ABSTRACT
Lutyens may have appeared in the Star’s list of ‘names to watch’ in 1938, but it was not until the 1940s that she began to make her considerable mark on the musical scene. She was one of the first British composers to explore 12-note music, and her engagement with the musical method proved to be an incendiary issue from the start. Her Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 7, the first of her large-scale works to show an awareness of the method, was premiered on 7 September 1940, the first night of the London Blitz. Consequently, the composer, together with Sir Henry Wood, the performers and the few audience members who had been brave enough to venture out, were forced to spend the night in the old Queen’s Hall. ‘The next day we learnt that the docks had been hit’, Lutyens recalled. ‘Whether it was the performance of my work or the German bombers, the Proms temporarily ceased’. 1 Although the premiere of the Three Pieces was somewhat eclipsed by events, the piece did not go entirely unnoticed. In particular, the performance caught the eye of Ernest Chapman, editor of the music journal Tempo:
I did not go [to the concert] and was all the more sorry when I found out from the press reviews that the work was in the 12-tone system! Surprisingly enough the critics were quite kind to it, but how far this was connected with her distinguished father I should not like to say. 2
