Analysis of Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata

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Analysis of Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata Rebecca Clarke (27 August 1886 – 13 October 1979) was born and raised in England, with a German mother and an American father. Her family was artistically motivated and her musical studies were encouraged Clarke went to the United States when she was an young adult. Clarke enrolled at the RAM in 1903, where she studied the violin. She was suddenly withdrawn from the institution in 1905, when her harmony teacher, Percy Miles, proposed marriage. In 1907 she began a composition course at the Royal College of Music, where she was Stanford’s first female student. Again, she was unable to finish her studies, as her father suddenly banished her from the family home. In order to support herself, she had active performance as a violist. In 1912 she became one of the first female musicians in a fully professional (and formerly male) ensemble, when Henry Wood admitted her to the Queen’s Hall orchestra. Clarke’s music spans a range of 20th-century styles including Impressionism, post-Romantic, and neo-Classical. Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata is first known in 1919. She was 23 years old she composed it. Her viola sonata got the second place in the composition competition, which Ernest Bloch’s work was declared as winner. The piece had its première at the Berkshires Music Festival in 1919, and was well received. It, along with the Piano Trio of 1921 and the Rhapsody for cello and piano of 1923, represent the peak of her compositional career, though afterwards Clarke wrote hardly any more music. Clarke gives us an incipit on the first page of the sonata, a quote from La Nuit de mai (1835) by the French poet Alfred de Musset: | | | |Poète, prends ton luth; le vin de la jeunesse

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