Rebecca Clarke (composer) - Music

Music

A large portion of Clarke's music features the viola, as she was a professional performer for many years. Much of her output was written for herself and the all-female chamber ensembles she played in, including the Norah Clench Quartet, the English Ensemble, and the d'Aranyi Sisters. She also toured worldwide, particularly with cellist May Muklé. Her works were strongly influenced by several trends in 20th century classical music. Clarke also knew many leading composers of the day, including Bloch and Ravel, with whom her work has been compared.

The impressionism of Debussy is often mentioned in connection with Clarke's work, particularly its lush textures and modernistic harmonies. The Viola Sonata (published in the same year as the Bloch and the Hindemith Viola Sonata) is an example of this, with its pentatonic opening theme, thick harmonies, emotionally intense nature, and dense, rhythmically complex texture. The Sonata remains a part of standard repertoire for the viola. Morpheus, composed a year earlier, was her first expansive work, after over a decade of songs and miniatures. The Rhapsody that Coolidge sponsored is Clarke's most ambitious work: it is roughly 23 minutes long, with complex musical ideas and ambiguous tonalities contributing to the varying moods of the piece. In contrast, "Midsummer Moon", written the following year, is a light miniature, with a flutter-like solo violin line.

In addition to her chamber music for strings, Clarke wrote many songs. Nearly all of Clarke's early pieces are for solo voice and piano. Her 1933 "Tiger, Tiger", a setting of Blake's poem "The Tyger", is dark and brooding, almost expressionist. She worked on it for five years to the exclusion of other works during her tumultuous relationship with John Goss and revised it in 1972. Most of her songs, however, are lighter in nature. Her earliest works were parlour songs, and she went on to build up a body of work drawn primarily from classic texts by Yeats, Masefield, and A.E. Housman.

During 1939 to 1942, the last prolific period near the end of her compositional career, her style became more clear and contrapuntal, with emphasis on motivic elements and tonal structures, the hallmarks of neoclassicism. Dumka (1941), a recently published work for violin, viola, and piano, reflects the Eastern European folk styles of Bartók and Martinů. The "Passacaglia on an Old English Tune", also from 1941 and premiered by Clarke herself, is based on a theme attributed to Thomas Tallis which appears throughout the work. The piece is modal in flavor, mainly in the Dorian mode but venturing into the seldom-heard Phrygian mode. The piece is dedicated to "BB", ostensibly Clarke's niece Magdalen; scholars speculate that the dedication is more likely referring to Benjamin Britten, who organised a concert commemorating the death of Clarke's friend and major influence Frank Bridge. The Prelude, Allegro, and Pastorale, also composed in 1941, is another neoclassically-influenced piece, written for clarinet and viola (originally for her brother and sister-in-law).

Clarke composed no large scale works such as symphonies. Her total output of compositions comprises 52 songs, 11 choral works, 21 chamber pieces, the Piano Trio, and the Viola Sonata. Her work was all but forgotten for a long period of time, but interest in it was revived in 1976 following a radio broadcast in celebration of her ninetieth birthday. Over half of Clarke's compositions remain unpublished and in the personal possession of her heirs, along with most of her writings. However, in the early 2000s more of her works were printed and recorded. Examples of recent publications include two string quartets and Morpheus, published in 2002.

Modern reception of Clarke's work has been generally positive. A 1981 review of her Viola Sonata called it a "thoughtful, well constructed piece" from a relatively obscure composer; a 1985 review noted its "emotional intensity and use of dark tone colours". Andrew Achenbach, in his review of a Helen Callus recording of several Clarke works, referred to Morpheus as "striking" and "languorous". Laurence Vittes noted that Clarke's "Lullaby" was "exceedingly sweet and tender". A 1987 review concluded that "it seems astonishing that such splendidly written and deeply moving music should have lain in obscurity all these years".