Doreen Carwithen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Doreen Mary Carwithen (15 November 1922 – 5 January 2003) was a British composer of classical and film music. She was also known as Mary Alwyn.

Doreen Carwithen was born in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire on 15 November 1922. As a child she had her first music lessons from her mother, a music teacher, starting both piano and violin with her at age 4. In 1941 she entered the Royal Academy of Music and played the cello in a string quartet and with orchestras. At age 16 she began composing by setting Wordsworth’s Daffodils for voice and piano.

Doreen Carwithen composed some orchestral music: an overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) (1945); a Concerto for piano and strings (1948); the overture Bishop Rock (1952) and a Suffolk Suite (1964).^[1] She also edited for performance the second piano concerto by William Alwyn, and later became his second wife.^[2]

At the Royal Academy she entered the harmony class of William Alwyn, who began to teach her composition. Her overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another) was premiered at Covent Garden by Adrian Boult in 1947. The same year she was selected by the Royal Academy to train as composer of film music.

She wrote scores for over 30 films, including Harvest from the Wilderness (1948), Boys in Brown (1950), Mantrap (1952) (released in the U.S. as Man in Hiding), and East Anglian Holiday (1954). She also scored Elizabeth is Queen, the official film of the coronation of Elizabeth II, and wrote two award-winning but little-known string quartets.

In 1961 she married William Alwyn, and took Mary Alwyn as her married name, as she disliked the name Doreen, and Mary was her middle name. She later worked as a Sub Professor of Composition at the RAM.

She was devoted to her husband and acted as his secretary and amanuensis. After he died in 1985, she resumed interest in her own music, while also founding the William Alwyn Archive and WIlliam Alwyn Foundation to promote her husband's music and facilitate related research projects. In 1999 a stroke left her paralysed on one side and she died in Forncett St Peter, near Norwich, on 5 January 2003.