IVANA LANG - CROATIA
BORN 15 NOVEMBER
Ivana Lang was a Croatian composer, pianist and piano teacher. She was born in Zagreb, Croatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire). She completed piano studies in 1937 at the Music Academy in Zagreb. Ivana Lang composed orchestral works (concert for piano and orchestra), chamber music, an opera ("The Captain of Kastav", Croatian: Kastavski kapetan) and two ballets, "False Knight" (Lažni vitez) and "Dance of the Ghosts" (Ples sablasti).
In her interesting and very valuable oeuvre (consisting of 110 opus numbers), Ivana Lang paid particular attention to original folk's music idioms, especially from Istria, knowing full well, like all major proponents of this line, that she would be unable to achieve a satisfactory effect with her artistic activity if she was not persistent in promoting and disseminating the art of the people.
As with the greatest masters of this movement, in the music of Ivana Lang spurred by folk models, too, there is no question of it being simply a one-sided reproduction, of a quotation; instead, it is a development and a filtration and a stylisation of the original model. Not one of her works inspired by popular strains was a common and conventional folk music picture book, rather a monument to sound in which a creator of so-called serious music, liberally but with great professionalism, making responsible use of the simple ideas of the anonymous originators and first movers from the people, elevated the vernacular sounds to the level of refined art. Directing all her attention first of all to the sung word, the composer, after that, took to more complex matter, and that was the arrangement of vernacular instrumental dance music.
Among her famous work was composing music to poems written by Dragutin Domjanić and Antun Gustav Matoš.
Ivana Lang had married at the age of 37 to Marjan Beck with whom she had one child.
Source: Wikipedia
♫ LISTEN
Dance of the goblins by Ivana Lang
DOREEN CARWITHEN - UK
BORN 15 NOVEMBER
BORN 15 NOVEMBER
Doreen Mary Carwithen was a British composer of classical and film music. The second wife of William Alwyn, she was also known as Mary Alwyn.
As a child she had her first music lessons from her mother, a music teacher, starting both piano and violin with her at the age of four. At the age of 16 she began composing by setting Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils)" for voice and piano.
In 1941 she entered the Royal Academy of Music and played the cello in a string quartet and with orchestras. Her overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) was premiered at Covent Garden by Adrian Boult in 1947. The same year she was selected by the Royal Academy to train as composer of film music.
She later worked as a Sub Professor of Composition at the RAM. After her husband's death in 1985, she founded the William Alwyn Archive and William Alwyn Foundation to promote his music and facilitate related research projects.
Doreen Carwithen wrote scores for over 30 films, including Harvest from the Wilderness (1948), Boys in Brown (1950), and others. She also scored Elizabeth Is Queen, the official film of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
She also composed orchestral music: an overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) (1945); a Concerto for piano and strings (1948); the overture Bishop Rock (1952) and a Suffolk Suite (1964). She also wrote two award-winning, but little-known, string quartets.
She also edited for performance the second piano concerto by her husband William Alwyn.
In 1999 a stroke left her paralysed on one side. She died at Forncett St Peter, near Norwich, on 5 January 2003.
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