Peggy Glanville-Hicks

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Peggy Glanville-Hicks (December 29, 1912, Melbourne–June 25, 1990, Sydney) was an Australian composer.

1 Biography
2 Music
3 Books
4 External links and Resources

[edit] Biography

She spent the years from 1931 to 1936 as a student at the Royal College of Music in London, where she studied with Arthur Benjamin, Constant Lambert, Sir Malcolm Sargent and Ralph Vaughan Williams among others. Her teachers also included Egon Wellesz. She was later to claim that the idea which opens his fourth symphony was taken from her, and it reappears in her 1950s opera The Transposed Heads. During this period (between 1949 and 1958) she was also a critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

After leaving England she lived also in Greece — from 1950 to 1976 — and the United States, where she asked George Antheil to revise his Ballet mécanique for a modern percussion ensemble for a concert she helped to organize ([1]) - before returning to Australia in the 1980s. She lost her sight in later life. She was a close friend of the expatriate writer and composer Paul Bowles.

[edit] Music

Important works in her output include the Sinfonia da Pacifica (1952-53), the opera The Transposed Heads in six scenes with a libretto by Thomas Mann (1953? premiered March 27 1954 [2]), the Etruscan Concerto (1954?), the opera Nausicaa with libretto prepared together with Robert Graves in 1956 and produced in 1961 ([3]) and a Concerto romantico (1957). Her harp sonata (1952) was premiered by Nicanor Zabaleta in 1953.

[edit] Books

Beckett, Wendy (1992). Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-17057-6.
Hayes, Deborah (1990). Peggy Glanville-Hicks : A Bio-bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-26422-8.
Murdoch, James (2002). Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press. ISBN 1-57647-077-6.