Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 3 (Fall 1998)
American Sources in Australia: The Peggy Glanville-Hicks Papers
Deborah Hayes, University of Colorado at Boulder
A major collection of correspondence of American musicians and writers with the New York composer
and critic Peggy Glanville-Hicks in the 1940s and 1950s is now housed in the manuscript collection
of the Mitchell library at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney. An Australian by birth
(born near Melbourne in 1912), Glanville-Hicks attended the Royal College of Music in London, moved
to New York City in 1941, was hired in 1947 by Virgil Thomson at the New York Herald Tribune to
write concert reviews, and took U.S. citizenship in 1948. Between concert seasons, from May to
October, she usually left New York for Australia, Europe, the West Indies, or elsewhere and
concentrated on composing music. By the early 1960s, she was living in Greece; in 1975, she returned
to Australia. The Mitchell Library collection, titled "Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Papers, 1894-1990,"
contains private documents, correspondence, sketches, and scores, many of them previously thought
destroyed, that were discovered in her Sydney home after her death, hidden away in cupboards and behind
rows of books.
Of particular interest to Americanists is her correspondence from 1948 to 1950 with the American composers
about whom she wrote for the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary. In 1948, she persuaded the
editor, her longtime London friend Eric Blom, to let her update the American composer entries from the fourth
edition of Grove's (1940) as the coverage seemed to be inadequate in view of post-war musical
activity in the U.S. The fifth edition of Grove's (1954) contains ninety-eight American composer
entries signed P. G-H., seventy-nine of which were new. The P. G-H. papers contain much of the
original correspondence, including the composer's own worklists, biographies, and assessments of their
work, most of them handwritten.1
Of the composers she added to Grove's, most are of her generation, born around 1912, and younger, the
youngest being Peter Mennin (b. 1923) and Lukas Foss (b. 1922). Most of the older composers, born
around 1900, made their first appearance in Grove's as well: Marion Bauer, Ruth Crawford, John
Duke, Otto Luening, Randall Thompson, Virgil Thomson. The fifth edition entries for several others of
that generation, such as Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Roy Harris (who were in the fourth edition),
are not by Glanville-Hicks. The oldest on her list who are new to Grove's are Bernard Rogers (b. 1885),
Albert Elkus (b. 1884), and Seth Bingham (b. 1882).
The length of an article seems to indicate the composer's relative importance -- in her eyes. The longest
of the American composer articles, by anyone, is her article on Thomson, spanning four columns.
Wilfrid Mellers' article on Harris is the next longest entry. Six of her articles are two to
two-and-a-half columns long: Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, Walter Piston,
and Wallingford Riegger. Gustave Reese's article on Howard Hanson is that length, too. Another
thirty-five are of medium length, one to one-and-a-half columns. The remaining fifty-six are short,
around one-half column.
Generally the format is as follows: composer's name and date of birth; identification (American composer
[and critic, and author, and teacher]); education; significant performances; employment history;
volunteer positions in composer associations (evidence of being a "good musical citizen"); comments
on style; a list of works, either in a single paragraph or in a longer "Catalogue of Works" by genre;
and finally, but not always, a bibliography of one or two titles. For Thomson she lists only her 1949
article in The Musical Quarterly. Blom in his leters chided Glanville-Hicks at first for
not following the set format in the material she was sending him. He also apologized for not being
able to pay larger fees.
If Glanville-Hicks knew the composer's work, she apparently added her own commentary about style. Some of
the medium-sized articles, e.g., Joseph Akhron (1886-1943), contain little stylistic information, and the
space is instead occupied by a detailed worklist. Other medium-sized articles, e.g., Leonard Bernstein
(1918-1990) contain a more extensive stylistic essay but only an abbreviated worklist.
Hicks pursued authentic traditional sources in creating her own musical language, and it is not
surprising that she frequently remarked on "Americana" she found "integrated" into a composer's
personal style: Charles Ives, George Antheil (jazz rhythm), Bernstein (cowboy songs, Mexican dances,
jazz idiom, all integrated), Copland (folksong), Marc Blitzstein, Morton Gould (Broadway and concert styles),
Crawford, Burrill Phillips, Arthur Berger (unspecified American vernacular elements integrated
into art), and Henry Cowell (tone clusters, folk material). She defined other styles or, as she later
called them, "categorical orbits," as well: dissonant (early Antheil, Ornstein); atonal (Ives,
Crawford); non-thematic, non-harmonic (John Cage); romanticist (Samuel Barber); lyrical, impressonist
(Norman Dello Joio); lyrical, romantic (Diamond); neoclassical (Elliott Carter, Walter Piston, Crawford);
and orientalist (Bowles, Criffes, Lou Harrison, McPhee).
In their correspondence Blom and Glanville-Hicks discuss her choices of whom to inlcude and, occasionally,
whether to assign an article to another writer. Some of her choices may be puzzling today. She omitted
some composers -- Miriam Gideon, George Perle, William Grant Still, Louise Talma to name a few -- who now
seem at least as important as some whom she included. She wrote about Cecil Effinger (1914-90), whom
she met one summer at Colorado College, but not Normand Lockwood, another Colorado composer of distinction.
Some of the composers Grove's designates as American were not born in the U.S. -- Henry Brant,
Nicolay Berezovsky, Ingolf Dahl, Ruel Lahmer, Colin McPhee, Nicholas Nabokov, Jacques de Menasce, Gian
Carlo Menotti, Leo Ornstein, and Dane Rudhyar. Though Glanville-Hicks, too, was often designated an
American composer in the 1950s, in Grove's she is designated as Australian; for the the fifth
edition Blom wrote the Glanville-Hicks entry himself.
Besides the Grove's correspondence, the Peggy Glanville-Hicks papers include substantial runs of
correspondence with her close friends and associates, many of them Americans, including Bowles (letters
dated 1945-1989), Cage (1948-1949), Harrison (1950; 1958-1959), McPhee, Hary Partch (1959), Thomson, the
choreographer John Butler, and the writer Alastair Reid (her librettist for her opera Nausicaa).
There are a few letters from Chandler Cowles, Ross Lee Finney, Alan Hovhaness, and Dane Rudhyar. She also
kept carbon copies of her own (typed) letters.
When I visited the library in September 1997 archivist had made substantial progress in sorting,
restoring, cataloging, and preserving materials. Two other visiting researchers, both Australian,
were working there, and the busy library staff were exceedingly gracious and helpful. A listing
of contents of the collection will soon be available at the library's websit at www.slnsw.gov.au
in PICMAN, the Pictures and Manuscript collections.
Further Australian items of interest to Americanists have appeared since Glanville-Hicks's death. At
the National Library of Australia in Canberra catalguing has been completed for two manuscript collections
deposted by Wendy Beckett, a young Sydney playwright whose book Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Sydney, 1992)
is based largely on the composer's own recollections of her life and career. The contents of the
collections are lists on the library's website at www.nla.gov.au/ms/findaids.
The Peggy Glanville-Hicks Collection, ms 9083, contains the composer's appointment books and other materials.
the Wendy Beckett Collection, ms 9084, includes Beckett's taped interviews with Glanville-Hicks,
Cage, Bowles, Thomson, Oliver Daniels, and others in preparation for writing her book.
In the Australian documentary video P G-H: A Modern Odyssey (1991), interviews with Bowles,
Butler, Cagte, Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin, Jac Venza (producer of the "Great Performances" series on
PBS), and Glanville-Hicks herself convey some of the excitement of New York musical life at mid-century.
The co-producer of the documentary was her close friend, the Australian musician, impresario, and writer
James Murdoch, who is a co-executor of her estate and has recently completed the authorized biography,
P G-H: A Transposed Life (not yet published). More information is availbale from me at the
College of Music, University of Colorado, Boulder 80309 (hayesd@spot.colorado.edu.
Notes
I listed and summarized the Grove's entries in my book, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Bio-Bibliography
(1990), pp. 141-155, items G487 through G584. She was very much alive when I was preparing the
bio-bibliography (she died a few months after it was published) but had apparently forgotten about
the Grove's material.
Deborah Hayes is a professor of musicology and associate dean for graduate studies at the University
of Colorado at Bouler. Her book, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Bio-Bibliography, was published in 1990,
a few weeks before the composer's death.
Updated 1/05/99