BORN 8 MARCH
Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor (8 March 1903 – 21 December 1998) was an English pianist, conductor, and composer. She was the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie (née Walmisley).
Gwendolyn wrote her first composition, Goodbye Butterfly, at the age of twelve. Later, she won a scholarship for composition and piano at Trinity College of Music in 1915, where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and Alec Rowley.
In 1933, Coleridge-Taylor made her debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall. She was the first female conductor of H.M.S. Royal Marines and a frequent guest conductor of the BBC Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. She was the founder and conductor of both the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra and its accompanying musical society in the 1940s, as well as the Malcolm Sargent Symphony Orchestra. Her compositions include large-scale orchestral works, as well as songs, keyboard, and chamber music.
In 1957, Coleridge-Taylor wrote the Ceremonial March to celebrate Ghana's independence. Her other well-regarded works include a Piano Concerto in F minor (Sussex Landscape, The Hills, To April, In Memoriam R.A.F.), Wyndore (Windover) for choir and orchestra, and Golden Wedding Ballet Suite for orchestra.
She dropped her first name after a divorce, thereafter going by Avril professionally. She had a tour of South Africa in 1952, during the period of apartheid. Originally she was supportive of, or neutral to the racial segregation; she was taken as white as she was at least three-quarters white in ancestry.When the government learned that she was one-quarter black (her paternal grandfather was a Creole from Sierra Leone), it would not allow her to work as a composer or conductor.
She also published compositions under the pseudonym Peter Riley.
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Avril Coleridge-Taylor | 2 Songs
DIED 8 MARCH
Clara Kathleen Rogers was born in Cheltenham, England, into a musical family. Her grandfather, Robert Lindley, was a cellist; her father, John Barnett, was an opera composer and was the first music teacher his children had; her mother, Eliza, was a singer. At the age of twelve, her family moved to Germany to further the musical education of the children. Clara was denied acceptance to the Leipzig Conservatory, but that decision was changed in 1857 in view of her talent, making her the youngest student ever admitted. Two of her siblings also attended the conservatory.
While at Leipzig, Rogers studied the piano, harmony, part writing, violin, cello, and voice. Although composition classes were not yet open to women at the conservatory, she nevertheless produced the first movement of her string quartet while a student there. Her classmate, Arthur Sullivan, copied orchestra parts for her, found players and arranged a performance of the piece. Rogers spent three years at the Conservatory, graduating at sixteen with honors.
Rogers chose to pursue a vocal career and became an opera singer. Using the pseudonym Clara Doria, she debuted in 1863 in Turin, Italy in a performance of Robert le diable by Giacomo Meyerbeer. After touring in Italy and five years in London as a concert singer, she came to United States in 1871 as a member of the Parepa-Rosa Opera Company and spent another seven years as a singer with at least three different troupes.
Her singing career ended in 1878 when she married Henry Munroe Rogers, a lawyer living in Boston, Massachusetts. In Boston, Rogers had many artistic friends, such as Amy Beach, Margaret Ruthven Lang, George Chadwick, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Amy Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow wrote the poem “Stay at Home, My Heart, and Rest” especially for Rogers. She held weekly musicales at her home and helped to promote the careers of her artistic friends.
During her marriage, Rogers took up teaching and composing, which she said was “a supreme delight – amounting at times almost to intoxication!” By the early 1880s, she had begun publishing some of her songs with the Arthur P. Schmidt company. In 1888, she helped found the Boston Manuscript Club and was invited to join the Manuscript Club of New York in 1895 by Amy Beach. Although she had rejected a teaching position there in the past, Rogers joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in 1902, where she taught voice and began to write on music. Her literary works (see below) include six books on diction and technique and three autobiographies.
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Clara Kathleen Rogers | Two Songs
Clara Kathleen Rogers | Two Songs
► FIND SCORES BY CLARA KATHLEEN ROGERS
BORN 8 MARCH
INA BOYLE was a prolific composer of vocal, choral, chamber and orchestral music, but her works are rarely performed today and few were published. She lived all her life in the family home, Bushey Park, Enniskerry, in the shadow of the great Sugarloaf. Her first music lessons were with her father, Rev. William Foster Boyle, who was curate at St. Patrick’s Church, Powerscourt. With her younger sister, Phyllis, she was taught the violin and cello by their governess, and she started to compose at an early age.
She studied composition with several private teachers in Dublin and entered works for competitions, while she was carer for her parents and sister and looked after the family home and estate. She had her greatest success with her orchestral rhapsody, The Magic Harp, which was selected for publication in 1920 by the prestigious Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. She was the only women composer to be honoured by the scheme.
From 1923 she crossed the Irish Sea by steamship for lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams, who thought highly of her music and encouraged her to have it performed. Unfortunately the outbreak of the Second World War ended her travels and cut her off from musical opportunities in London. She continued to compose throughout her life and never ceased to promote her music by sending scores to conductors and choir directors. Her friend Elizabeth Maconchy noted that as a result of her isolation she made few musical contacts and her music remained little known and almost unperformed.
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Elegy by Ina Boyle
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