Composer Douglas Young speaks out for Priaulx
Rainier, a former President of the Bmic Friends whose centenary
it was in March 2003
Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986) was born in South Africa on the edge
of Zululand. She grew up in a family devoted to classical music,
yet within sight and earshot of African native music and dance.
This duality never left her, and imprinted itself on her own music.
She came to London in 1920 to study music, and worked as a professional
violinist for many years. A serious car accident in the early 1930s,
and the long recuperation required, awoke her latent desire to compose.
She was essentially self taught, like Schoenberg, apart from a few
consultations with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. From her first compositions
a decisively individual voice emerged, radically at odds with the
accepted norms of English music.
Her work falls into several periods. The first culminates in a
series of pieces which show her African origins most vividly –
Barbaric Dance Suite (1949), Suite for Clarinet and Piano (1943)
and Ubunzima (a setting of Zulu words (1948).
In 1949 Rainer met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. She had
known their work since the publication of CIRCLE in 1937, and through
them became close to the severely abstract ‘constructivist’
world of Naum Gabo, Mondrian and John Wells. When Hepworth bought
a studio in St Ives in 1950 Rainier spend more and more time there,
eventually acquiring her own cottage high above the town. So fascinated
did Rainier become by the process of making sculpture that she notated
the percussive rhythms made by Hepworth and her two assistants as
they hammered and chiselled. Priaulx claimed that only sculptors
and architects fully understood her music – an opinion which
Varèse and Xenakis would have appreciated.
Around 1960 an astonishing transformation occurs in Rainier’s
music. Her works of this time, in particular Quanta (1962), are
among the most radical atonal compositions of the period, and show
full awareness of the post war European avant garde – Boulez,
Stockhausen, Ligeti, as well as the late works of Stravinsky, the
composer she most admired. While Rainier never adopted 12 tone or
serial techniques, her music shows a profound understanding of the
new musical language. Several of the works she wrote at the time
will always form part of any serious study of post war musical modernism,
and she can be credited with the first truly athematic works composed
in England.
In her final period Rainier sought to reintegrate more evocative,
discursive writing into her abstract
musical structures. The Violin Concerto of 1977 draws all the threads
of her life into one superb symphonic architecture. The sounds and
rhythms of her native African childhood can once again be heard,
but now in a work of consummate maturity.
Priaulx was also a passionate gardener and ecologist. The exotic
plants in Hepworth’s Sculpture Garden in St Ives were planned
and planted by Priaulx. Indeed, her last work, commissioned by Yehudi
Menuhin, Wildlife Celebration, was performed in aid of Durrell’s
‘Wildlife Conservation Trust’. Organic growth fused
with mathematical constructivism to generate some of he most original
work of the later 20th century.
The Tate St Ives are mounting the most comprehensive exhibition
of Hepworth’s sculpture ever seen – opening May 23rd
2003 – with lectures, music, dance and film events running
through the first weekend and at selected points until mid October.
The Royal Academy of Music are mounting a Hepworth-Rainier Day in
London on 20th June. Full details of all events will be available
from the Bmic in the spring.
more info: www.tate.org.uk/stives |
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Priaulx Rainier
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