in 1923: Clarke was the only female composer Coolidge commissioned work from.

Clarke settled back in London in 1924, where she performed as a soloist and ensemble player with musicians including Myra Hess, Adila Fachiri, André Mangeot, Gordon Bryan, Adolphe Hallis, Guilhermina Suggia and Mukle. In 1927 the English Ensemble was formed, a piano quartet made up of Clarke, Marjorie Hayward, Kathleen Long and Mukle. Clarke also performed as a soloist and ensemble musician in BBC broadcasts, and made several recordings. The quantity of her compositional output decreased in the late 1920s and 30s, possibly because of the discouragement she faced as a composer. As the Second World War broke out, Clarke was in the USA, rotating between the homes of her two brothers and their families. During this period she returned to composing. Her productivity ended, however, when she accepted a position as a nanny in 1942. She married the aforementioned James Friskin, a member of the piano department at the Juilliard School, in 1944. She basically stopped composing after that. She died in October 1979 at her home in New York City at the age of 93. A Rebecca Clarke Society was founded in 2000 to promote performance, scholarship, and awareness of the works of Rebecca Clarke: however, it's not well-designed, hasn't been updated in ages and isn't exactly a testament to a glorious talent.

Rebecca Clarke is routinely called an English composer, though she lived most of her life in the USA and her most significant compositions were all written in the United States. Her output is small and consists mainly of chamber works, frequently written with the viola in mind, given her own particular skills on that instrument. Much of her work remains unpublished and the property of her estate: some previously unknown works were published in the 1990s and more may yet appear. Until then, the Piano Trio and Viola Sonata are the two works most likely to define her and remain the most frequently-recorded of her compositions.

As to the musical qualities of the few works of hers we do possess, it can certainly be described as distinctive, rooted in the Austro-German tradition yet also steeped in a love of the English pastoralists like Vaughan Williams and French impressionists such as Debussy and Ravel. While in Hawaii, Clarke heard gamelan and a Chinese orchestra, whose sounds can also be discerned in, for example, the Viola Sonata. Her harmonic blend draws on tonal, modal and octatonic scales; her melodic writing moves between impassioned outbursts and rhapsodic reverie.

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