Born in Harrow, near London, Aug 27, 1886
Died in New York, Oct 13, 1979
- Rebecca Clarke was an English violist and composer.
- Clarke studied both violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, but was unable to complete either course of study because her father withdrew financial support.
- Clarke embarked on a career as a violist to support herself, and became one of the first women employed in a professional British orchestra (the Queen’s Hall orchestra, directed by Henry Wood).
- In 1919, Clarke’s Viola Sonata was a runner-up at a competition in the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival, sponsored by American arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Judges and press struggled to believe that the work’s composer was a woman; some judges believed the work was by Ravel, and a writer for the Daily Telegraph proposed that the name “Rebecca Clarke” was actually a pseudonym for Ernest Bloch.
“I take this opportunity to emphasize that I do indeed exist … and that my Viola Sonata is my own unaided work!”
Rebecca Clarke, program notes (1977) to her Viola Sonata1
- Clarke was an active viola soloist and chamber player in London in the 1920s, and a member of the all-women piano quartet, the English Ensemble.
- Clarke’s compositional output slowed after the 1940s, partly due to discouragement from lack of recognition.2
Read more at RebeccaClarke.org
Sources
- Liane Curtis, ed., A Rebecca Clarke Reader (United States: Rebecca Clarke Society, Title 9 Music, 2005), 226.
- Liane Curtis, “Clarke [Friskin], Rebecca,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed July 16, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044728.