Among the many women composers side-lined in musical
history who are becoming the focus of new interest, Ailsa Dixon (1932-2017)
only began to receive her share of recognition in the last months of her
life. While there were a handful of
performances during her most fertile period of composition in the 1980s and
’90s (most notably by Ian Partridge, Lynne Dawson, and the Brindisi Quartet),
there followed several decades of almost complete neglect. Then, in 2017, a work that had been lying in
manuscript for thirty years was chosen for premiere as part of the London
Oriana Choir’s Five15 project highlighting the work of women composers. These things shall be
received
its first performance in the spectacular glass-roofed concert hall surrounding
the keel of the Cutty Sark just five weeks before the composer’s death.
Five 15 at the Cutty
Sark, July 2017. Photo: London Oriana
Choir / Kathleen Holman
It was sung again at memorial concerts in London and
Bristol, and is now showing signs of entering the choral repertoire, with
subsequent performances by choirs in Oxford and Cambridge and festivals from
Little Missenden to Romsey Abbey. With its vision of a future when ‘New
arts shall bloom’, it seems especially apt that it came to light in the context
of the enterprise to give due prominence to the work of women composers.
Ailsa Dixon
(centre) at the premiere of
These things Shall be in July 2017, with
fellow composers Dobrinka Tabakova (left) and Cheryl Frances Hoad (right). Photo: London Oriana Choir / Kathleen Holman
Born Ailsa Harrison, she came from a musical family
background: next to the piano in the cottage where she grew up was a portrait
of her musical ancestor Feliks Yaniewicz (1762-1848), the Polish composer and
violinist who co-founded the first Edinburgh Festival. She played the violin in the London Junior
Orchestra, studied the piano with Hilda Bor, took her LRAM, and went on to read
music at Durham University in the early 1950s.
It was here that she first began playing the lute, which she later
studied with Diana Poulton. There was no
formal tuition in composition, but by the time she left university she had
written her first work for string quartet (a Scherzo recently rediscovered in
her archive), though it was not until some decades later that she returned to
composition in earnest.
Ailsa (with lute) and contemporaries at Durham in the early
1950s
The intervening period was spent teaching and
singing, but her musical life took a new turn in 1976 when she undertook a
production of Handel’s Theodora. This
was an all-consuming project, and left her with such withdrawal symptoms that
afterwards, to fill the gap, she began to conceive an opera of her own, Letter
to Philemon (based on an episode in the life of St Paul) which was
performed in 1984 and proved to be the start of her most fertile period as a
composer.
In the following two decades she wrote three works
for string quartet (Nocturnal
Scherzo, Sohrab and
Rustum, and Variations on
Love Divine), chamber works including a set of 3
fugues on Biblical subjects, and Airs of the Seasons, a sonata for piano
duet (4 hands). Among her vocal
compositions are a variety of songs and duets, including settings of two
Shakespeare sonnets for soprano and tenor, a cycle of 5 Songs of Faith
and Joy for mezzo soprano and guitar, a set of
3 songs for soprano and string quartet entitled The Spirit of Love, and Shining
Cold, a vocalise for high soprano, ondes martenot and strings.
Many of these works went unperformed in her lifetime,
but recent discoveries in her musical archive have stimulated a raft of new
performances, including posthumous premieres of Airs of the Seasons at
St George’s Bristol in 2018 and The Spirit of Love (in February 2020). Plans are underway for a recording of her
complete works for string quartet by the Villiers Quartet. Her manuscript scores are now being digitised
as part of a project
in Finland to preserve the work of neglected female composers, and there are
plans to deposit her archive at Heritage Quay, where the British Music
Collection is held.
Religious themes are a strong element in Ailsa Dixon’s
works, while literary texts (from medieval Latin lyrics to Shakespeare, Matthew
Arnold and Walter de la Mare) inspired many of her compositions. When asked about her musical influences in an
interview
in the ‘Meet the Artist’ series shortly before she died, she cited ‘Fauré (for
his harmonic suppleness), Britten (for his powers of evocation and empathy),
and Bartok (studying his compositional processes at Durham stimulated an
interest in his lively variations of time signature and the elasticity of
musical motifs)’, while observing that ‘the Greats preside over it all’. Her interest in counterpoint is especially
prominent in the three instrumental Fugues and the quartets, and was often
deployed to figure the interplay and resolution of conflicting emotions, as in
the Nocturnal Scherzo, and a farewell fugue sung by four characters in Letter
to Philemon.
Frances Wilson wrote of her musical style in a review
of Airs of the Seasons, ‘The opening chords… are reminiscent of Debussy
and Britten in their distinct timbres, and the entire work has a distinctly
impressionistic flavour. Ailsa’s admiration of Fauré … is also evident in the
harmonic language, while the idioms of English folksong and hymns, and melodic
motifs redolent of John Ireland and the English Romantics remind us that this
is most definitely a work by a British composer with an original musical
vision.’
More details at www.ailsadixon.co.uk To subscribe to
occasional newsletters featuring recent and upcoming performances of Ailsa
Dixon’s works and news on the availability of scores, please use the Contact page on her website.
