Alice Mary Smith

Alice Mary Smith (married name Alice Mary Meadows White; 19 May 1839 – 4 December 1884) was an English composer. Her compositions included two symphonies and a large collection of choral works, both sacred and secular.[1]

Alice Mary Smith
Born(1839-05-19)19 May 1839
London, England
Died4 December 1884(1884-12-04) (aged 45)
London, England
OccupationComposer

Biography

Smith was born in London, the third child of a relatively well-to-do family. She showed aptitude for music from her early years and took lessons privately from William Sterndale Bennett and George Alexander Macfarren, publishing her first song in 1857. In November 1867, the year of her marriage to a lawyer, Frederick Meadows White, she was elected Female Professional Associate of the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1884 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music. The same year, after a period of illness in which she went abroad to try to recover, she died of typhoid fever in London.[2]

Works

Smith was a prolific composer, writing for a diverse range of ensembles.

Among her chamber compositions are four piano quartets, three string quartets and a clarinet sonata (1870), perhaps the first British example, anticipating sonatas by Swinnerton Heap, Prout, Tovey and Stanford.[3] Her orchestral compositions include six concert overtures and two symphonies. Her first symphony, in C minor, was written at the age of 24 and performed by the Musical Society of London in 1863; the second, in A minor, was written for the Alexandra Palace competition of 1876, but was never submitted.

Smith composed two large pieces for the stage: an operetta, Gisela of Rüdesheim for chorus, orchestra, and soloists which was performed in 1865 at the Fitzwilliam Music Society, Cambridge, and The Masque of Pandora (1875), for which the orchestration was never completed.

Smith's oeuvre includes one of the largest collections of sacred choral music by a woman composer, and comprises six anthems, three canticles (and the beginning to a fourth), as well as a short Sacred Cantata Exile, based on episodes from Jean Racine's Esther. Her anthems Whoso hath this world's goods and By the waters of Babylon were performed in a liturgical context at St Andrew's, Wells Street by Sir Joseph Barnby in February 1864, making them the first recorded instance of music by a woman composer to be used for the liturgies of the Church of England.[4]

In 1880 she turned her attention towards writing large-scale cantatas, all published by Novello & Co. These included Ode to the North-East Wind for chorus and orchestra, Ode to The Passions (1882), her longest work, performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in that year, and two cantatas for male voices in the last two years of her life. In her obituary, her husband claimed that she was working on a setting of the poem The Valley of Remorse by Louisa Sarah Bevington for chorus, soloists and orchestra; however, there is no manuscript to support this claim. Of her forty songs, her most popular work was the vocal duet O that we two were maying. Another, Lessons of the Gorses (setting Elizabeth Barrett Browning), was published in The Girl's Own Paper in 1883.[5]

Since 2010, Smith's manuscripts are housed in the Royal Academy of Music Library. Two symphonies and two overtures are published by A-R Editions in editions by Ian Graham-Jones.[6] The Symphony in A minor, Symphony in C minor and the Andante for clarinet and orchestra (taken from the Clarinet Sonata) have been recorded by Howard Shelley and the London Mozart Players for Chandos.[7] Leonard Sanderman edited the complete sacred choral music of Alice Mary Smith,[8] and recorded this repertoire with The Eoferwic Consort,[9] supported by an AHRC Knowledge Exchange Grant.

According to an obituary in The Athenaeum of 13 December 1884: "Her music is marked by elegance and grace ... power and energy. Her forms were always clear and her ideas free from eccentricity; her sympathies were evidently with the Classic rather than with the Romantic school."

References
  1. Rosemary Williamson: 'Smith [White; Meadows White], Alice Mary', Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 4 February 2005)
  2. J. C. Hadden, ‘White, Alice Mary Meadows (1839-1884)’, rev. David J. Golby, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 4 Feb 2005
  3. Lazaras Edition
  4. But note the competing claim for Clara Angela Macirone's Te Deum and Jubilate in: Brown, James Duff; Stratton, Stephen Samuel. British musical biography: a dictionary of musical artists, authors and composers, born in Britain and its colonies (1897)
  5. Victorian Voices archive
  6. "Alice Mary Smith". Areditions.com. Retrieved 27 July 2020.
  7. Chandos CHAN10283 (2005), Gramophone review by Jeremy Nichols
  8. "The Complete Sacred Choral Music (Alice Mary Smith) - ChoralWiki". 1.cpdl.org. Archived from the original on 1 August 2021. Retrieved 13 August 2019.
  9. "Alice Mary Smith - The Complete Sacred Choral Music". YouTube. Retrieved 13 August 2019.

Further reading
  • Ian Graham-Jones: The Life and Music of Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884), A Woman Composer of the Victoria Era (Edwin Mellen Press, 2010)
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