Elizabeth Maconchy

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994) was born in Hertfordshire to Irish parents and spent much of her childhood in Ireland, where she was writing music from the age of six. At sixteen she entered the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became a lifelong friend. Her own tastes ran less to English pastoralism than to the modernism of central Europe, Bartók above all, and she completed her training in Prague with Karel Jirák. She first came to public notice in 1930, when Henry Wood conducted her orchestral suite The Land at the Proms. The core of her output is a cycle of thirteen string quartets written between 1932 and 1983, music of concentrated argument that she likened to an impassioned debate among four voices; she also wrote operas, orchestral works and a great deal of vocal music. She chaired the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, was President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and was made a Dame in 1987. The composer Nicola LeFanu is her daughter.