Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata


This March, the Daily Classical Music Post will introduce you to some of the most wonderful music ever composed—and, yes, it will all be by women composers!

https://youtu.be/NxtbFlnxiMk

 

The English composer and violist Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) was known primarily as a performer. Her output as a composer is, sadly, small; she once said, "I can't do it unless it's the first thing I think of every morning when I wake and the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep."

According to the Rebecca Clarke Society (http://www.rebeccaclarke.org/), "Rebecca Clarke achieved what she called 'my one brief whiff of fame' in 1919 when her Viola Sonata tied for first place in a competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Clarke lived much of her life in the US, although she was born and educated in Great Britain. Striking for its passion and power, her music spans a range of 20th-century styles including Impressionism, post-Romantic, and neo-Classical. Although she wrote nearly 100 works (including songs, choral works, chamber pieces and music for solo piano), only 20 pieces were published in her lifetime, and by the time of her death in 1979, at age 93, all of these were long out of print."

When her Viola Sonata tied for first in the competition, it is said that many on the jury thought that "Rebecca Clarke" was a male composer's pseudonym, as it was hard for them to imagine that a woman could write something as beautiful as this. You can definitely hear the influence of Debussy and Vaughan Williams, both of whom were very important to Clarke.

My classical music post for today is Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata.

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