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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
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.”

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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