ABSTRACT
While Lutyens had lived in a musical no-man’s-land in the early years of her career, Maconchy’s reputation as one of the most promising British younger composers had continued to flourish. Her music was regularly performed throughout the 1930s both at home and abroad – an entire concert of her chamber music was presented in Krakow in 1937, for example, and performances of her work took place in Budapest, Brussels, Paris, Warsaw, Düsseldorf and Lausanne. Furthermore, at the age of 33, she was one of the few younger British composers (along with Berkeley, Britten and Tippett) to be thought noteworthy enough to merit a couple of columns in the 1940 edition of Grove’s Dictionary. ‘Her artistic creed’, Grove noted, ‘is that music exists for discourse … and that its method should therefore be in essence contrapuntal’. 1
