Eleanor Clementine Rudall (26 April 1881 - 6 May 1960) was a composer and pianist, who after a promising start while a student at the Royal Academy of Music struggled to find more widespread recognition. She continued her career teaching piano, harmony and composition, and in 1927 became the second wife of composer Frederick Corder. She was a friend and collaborator of English composer and pianist Emma Lomax. [1]
Rudall was born at 25 Upper Phillimore Place, Kensington (now Kensington High Street), the daughter of composer and author Henry Alexander Rudall (1837-1896) and Jane Sinclair Bails. [2] H.A. Rudall wrote a biography in the Great Composers series on Beethoven in 1890. [3]
Her Introduction and Allegro for string octet was played at a Royal Academy of Music concert in 1906. [4] Four Orchestral Illustrations (inspired by the paintings of G F Watts), were performed at a Queen's Hall student concert on 25 June 1907. [5] Rudall won the Charles Lucas Medal for composition in 1908 for her Suite of Three Movements for orchestra. Her orchestral Variations on an Irish Air was also performed that year. [6] The ambitious operatic prelude The Rock of Aesjoen for soloists, chorus and orchestra was heard at another Queen's Hall student concert on 30 June 1909, conducted by Frederick Corder. [7]
On 7 November 1927 in Hampstead Rudall became Corder's second wife. By then aged 75, he had retired from the music profession three years earlier. They lived at his house, 13, Albion Road (now Harben Road), South Hampstead, where she continued to live after his death in 1932. [8] [9]
By the mid-1930s Rudall was a professor of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy, while also teaching piano at the Tobias Matthay Piano School. On 9 November 1938 she organized a concert of her compositions at the Queen Mary Hall, Great Russell Street, including two String Quartets. [10] She became involved in the running of the Society of Women Composers [11] and this resulted in performances of her music at Society concerts, such as the Phantasie for violin and piano played in July 1934, [12] and a string trio in November 1950. [13] She died in May 1960, aged 79.
In her 1950 entry for Who's Who in Music, Rudall listed more of her compositions, now all unknown, including three String Quartets, a Piano Quintet, a Cello Sonata, To a Passer By for chorus and orchestra, and Ballad of Summer Waters, for female voices. There are published song settings of Robert Bridges' The Robin and Christina Rossetti's Spring Quiet, and the Spring Pastoral for piano four hands. [14]
Sir Donald Francis Tovey was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist. He had been best known for his Essays in Musical Analysis and his editions of works by Bach and Beethoven, but since the 1990s his compositions have been recorded and performed with increasing frequency. The recordings have mostly been well received by reviewers.
Eric Francis Harrison Coates was an English composer of light music and, early in his career, a leading violist.
Grażyna Bacewicz Biernacka was a Polish composer and violinist of Lithuanian origin. She is the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century.
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
Joseph Charles Holbrooke was an English composer, conductor, and pianist.
Franz Theodor Reizenstein was a German-born British composer and concert pianist. He left Germany for sanctuary in Britain in 1934 and went on to have his teaching and performing career there. As a composer, he successfully blended the equally strong but very different influences of his primary teachers, Hindemith and Vaughan Williams.
Sir John Blackwood McEwen was a Scottish classical composer and educator. He was professor of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, from 1898 to 1924, and principal from 1924 to 1936. He was a prolific composer, but made few efforts to bring his music to the notice of the general public.
Edwin York Bowen was an English composer and pianist. Bowen's musical career spanned more than fifty years during which time he wrote over 160 works. As well as being a pianist and composer, Bowen was a talented conductor, organist, violist and horn player. Despite achieving considerable success during his lifetime, many of the composer's works remained unpublished and unperformed until after his death in 1961. Bowen's compositional style is widely considered as ‘Romantic’ and his works are often characterized by their rich harmonic language.
Doreen Mary Carwithen was a British composer of classical and film music. She was also known as Mary Alwyn following her marriage to William Alwyn.
Frederick Corder was an English composer and music teacher.
Adam Von Ahnen Carse was an English composer, academic, music writer and editor, remembered today for his studies on the history of instruments and the orchestra, and for his educational music. His collection of around 350 antique wind instruments is now in the Horniman Museum.
Charles Lucas was an English composer, cellist, conductor, publisher and from 1859 to 1866 third principal of the Royal Academy of Music.
Ebenezer Prout was an English musical theorist, writer, music teacher and composer, whose instruction, afterwards embodied in a series of standard works still used today, underpinned the work of many British classical musicians of succeeding generations.
Ivy Priaulx Rainier was a South African-British composer. Although she lived most of her life in England and died in France, her compositional style was strongly influenced by the African music remembered from her childhood. She never adopted 12-tone or serial techniques, but her music shows a profound understanding of that musical language. She can be credited with the first truly athematic works composed in England. Her Cello Concerto was premiered by Jacqueline du Pré in 1964, and her Violin Concerto Due Canti e Finale was premiered by Yehudi Menuhin in 1977.
John Francis Barnett was an English composer, pianist and teacher.
Louise Emily (Emma) Lomax was an English composer and pianist. She was born in Brighton, daughter of the curator of Brighton Free Library and Museum. She studied at the Brighton School of Music and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying composition with Frederick Corder and the clarinet. She was a Goring Thomas Scholar from 1907 to 1910 and won the Charles Lucas Medal in 1910, awarded for her Theme and Variations for orchestra.
Mary Lucas, sometimes referred to as Mary Anderson Lucas, was an English composer and pianist.
Harry Waldo Warner was an English viola player and composer, one of the founding members of the London String Quartet and a several times Cobbett Competition winner for his chamber music.
Margaret Marie Dare, usually known as Marie Dare, was a Scottish composer and cellist, born in Newport-on-Tay. She composed mostly chamber music, including several string quartets and a quintet. Some of her cello music written for educational purposes is still in use today.
Ethel Edith Bilsland was an English composer, soprano and pianist.