Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Training and a working life abroad

Peggy Glanville-Hicks was born in Melbourne in 1912. She studied composition with Fritz Hart before leaving for Britain and further study. The later course of her career, through New York and Athens to a return to Australia, made performance opportunities a practical concern as well as a matter of artistic ambition.

She was both a composer and a critic. In New York she wrote for the New York Herald Tribune. Reviewing concerts required attention to what an institution made available to hear, a question she also addressed directly by helping organise events.

Sources for this section: [1] · [2]

Making concert opportunities

The Composers’ House account describes her involvement with the Museum of Modern Art’s Junior Council and the Composers’ Forum. A 1952 museum announcement lists her among the composers whose work was presented in Music for Percussion. A 1956 release puts her in another role, explaining compositions by Teo Macero.

The two notices show how one working life can cross the categories used by an archive. The credit attached to an individual evening matters more than a general label such as organiser, critic or composer. She might contribute a work to one event and write about somebody else’s music at another.

Sources for this section: [1] · [3] · [4]

Pieces made with performers in mind

Glanville-Hicks wrote the Etruscan Concerto for the pianist Carlo Bussotti. Other compositions similarly had particular performers in view. The association allows a researcher to ask who made a new piece possible on the concert platform, and to compare a score’s dedication with the actual performance history.

Her later research interests connected different musical traditions. From a base in Athens she examined Greek and Indian music. The Composers’ House biography connects that work to her continuing search for alternatives to dominant European harmonic approaches.

Sources for this section: [2] · [1]

A home becomes an opportunity for others

Glanville-Hicks returned to Australia in 1975 and died in 1990. Her will established the basis for a composer residency at her former home in Paddington, Sydney. The institution gives a material expression to a long-standing feature of her career: making it easier for artists to find time and space in which to work.

Sources for this section: [1]