Rosalind Ellicott

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Rosalind Ellicott (1857-1924) was an English composer.

1 Life
2 Music
3 Discography
4 Further reading
5 References

[edit] Life

Ellicott was born in Cambridge, the daughter of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. Her father had no interest in music whatsoever; it was her mother, a singer who had been involved with the founding both of London's Handel Society and of the Gloucester Philharmonic Society that encouraged young Rosalind's talent. From 1874 to 1876 she studied piano with Frederick Westlake at the Royal Academy of Music; here, too, she studied for seven years under Thomas Wingham, a pupil of Sir William Sterndale Bennett. Her first published composition, a Sketch, appeared in 1883. Shortly thereafter, Ellicott began composing ambitious works for chorus and orchestra, cast in a traditional, broadly Romantic vein. While many of these gained performance at festivals in Gloucester, Ellicott began to turn her attention to chamber music by the end of the nineteenth century, likely hoping that there would be more opportunities for it to be performed. Still, she began disappearing from the public eye sometime around 1900, moving to the south coast after World War I and dying in Seasalter in 1924.^[1]; she is buried near her parents in the churchyard of Birchington on Sea, in Kent.

[edit] Music

Comparatively little of Ellicott's work has survived to this day; apart from a few songs and other instrumental works, only the cantatas Elysium and The Birth of Song, along with an incomplete copy of the First Piano Trio and a complete copy of the Second, are known to exist in published form. Ellicott's contemporaries often spoke favorably of her music; she was once told by Charles H. H. Parry that she "handl[ed] her brass as if [she] had been at it for twenty years", and others even felt that her work was superior to that of her male colleagues. Much of the surviving music is richly, lushly Brahmsian, built on thick textures and rich instrumentation, even in chamber works such as the second piano trio.