Finding Antoinette Kirkwood
Finding Antoinette Kirkwood
Jessica Phibbs introduces me to her mother, composer Antoinette Kirkwood
Behind the thick, drawn curtains of a flat in central London, a sliver of light falls on a black and white portrait of a woman in evening dress. She is, by any accounts, quite striking. She is in her twenties, hair cropped short, wearing an elaborate necklace and dark dress. Showing me the photograph is poet Jessica Phibbs, who has inherited her mother’s large eyes and concentrated gaze. ‘My mother was a very passionate person’, she tells me. And I believe her. The woman in this portrait has an air of formidable self-possession and determination. ‘She knew everything and she had an opinion on everything’, Jessica continues, ‘and told absolutely anyone who’d listen to her exactly what she thought.’
I’ve come to London on the trail of composer Antoinette Kirkwood. I first heard her name when researching the composer Dorothy Howell. Howell taught Kirkwood both piano and composition, and their music appeared together in a 1960 concert conducted by Kathleen Merritt, made up entirely of compositions by women. Their fellow composers were Grace Williams, Elizabeth Maconchy, Ruth Gipps, and Ina Boyle. This was, in 1960, illustrious company. Maconchy and Williams, in particular, were two of the biggest names of contemporary British composition, certainly as far as women were concerned. It was no small achievement to have work programmed alongside theirs, especially a piece as substantial as Kirkwood’s multi-movement Suite for Strings.
But this concert was, for Kirkwood, an exception in an otherwise quiet career. Unlike many of the composers who I write about (such as Rebecca Clarke and Avril Coleridge-Taylor), Antoinette Kirkwood’s musical life was lived mostly out of the limelight. As Jessica puts it, Kirkwood’s music ‘was never successful’, either while she was alive or since her death in 2014. And yet her catalogue, small though it might be, extends to large orchestral works including a Symphony (broadcast by Radio Éireann), three Fantasias, a music drama, a ballet, and songs and chamber music. Her story is one shared by so many women, balancing a constant trade-off between family life and career.
Kirkwood the Composer
Kirkwood was born in to a military family in February 1930, the daughter of a major, Charles Kirkwood, and singer Ivy Burlton. The family lived between St John’s Wood and Woodbrook in County Roscommon, which was described in vivid detail by Kirkwood’s tutor:
It was spacious and beautiful… From here, at the side of the house, you could see part of the drive up which we had come curving away beneath a high bushy bank until it went out of sight and gave place to a piece of the long, low meadow, which stretched from the bottom of Hughestown Hill as far as the gate lodge to the west… The old part of the house had two storeys, but the drawing-room and dining-room had no bedrooms above them; they had been built later of the same grey blocks of stone, forming low wings of beautiful proportions with flat roofs. One of the windows of the dining-room opened on to a rough sloping garden with more shrubs in it than flowers, beyond which lay a tennis court and paddock, and beyond those the lake with the Leitrim mountains blue in the distance to the east.
Both Antoinette and her sister Phoebe were mostly home-tutored, thanks to the family’s general aversion to formal schooling. This distaste for standardised education and qualifications, seeing them as a form of conformism, may well have shaped the somewhat ad hoc nature of both Antoinette’s and her mother’s careers. Ivy was prevented from studying music in Salzburg by her father, despite having a clear passion for singing. She worked as a nurse in a Dublin hospital during World War I, then took to the stage after the war as a coloratura soprano under the name “Rome Lindsay”.
It’s not clear whether Ivy intended her singing career to be full-time, or indeed professional. In the early twentieth-century, many admired performers of the day did not accept payment for their performances, nor did they perform often enough for it to be full-time work. This was particularly true among upper-class women. The harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse, for example, was widely recognised as one of the most exceptional harpsichord players of the century, but would not have been described as a “professional” performer. As for Ivy, she made occasional appearances in both London and Ireland, where the Sligo Independent hailed her as having ‘a fine soprano voice, which she uses with great flexibility and expression.’
Without question, Ivy was Antoinette’s strongest musical influence throughout her childhood. She would stay up at night to listen to her mother practicing her Schubert and Borodin, and in the daytime would come and pick out the bass-line of her accompaniments on the piano. Believing that learning to read music was restrictive, Ivy encouraged Antoinette to play entirely by ear. Antoinette learned Ivy’s accompaniments and began to compose her own music, but she never wrote down anything she composed until she was a teenager, when she briefly studied harmony and cello at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and later took private lessons in composition with Dorothy Howell, Professor at London’s Royal Academy of Music.
From Songs to Symphonies
Interviewed by musicologist Jill Halstead in 1993, Kirkwood said of her music that ‘For me the important thing is to succeed in writing the work as I meant it to be … I have never had the slightest ambition to be a revolutionary.’ Kirkwood was one of a group of composers — not coherent enough to be called a school, but perhaps distinct enough to be called a movement, perhaps — who rejected both atonality and serialism. They styled themselves as anti-establishment, believing that British musical institutions were biased against their music. This group included composers such as Ruth Gipps, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Doreen Carwithen, William Alwyn (who complained that serialism ‘replaces composition with applied mathematics’), and Kirkwood’s tutor Dorothy Howell. When first faced with atonal music in 1914, Howell declared that she had ‘never heard such a noise in my life’, which remained her position until she died in 1982.
Despite their similar outlook on musical styles, there’s a humour and lightness in Howell’s music that isn’t shared by Kirkwood. Howell took great delight in encouraging her audiences, young and old, to laugh, and adored writing pieces with whimsical titles like Puppydogs’ Tales and A-Shopping we will go. Kirkwood’s music is altogether more sober. And this is reflected in descriptions of their personalities. Howell is often described by those who knew her as being full of laughter, with an ‘endearing sense of fun’ and a ‘zest for life’. Jessica remembers her mother Antoinette somewhat differently. ‘Passionate’ comes up a lot, as does the phrase ‘dominant personality’. The impression I get is of someone gregarious and opinionated, who took life seriously and didn’t mind being the centre of attention. Her music is similar — confident, memorable, and earnest.
Where tutor and pupil meet, however, is in their idealistic outlook. At its most beautiful, their music has a haunting poignancy to it — it conjures up a world that never was or could be, but is all the more captivating for being unobtainable. In the slow movements of Howell’s Violin Sonata and Kirkwood’s Cello Sonata, written just a few years apart, melodies soar and harmonies plead. There’s a wistfulness that’s common to both their works. And Kirkwood clearly took Howell’s advice to ‘bestride her barlines’, because the faster movements have a quirky rhythmic playfulness to them.
Kirkwood was composing consistently through her late teens and early twenties, producing all of her major works during these years. As she began composition without notation, it’s hard to trace her early compositional development. But she seems to have started out composing for her own instruments, that she knew the best — piano, cello, and voice. Her Op. 2 Piano Sonatina dates from 1946, and her Cello Sonata from 1950. Perhaps it was Howell, herself an exceptional orchestrator, who encouraged Kirkwood to make the move to orchestral composition. Through the 1950s Kirkwood worked on her Symphony (completed 1953), and finished the decade with her music drama Alessandro (1957), ballet Musa the Saint to a scenario that she wrote herself (1958), and her three Fantasias for orchestra (1958-1961). As Kirkwood entered her thirties, it was as a composer who had found her voice, whose works were blossoming in new directions.
Antoinette Kirkwood becomes Mrs Richard Phibbs
Antoinette Kirkwood first met Richard Phibbs when she was eighteen. Just in passing — they shared a train carriage, and he, several years older than she, was married to another woman. They parted ways without further thought. But fate, it seemed, was determined to push them together. They kept bumping in to one another until, finally, Ivy invited Richard round to lunch at the Kirkwood home. It was many years before anything like a relationship blossomed. According to their daughter, Richard only began to take a romantic interest in Antoinette in 1961, by which time he was divorced and Antoinette was helping him with the typesetting of his latest book — a ten volume behemoth about the Greek statesman Alcibiades. Being able to envisage the role she might play in his life, it seems, tipped the balance from friendship to courtship.
Their marriage was, apparently, a happy one. Jessica remembers that her parents ‘absolutely adored each other … They never even argued, they always got on’. But marital harmony came at the cost of Kirkwood’s career. Richard made what money he had from property renovation, which Antoinette was expected to help with — as well as assisting with his second career as a writer. And then there was the question of children. Jessica tells me that Antoinette ‘assumed my father wouldn’t want children’, having had children in his previous marriage. She assumed wrong. Antoinette and Richard had three children, with their education and upbringing primarily falling to Antoinette.
As Jessica unfurls this story for me, it feels as though there’s something contradictory in Jessica’s account of her mother’s personality and her marriage. If she was such a ‘dominant personality’, why enter in to this marriage where she couldn’t pursue composition? Why agree to children? I ask Jessica if she can shed any light on this. Kirkwood was ‘a passionate anti-feminist’, Jessica says. It’s an observation that’s reflected in Kirkwood’s own comments, remarking that the women’s movement had ‘been quite counterproductive in many ways’, and insisting that ‘men are stronger and more aggressive than women, why try and pretend otherwise?’ Her ‘anti-feminist’ views extended to her role in the home. If she was going to have children at all, ‘she was very keen on mothers looking after their own children.’ As far as Kirkwood was concerned, it wasn’t a choice but a necessity to put her composition second to domestic responsibilities. And once she had set her mind on something, it was almost impossible to persuade her otherwise.
So Antoinette Kirkwood became Mrs Richard Phibbs, and stopped composing altogether for over twenty years. She taught all her children music, because ‘my husband had decided that he wanted them to have a musical education. He said, “My children are not going to get a classical education so I want you to see to it that they have a musical education”.’ As well as ensuring they had good instrumental tutors, she took them to a wide variety of concerts — including some with her own works on the programme. Clearly she never gave up on her music entirely. She was a member of the Composer’s Guild and, when she had enough money, occasionally hired the British Music Information Centre as a venue to perform pieces by herself and fellow composers.
Performing Kirkwood today
I can’t help but wonder what Kirkwood might have gone on to compose had she not been brought up in an environment that expected her both to prioritise her husband’s desires over her own, and to see family and career as mutually exclusive. Might she have become a major symphonist like Ruth Gipps? Perhaps followed in Ethel Smyth’s footsteps to write opera? Or written concertos for those instruments she knew and loved? She had already begun to move in that direction with her songs for voice and string orchestra. There’s such range in her work that the unanswerable questions about her unwritten music become all the more tantalising, and the curtailment of her career all the more frustrating.
But what she didn’t compose shouldn’t overshadow what she did. Attempts to programme music by historical women already face enough resistance from the belief that ‘there were not enough good works written by them’ to warrant widespread inclusion. (Disclaimer: definitely not true). Women composers did write many good works, and the expectation that composers produce hundreds of works very much assumes that they had both the time and the money to compose full-time over a relatively long and burden-free life. It’s an assumption that excludes many men, but it’s especially inappropriate for historical women who, if they had enough money to compose in the first place, were expected to give up any career after marriage. And even if they defied societal norms to remain single and dedicate themselves to their craft, they had to spend a disproportionate amount of time fighting for recognition, chipping in to their composition time and, frankly, enthusiasm. (There’s no small irony in Ethel Smyth’s obituaries dismissing her for being insufficiently dedicated to composition — on the grounds that she wasted too much time fighting for women’s rights.) If the music that Kirkwood wrote was gripping and glorious and deserves to be heard — why does it matter that her full catalogue is closer to 40 works than 400?
Jessica sends me away with a CD of her mother’s music, a recording of a concert that she organised in Antoinette’s memory in 2017. The Cello Sonata and Six Impromptus for Piano were on the programme and as I listen, the more I can hear a space in the twenty-first century for Kirkwood and her music. It is part of a whole generation of British music that has been pushed to the margins of history, offering a wealth of sounds and experiences that we’re only just beginning to hear and understand. The recent recordings of music by composers like Gipps and Maconchy have shown us just how complex and varied music-making was over the last century — Kirkwood may be a lesser-known name, but her music belongs with theirs now just as much as it did in 1960. Thankfully Kirkwood’s music has been published, so I hope her own renaissance is forthcoming. Because there is an audience for this music, if they can only get to hear it.
Kirkwood’s music is published by Bardic Edition — a works list is available here.
If you want to find out more about Antoinette Kirkwood, she features in Jill Halstead’s book The Woman Composer: Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition available from Routledge.