Doreen Carwithen was born in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, on 15th November 1922. She came from a musical family – her father, Reginald, sang bass in a local church choir, and her mother, Dulcie, was a pianist and music teacher. Her sister Barbara, born four years later in 1926, played the piano and would often accompany Doreen in piano duets, and later followed her as a student into the Royal Academy of Music. Both girls had perfect pitch and showed musical promise from a very young age. Doreen’s music lessons with her mother commenced at the age of four, when she began learning both piano and violin. Her mother continued to give Doreen music lessons until she entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1941.
 
Her principal studies at the RAM were piano, cello and composition. Doreen’s harmony (and later composition) teacher at the Academy was the British composer William Alwyn (1905-1985) whom she married many years later. While at the RAM she received several composition prizes including the Elsie Owens prize for the most distinguished RAM student. Between 1938 and 1941 she had cello lessons with the well-known English cellist Peers Coetmore (1905-1977), who later became the wife of the composer E. J. Moeran (1894-1950). Doreen continued to gain musical experience by playing cello regularly in local string quartets and orchestras. Other than this, she relied on the BBC for her knowledge of orchestral music (as the family did not possess a gramophone), which she would follow assiduously with scores, becoming an adept score-reader – a facility that would prove invaluable to her in the future.
 
In 1944 Carwithen composed a Sonatina for Cello and Piano which was broadcast by the BBC in July 1946. However, her first major breakthrough came with the orchestral Concert Overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing after Another), composed between 1945 and 1946 and based on the novel of the same name by John Masefield. In 1947 ODTAA was selected as the first new score chosen by the London Philharmonic Orchestra Music Advisory Committee, and received its first public performance on 2nd March 1947 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden with the LPO conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The work proved to be very successful with many performances and broadcasts over the next few years.
 
It could well have been the success of ODTAA that led to Carwithen being selected in autumn 1947 for the newly instituted J Arthur Rank Apprenticeship Scheme, which enabled composers to study the art of film music. She was the only composer chosen from the RAM as apprentice to this scheme. Between 1947 and 1955 Carwithen scored the music to 34 films. The majority of this number were documentaries and shorts, with only six being full-length feature films. In addition to ODTAA there are three other orchestral works: Concerto for Piano and Strings (1946-48), Bishop Rock (1952) and the Suffolk Suite (1964). Bishop Rock was chosen by Rudolf Schwarz to open the 1952 Birmingham Proms season.
There are also some songs, instrumental and chamber music. Among the latter special mention should be made of the two award winning string quartets. String Quartet No. 1, completed in 1945 and much admired by Vaughan Williams, received the A J Clements prize in 1948, and String Quartet No. 2, dating from 1950, the William Cobbett Award in 1952. The latter year also saw the first public performance of Carwithen’s Concerto for Piano and Strings when it was premiered on 25 August during the BBC Promenade Season of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, with Iris Loveridge as soloist and the LPO conducted by Trevor Harvey. Carwithen was the only female composer represented during that season of concerts.
 
Sadly, despite this initial success, it was hard for her to obtain a publishing contract, possibly due to her gender, and her works were seldom performed. Carwithen’s academic positions included Sub-Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music (1946-48), Lecturer in Music at Furzedown Teacher Training College, London (1946-61) and serving on the Committee of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain (1958-62). In 1961 (having largely given up composing) she left London and relocated to Blythburgh in Suffolk where she set up her new home with the composer, William Alwyn, becoming his amanuensis and literary secretary, roles she continued to fill until his death in 1985.
 
After Alwyn’s death, Carwithen established the William Alwyn Archive, and in April 1990 formed the William Alwyn Foundation in order to promote her husband’s musical legacy. In this regard she instigated a new series of recordings of Alwyn’s music, wrote sleeve and programme notes and edited some of the unpublished works. In 1999 Carwithen suffered a severe stroke, which left her paralyzed down one side, and she spent the remaining four years of her life in a nursing home where she died on 5th January 2003, aged eighty. At her death a few incomplete works were discovered, which include a Third String Quartet and a Symphony. There were also plans to compose a Cello Concerto, which unfortunately never progressed beyond the sketching stage.
 
© Andrew Knowles

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Overture "ODTAA"

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