After a year’s silence, I write to memorialize the following:
Every note that Rebecca Clarke wrote for performance and left in a performable state has now been published—admittedly, by six different publishers, but a Gesamtausgabe is a Gesamtausgabe, no matter how you slice it, and hello, Bach and Beethoven.
Every note that Clarke wrote for voices and left in a performable state has now been published and recorded.
Every note that Clarke wrote for instruments and left in a performable state has now been published, and virtually every bit of that has been recorded.
The remainder, consisting of a single counterpoint exercise and two fragments, is in the works.
Details may be seen here, here, and here. I rest my case.
Favorable cards from Clarke’s tarot deck (Ferd. Piatnik e Figli [Ferd. Piatnik & Söhne], Vienna, n.d.), which she was given as a gift on 19 September 1928 and used to read Ravel’s fortune a month later—one of several experiences that ultimately led her to put away the cards for good, “as there were things I was simply not meant to know.”
What we believe to be the last of Clarke’s extant pieces for violin have just been published by Sleepy Puppy Press.
They can’t be dated with certainty, but circumstantial evidence suggests an association with the early years of World War Two, when Clarke was marooned in the United States, cut off from her funds, unable to secure a visa to return home to London, and forced to camp out with her two brothers and their families. She contributed as she could, in part by giving her niece Magdalen violin-lessons.
The duet “For 2 Violins” dates from 1940—or so Clarke recalled decades later—although the autograph continues with the beginning of another duet with the lower voice in bass clef, similar to a piano-piece that she wrote while studying counterpoint with R.O. Morris, in London, in the early 1930s.
The unaccompanied solos Lament and Jig/March are a total mystery. I stumbled across them a few years ago, jotted down on yellow tablet-paper, folded down small, and inserted into one of Clarke’s books, where they marked a passage about Debussy’s experience at the beginning of World War One. Their purpose remains unknown—as does their instrumentation, although an unaccompanied violin seems like just the thing for a jig, and perfectly plausible for a lament.
Since all three pieces can be associated, however tangentially, with the time when Clarke was giving violin-lessons, and can serve, quite nicely, as instructional materials for that instrument, we decided to publish them together, providing optional accompaniments for Lament and Jig/March—carefully modeled after Clarke’s late style, by Alan and Andrew Bell—in order to facilitate use in the studio and in recital. The pieces can be used, singly or together, in a variety of ways: as two short solos and a more extended duet; as a set of three violin-duets; as a pair of violin-and-piano duos; or in any combination, mix and match.
Admittedly, this goes far beyond anything Clarke ever stipulated, but we couldn’t help feeling that these pieces were just too attractive to be put before the public as bare technical material. so we’ve tried to present it both ways: if you want (or require) the Urtext, you have it here, as Clarke left it; and if you want it in a form that wouldn’t be out of place in your next recital, you have that, too.
Available in print and digital formats, with a full set of demonstration videos either way.
Rebecca Clarke (right) with her niece Magdalen Thacher Clarke (second from left), at a family wedding in London, 3 August 1938
Clarke’s Daybreak, for voice and string quartet, originally published in 2012, has just been reissued—freshly engraved, with an updated introduction and a cover-design that captures something of the piece’s overwhelming sensuality—by our friends at Sleepy Puppy Press. Details on our Shop page, and on Sleepy Puppy’s website (here for the print edition, here for the digital).
The text is John Donne’s aubade “Stay O sweet, and do not rise!”—which, in case you’ve forgotten, is not just a morning-song but a morning-after song, in which two lovers are not only still in bed, but wound very tightly in one another’s embrace.
Little else needs to be said, except that you should immediately knock yourself out with the glorious performance by Nicholas Phan and Brooklyn Rider, here or at either of the Sleepy Puppy links above.
Cover art: Detail from a portrait of Rebecca Clarke, 21 July 1925, by Langfier Ltd., London, Rebecca Clarke and James Friskin Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress
Just a touch late, but this entrancing take on Clarke’s Chinese Puzzle, by members of the Ulster Orchestra, popped up only this morning:
Gongbo Jiang, violin, Wenhan Jiang, viola, and Thomas Isaac, cello
This is an arrangement—uncredited, but absolutely terrific, and one that I think Clarke would have loved. The original is for violin and piano, but she herself made arrangements for viola and piano, and for a ravishing mixed ensemble of violin, flute, viola, cello, and piano (details here), and the piece was always a winner for her in concert, so what’s one more arrangement among friends?
The tune is one that a Chinese classmate of Clarke’s brother Hans hummed while spending weekends at the Clarke home in Harrow, England, in the early 1900s. Many years later, while on tour in Peking, Clarke checked out her transcription with a native colleague, who confirmed its accuracy, but blushed to say that it had words that he could not repeat in polite company.
And on that cheerful note, we wish you happy puzzling, and a very prosperous Year of the Dragon!
Caroline Castleton’s glorious Rebecca Clarke, The Violist: Her Career and Performance Practice on an Emerging Solo Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century (DMA diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2023) has just been published, and you need to get your copy now.
This is the absolutely the finest thing ever written about Clarke’s performing career, her instrumental technique, her writing for the viola, and her role as a public advocate for the instrument on a par with Tertis and Primrose, and ahead of both of them on the international circuit. It’s a vital resource for anyone seriously interested in Clarke, and—miracle of miracles—it is fully accessible to general readers, without stinting so much as a jot in academic rigor and technical detail.
Click here for an abstract, a full table of contents, and a generous sample, but to whet your appetite, consider that Castleton goes full-tilt on Clarke’s performance materials for her own Sonata and Dumka, along with bedrock repertoire by other composers, and a couple of her own arrangements that were first published only the other day, all generously illustrated with reproductions of the manuscripts and marked parts, historic photos, and newspaper-clippings. Appendices include a reproduction of Clarke’s autograph cadenza to the “Handel”/Casadesus Concerto, photographs of Clarke’s viola, and comprehensive tallies of Clarke’s BBC broadcasts and recital appearances.
Order here or here. It’s available in cloth and paper, in five different formats, and in PDF, for immediate download, all under Pub ID 30422290. You may also order by phone, at +1 800-521-0600 (press 2, then press 1), where Proquest’s incredibly kind and helpful dissertation team will help you, Monday through Friday, 8:00 am–6:00 pm US Eastern Time. In case of trouble, email them at disspub@proquest.com.
Sample pages below. You may also like to check out Castleton’s degree recital, which offers practical demonstrations of points developed in the dissertation.
Unless we’ve missed something, every note that Rebecca Clarke wrote for the viola, her chosen instrument, is now in print, with the publication of her arrangements of works by Percy Grainger, Stanley Marchant, and Sir Hubert Parry, and her cadenza to the “Handel”/Casadesus Concerto in B Minor, by Sleepy Puppy Press. Print and digital editions are available.
These are terrific pieces in their own right—Grainger’s Sussex Mummer’s Christmas Carol is familiar in its original form, for cello or violin, but Parry’s Sarabande and Marchant’s setting of Londonderry Air, both originally for violin, will be welcome re-additions to the repertoire—and they’re of particular interest in showing how Clarke displayed her gifts as a player, while demonstrating the distinctive qualities of the instrument. To that end, Clarke’s markings have been painstakingly reproduced, including her fingerings, bowings, and timings. Caroline Castleton’s crisp introduction lays all this out for you.
Clarke stood nearly six feet tall in her prime, and she had exceptionally long, elegant arms and fingers, as shown in the cover art. She deliberately undermarked her publications, so as not to bind violists with different physical attributes, which means that you should take the markings in this album seriously, but not literally—”for interest only,” as they say. Still, it’s a fascinating set of insights into Clarke’s own style and methods, and thus uniquely valuable.
Also, barring some unexpected discovery, you now have Rebecca Clarke’s Absolutely, Totally, Positively 100% Complete Works for Viola, so what are you waiting for?
The New York Review of Books published a review-essay about Leah Broad’s Quartet in their issue dated October 5, 2023 (published online in mid-September), and while the bulk of the reviewer’s attention went to Dame Ethel Smyth—whose success at eating all the oxygen in any room she’s let into remains unparalleled—a number of statements were made about Rebecca Clarke, virtually all of them untrue, and most of them plainly lifted, not from Dr. Broad’s book, but from Wikipedia.
Well, this wasn’t our first rodeo, so we weren’t particularly surprised, even though the reviewer is Distinguished Professor of Music History and Dean Emeritus at a well-known American university, and probably wouldn’t tolerate such behavior from his students. What stuck in our craw, however, was not the ahistorical and overwhelmingly reductive treatment of Clarke’s output and publishing-history, but the final as-if silver lining—”Fortunately her works are being championed and the unpublished pieces brought into print by the recently formed Rebecca Clarke Society at Brandeis.”—giving credit to a scofflaw outfit that has been the principal impediment to the publication of Clarke’s works for the last two decades.
Clearly, this required a response, so we contacted the Review immediately with the relevant facts. This yielded a slight correction, deleting “and the unpublished pieces brought into print” from the body of the review, and adding a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line at the end, reading “An earlier version of this article misstated the purpose of the Rebecca Clarke Society at Brandeis.” Well, no, actually—both versions of the article misstated the facts of the matter across the board, so we submitted a formal letter to the editor, and were told that it had gone to the relevant department for consideration. A month of near-silence passed, followed by a month of absolute silence, followed—after one final query on our part, just this morning—by news that space could not be found.
Be that as it may, people are still being misled, so here’s our letter, as submitted on October 19, 2023. We realize that our circulation doesn’t quite equal that of the New York Review, but we do make every effort to keep the public record straight, and to find space for the truth.
The morning mail brings Rebecca Franks’s guide to Clarke’s Viola Sonata, just published by BBC Music Magazine. As you can see from our own Discography, our recommended recordings are somewhat different, but we rejoice to see the Sonata—actually, any piece by Clarke—treated seriously on its own merits and discussed like any other worthwhile work of art, without the kind of special pleading that it so often gets, but so conspicuously does not need. Franks has taken the trouble to get her facts straight and, as always with Clarke, the facts speak, very powerfully, for themselves.
As a bonus, the online version includes a pretty stunning video, from 2015, of the Sonata’s first movement, by the (then) sixteen-year-old Sarah Sung. Enjoy!
It is with great joy—and in a state of dazed half-belief—that I announce the following:
All of Rebecca Clarke’s remaining vocal music—the early songs that she wrote as an uninstructed amateur, her first experiments as a fledgling professional, her fabulous duets—will be published by ClarNan Editions, an imprint of Classical Vocal Reprints, in a series of volumes co-edited with Nicholas Phan, the brilliant Grammy-nominated tenor who has done so much for Clarke’s music in the concert-hall.
All of Clarke’s remaining music with strings—including the ensemble-version of Chinese Puzzle that she made for the Aeolian Players, and the violin teaching-pieces she wrote for one of her nieces—will be published by Sleepy Puppy Press, along with a volume for viola comprising Clarke’s arrangements of pieces by other composers, and her cadenza for the “Handel”/Casadesus concerto, co-edited by Caroline Castleton, whose doctoral work at the University of Maryland promises to transform our understanding of Clarke as a performer.
If current projections hold, this means that all of Clarke’s compositions known to exist in a completed state—excluding only sketches, drafts, and exercises—will have been published by the end of 2023. Thus, Clarke will join the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, and Palestrina in having virtually every note she ever wrote put before the public, but with one vital distinction: Clarke’s de-facto Complete Works Edition will exist, not as a monumental set that only large reference collections can afford to acquire, but as a series of practical publications available through normal commercial channels to the widest possible range of musicians, students, and music-lovers.
Once these projects are completed, along with a giant piece of research that I am determined to finish on the same schedule, I will be donating Clarke’s manuscripts and papers, and those of her husband, the great pianist James Friskin, “to the United States of America for the benefit of the American people and inclusion in the Library of Congress“—a phrase in the deed of gift that overwhelms me every time I think of it—where they will form a named collection, The Rebecca Clarke and James Friskin Papers, to which the aforementioned research project will serve as a key.
In 1982, Clarke’s heirs assigned her rights to me with the goal of “promoting such rights as a memorial,” and in the intervening forty-one years much ink has been spilled as to whether or not I have done so. Like Clarke, I am content to let my work speak for itself.
Library of Congress James Madison Building, Washington, D.C., exterior view, from corner of Independence Avenue and 2nd Street, by Carol M. Highsmith, 2007, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LOT 13908 (ONLINE)
A quick news-flash to mark the release of Clarke’s violin sonatas in digital-download editions, with print editions to follow, as promised in our previous post.
We cannot sufficiently stress the joy that this moment brings, with all of Clarke’s big concert works now published and in general circulation throughout the world. (And—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—there are plans in place for the rest.)
Rebecca Clarke 