Doreen Carwithen Suffolk Suite (1964) 1. Prelude

Doreen Carwithen was born in 1922 at
Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, into a musical
family. Her mother -- a music teacher -- provided
her with her first lessons on the piano and
violin at the age of four, and continued
teaching her the piano until she entered the
Royal Academy of Music as Buckinghamshire
County Scholar in 1941. Carwithen also had
cello lessons with Peers Coetmore, and while
still at school regularly played the cello with a
string quartet and in local orchestras. Apart
from this involvement the only music she heard
came from the radio -- the family did not have a
gramophone, so she was dependent on the
BBC for exposure to orchestral music. As it was
wartime, this was limited to concerts on the
Home Service, but these motivated her to learn
score-reading so as to gain insight into the
sounds of the orchestra -- a decision which
proved invaluable for her future career.
In 1947 J. Arthur Rank started an
Apprenticeship Scheme for composers to
specialise in the study of film music.
Carwithen was the first from the R.A.M. to be
selected for this and subsequently wrote
scores for over thirty films. Her documentaries
ranged from Teeth of the Wind, a study of
locusts, to the official film of the coronation,
Elizabeth is Queen. Among her feature films
were two in which music takes the place of
dialogue: The Stranger Left No Card (1952)
and On the Twelfth Day (1954). The former
received The Cannes Festival Award for the
best short, fictional film, and was then shown
at the Edinburgh Festival.
1947 also saw the selection of the
overture ODTAA as the first new score to be
chosen by the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Music Advisory Committee. ODTAA had its
first performance at Covent Garden in March
1947, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult; it was a
great success and many performances and
broadcasts followed, particularly in the north
of England. Bishop Rock was chosen by Rudolf
Schwarz to open the City of Birmingham
Orchestra's season of Promenade Concerts.
The same year saw the first public
performance of the Concerto for Piano and
Strings at the Henry Wood Promenade
Concerts in 1952, where Carwithen was the
only woman composer to be represented
during that season.
In spite of the initial success of these
works, publishers were not interested in a
woman composer, so scores and parts
gradually returned home where they remained
cocooned and rarely heard. The two Carwithen
String Quartets remain unknown even though
they were awarded the principal prizes for
Chamber Music of the A.J. Clements Prize
(1948) and the Cobbett Award (1952). A third
Quartet, well advanced in the composer's
sketches, was sadly never completed.
In 1961 Doreen Carwithen became
amanuensis and literary secretary to William
Alwyn, who had been her professor of
composition at the R.A.M. and whom she later
married. After his death in 1985 she
established the William Alwyn Archive of
music, poetry and art and formed the William
Alwyn Foundation to promote her husband's
music. To this end she instigated and
supervised a number of recordings, editing his
unpublished works and writing sleeve and
programme notes. She continued to oversee
Alwyn research projects and to help students
from all over the world in their doctorate
studies of Alwyn's life and music, in this way
continuing her additional career as a teacher,
which had begun as Sub Professor of
Composition at the R.A.M. and Lecturer in
Music at Furzedown Teacher Training College.

Suffolk Suite (1964)
This was written at the request of the music
master of Framlingham College, Suffolk, for the
boys to perform when royalty came to open
their new concert hall. Before the composer
began, she listened to the school orchestra so
as to hear the capabilities of the young
performers, and kept these in mind as she
wrote. There are four movements which
develop tunes she originally used in a film about East Anglia.

Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox.