SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER: A MUSICAL LIFE LYNN MUTTI UCL PhD 1 I, Lynn Mutti, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER: A MUSICAL LIFE Abstract Music was central to Warner's life: she was first a young, aspiring composer, then a musicologist, later a librettist and friend to musicians and composers, and for fifty years a writer whose works regularly engaged with music in richly diverse ways. Unpublished diary entries show her knowledgeable and personal response to music heard in the concert hall, on the radio, via gramophone records or as a participant in a choir. Her ear was tuned to sound, especially sound in nature: water, birds, animals, the sea, the wind, as well as the cacophony of human voices, singing, shouting, joyous or sad. Warner's acute ear tuned into the life around her and articulated it in her written work. A late diary entry just a few months before her death shows her frailty and the continuing importance of music in her daily life. Sound and music are contained in one eloquently descriptive sentence: 'I fell against the tool-shed with a loud clang. Little the worse. Revived by a fine performance of the Pastoral Symphony'.1 My aims in this thesis are to present the fullest narrative yet of Warner's engagement with music, to examine her academic writing on the subject and to recount her musical collaborations and friendships which have not previously been a subject for academic discussion. My research draws both on printed sources and on 1 Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994) 17 October 1977, p. 377. 3 previously unexplored archives to give information about music from Warner's childhood until the end of her life. Music is woven through Warner's creative writing, too, and this is briefly discussed within chapters of the thesis. The importance of music to Warner has often been noted but never until now researched. This biographical account of music in her life will provide another focus for ongoing academic study and analysis of her literary work. 4 SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER: A MUSICAL LIFE Impact Statement Sylvia Townsend Warner is better known as a novelist and poet than she is as a musicologist. This area of her life, and the effect that music may have had on her writing, has never previously been researched. I have investigated primary source material in a variety of archives, and gathered a substantial amount of new information about the influence of music in Warner's life. My aim in this thesis is to present a full narrative of Warner's engagement with music, to examine her academic writing on music, and to recount her musical collaborations and friendships which have not previously been a subject for academic discussion. This biographical account of music in Warner's life will provide another focus for ongoing academic study and analysis of her literary work within academia. It will also provide material that will be part of a wider discussion regarding other novelists, for example, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and James Joyce, among others, who used musical themes in their writing. 5 SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER: A MUSICAL LIFE Acknowledgements To my supervisor Professor Peter Swaab, a model of patience and verbal clarity, I owe huge thanks for all he has helped me achieved. A debt of gratitude is owed to my friend and mentor in music Richard Searle, for his assistance with the musical intricacies of this thesis. Dr. Richard Hall provided valuable insights, loaned many musical texts and was endlessly encouraging. Thanks, too, to my friends in the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society whose support of this project has been invaluable. Last, but not least, love and thanks to my family for having tolerated Warner in their lives for so many years. Music does not influence research work, but both are nourished by the same sort of longing, and they complement each other in the release they offer. Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) Letter to Paul Plant, 23 October 1928 6 SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER: A MUSICAL LIFE Preface p. 8 Introit Chapter 1 The Musical Renaissance in England from 1880 p.17 Overture Chapter 2 Early Life, Music and Composing p. 51 Accelerando Chapter 3 The Tudor Church Music Project 1916-1929 p. 95 Allegro Inception The Early Years The Later Years Chapter 4 Warner Writing on Early Music 1919-1930 p.180 Andante Chapter 5 Early Music in the novel The Corner That Held Obbligato Them p.215 Chapter 6 More Than Music: Life, Love and Writing p.226 Affettuoso Chapter 7 Warner as Librettist and Collaborator p.277 Sostenuto Chapter 8 Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten: p.308 Adagio Loss and Friendship Conclusion p.338 Coda Abbreviations p.341 Appendices p.342 Bibliography p.346 7 Preface Introit Sylvia Townsend Warner led an extraordinary life. Born to upper middle-class parents, she grew up in Harrow School where her father was a senior master. There she had piano lessons with Percy Buck, the head of music for the school, becoming an accomplished pianist; she also became his secret mistress at the age of 19. The affair lasted for eighteen years. During this time Warner moved to London, learned to be an expert in Tudor music and began writing novels and poetry. She met Valentine Ackland at the home of the novelist Theodore Powys in Dorset and the women became lovers in 1930; for Warner it was a life-long commitment. In 1936 both she and Ackland joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and were active comrades in their home county of Dorset. They went twice to Spain during the Civil War, once as clerical aides in a hospital unit and then as delegates to the 2nd International Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture. Warner remained a committed Communist well into old age. Ackland's frequent ill-health and many affairs, particularly the affair with Elizabeth Wade White which almost broke the liaison with Warner, ensured that Warner's life was sometimes even more turbulent than the river that flowed past her house in Frome Vauchurch, Dorset. 8 Scholars have written about lesbianism and politics2 in Warner's writing but music has not been comprehensively studied although some recent articles have been published. 3 In addition, some of her poems have been set to music and performed, as have some of her own compositions.4 In this thesis I offer thorough and original archival research into the place of music in Warner's life, from her early aspirations to be a composer, and later her relief at 2 Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist, 1893-1978, ed. by G. Davies et.al. (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press, 2006). The Gender of Modernism: a Critical Anthology, ed. by Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana State University Press, 1990). 'Sylvia Townsend Warner', essay by Jane Marcus, pp. 531-38. The History of Women's Writing, 1920-1945, ed. by Maroula Joannou (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 'The Art of Bi-location – Sylvia Townsend Warner', essay by Maud Ellmann, pp. 78-93. Gillian Beer, 'The Centrifugal Kick', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 4(2004), 18-31. Kirsten Ewins, 'The Question of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Socialist Writing in the 1930s', Literature Compass 5 (2008), 657-667. Terry Castle, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction', in The Apparational Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 66-91. Jane Garrity, 'Encoding Bi-Location: Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Primitive Erotics of Sapphic Dissimulation', in Stepdaughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 140-87. Chris Hopkins, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Marxist Historical Novel', Literature and History 4 (1995), 50-63. Mary Jacobs, 'Gender, Genre and Politics: The Literary Work of Sylvia Townsend Warner in the 1930s. University of Plymouth, (Electronic publication). 'The Politics of Disclosure and the Fable', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 6 (2006), 17-35. Gay Wachman, 'Lesbian Empire: Radical Cross-writing in the Twenties' (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 3 Gillian Beer, 'Music and the Condition of Being Alive: The Example of Sylvia Townsend Warner', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 14(2014), [51]-75. Lynn Mutti, 'The Ambivalent Composer and the Carnegie Competition: From Music to Literature', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society,11(2011), [21]-36. 'That Odd Thing, A Musicologist', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society,13(2011), [17]-34. 'Notes on Warner and Schoenberg', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 17(2017), 31-38. Richard Searle, 'Sylvia Townsend Warner and Tudor Church Music', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society,11(2011), [69]-88. 'One Person's Weight: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Herbert Howells', Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 14(2014), [31]-49. Peter Swaab, The Sea Change libretto edited and published with annotations in the Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, 15 (2015), 14-34, together with his article 'Heavenly Hermaphroditism: A Note on The Sea-Change', 35-39. 4 John Ireland's settings of Warner's poems 'The Soldier's Return', Hymn for a Child' and 'The Scapegoat' [Songs Sacred and Profane [1929]], together with Thomas Hardy's poems 'She at His Funeral' and 'The Subalterns' with music by Warner, were performed at a concert at St. Anne's College Oxford on 3 May 2008. Also performed was Stephen Tomlin's poem 'The Lonely Traveller', with music by Warner [1921].