Peggy Glanville-Hicks - papers, ca. 1840, 1894-1990

fonds

ca. 1840, 1894-1990

Textual Records, Graphic Materials, Clippings, Musical Sound Recordings, Nonmusical Sound Recordings, Drawings, Watercolours, Manuscript Notated Music, Notated Music

152454

Microfilm : CY 4158, frames 1-78 (MLMSS 6394/34)

15.25 metres of textual material (28 boxes, 31 outsize items) - manuscript, typescript, and printed
Clippings
Sound Recordings
1 drawing
Music - (manuscript sketches)
Music - (manuscript and printed scores and parts, some bound, some with manuscript annotations)

Peggy Glanville-Hicks, internationally acclaimed composer and music critic, was born in Melbourne, Australia on 29 December 1912, daughter of Ernest and Myrtle Glanville-Hicks. Educated at Methodist Ladies College and the Clyde School, she studied composition with Fritz Hart at the Melbourne Conservatorium from the age of 15. In 1931 she won the Carlotta Rowe Open Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music London, where her teachers included Vaughan Williams, Arthur Benjamin, Constant Lambert, and Sir Malcolm Sargent. She was awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship in 1936 for further studies in Vienna with Egon Wellesz and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.

Glanville-Hicks married Stanley Bate on 9 November 1938 (they divorced in 1949), and the couple moved to America in 1940. Glanville-Hicks lived in America until 1959, becoming an American citizen in 1948. In New York she supported herself by copying scores for other composers, by contributing articles on music to various journals and magazines, and, from 1947 - ca. 1955 as a critic with the New York Herald Tribune under the leadership of Virgil Thomson. In the early 1950s she also wrote many of the American entries for the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th Edition, as well as some of the articles on Danish composers.

During 1948, Glanville-Hicks represented Australia for the second time at the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam, where her Concertino da Camera was performed. October of that year saw her first public concert in New York, with the performance at a Composer's Forum of her compositions Profiles from China, Concertino da Camera and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. She lived in Jamaica during the early part of 1953 while undertaking her first important commission, the composition of her opera The Transposed Heads, based on a novella by Thomas Mann. Another commission followed in 1958, when she was requested by the First Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds to write two ballets for choreographer John Butler.

While living in New York during the 1940s and 1950s Glanville-Hicks was involved in the promotion of American composers and contemporary music through wide-ranging activities which also utilised her considerable talents as an organiser and fundraiser.

Glanville-Hicks moved to Greece in 1959. Directed by John Butler, the premiere of her internationally acclaimed opera Nausicaa (on the text of Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves) took place at the Athens Festival in August 1961. In 1963 she was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, to write the opera Sappho, based on a play by Lawrence Durrell, but it was not performed.

While visiting New York in 1966 Glanville-Hicks underwent surgery for the removal of a brain tumour, and after her return to Greece made several trips to London during the next few years for the treatment of ongoing inner ear problems. These events effectively marked the end of her productive years as a composer, but she maintained an active association with the world of music, returning to Australia permanently in 1975 to direct the Asian Music Studies Program at the Australian Music Centre, on a grant from the Myer Foundation.

Glanville-Hicks has been the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships: an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant (1953); Guggenheim Fellowships (1956-1958); a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Aegean Demotic Music (1961); a Rockefeller Grant for travel and research, Middle and Far East (1960). In May 1987 she received a Doctorate of Music (honoris causa) from the University of Sydney.

Glanville-Hicks died in Sydney on 25 June 1990. Her will provided for the establishment of the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers' Trust, with her Sydney house to be used as a haven for composers in residence to further their creative work.

1. Personal correspondence, 1943-1990.
A. Family correspondence.
B. Correspondence with friends.
C. Financial and legal correspondence.
D. Personal correspondence files.
2. Professional correspondence, 1945-1990.
A. Correspondence with choreographers.
B. Correspondence with composers and musicians.
C. Music files.
D. Correspondence with publishers and literary agents.
3. Diaries and notebooks, 1931-1990.
4. Documents and certificates, 1932-1990.
5. Financial records, 1945-1990.
6. Literary manuscripts, 1945-1961.
7. Literary manuscripts collected, 198-?.
8. Librettos, ?1950-1963.
9. Artwork, ?1950-?1970.
10. Photographs and drawings, ca.1900-1989.
11. Printed material, 1931-1990.
12. Music manuscripts, 1935-1978.
13. Music manuscripts collected,1932-1988.
14. Printed music, 1938-1985.
15. Printed music collected, 1894-1982.
16. Miscellaneous papers, 1945-1990.
17. Sound recordings, 1957-1990.
18. Lady Bowden, wife of Sir Charles Bowden, Admiral of the British Navy...[watercolour miniature portrait, ca. 1840]

This collection comprises 18 manuscript and pictorial record series. You may navigate to a more detailed description of each series from this collection record.

English, French, German, Greek, Modern (1453- ), Italian, Japanese, Spanish

Approval for publication required

A printout of the series listings for the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Papers and Detailed Contents Lists for selected series (music manuscripts, music manuscripts collected, printed music and printed music collected) are available on the Guide Shelf in the Sir William Dixson Original Materials Reading Room, Mitchell Library.