The Carwithen Music Festival: Celebrating the centenary of a ground-breaking female film composer

Born in 1922, she is said to be the first woman to have worked full-time as a film composer. But if it was the famous studios in Denham that launched the career of Doreen Carwithen, it is another, similarly named, Buckinghamshire village that will be commemorating her centenary.

Thanks to the initiative of local musician Mark Chivers, Haddenham will this summer host the first Carwithen Music Festival. The very building in which she was born, now a photography studio but then her grandfather’s prosperous bakery and grocery, is to be the venue for a temporary exhibition, while a six-concert series at venues including Haddenham’s St Mary’s church explores her music and music connected to her. The festival will also include the unveiling of a permanent commemorative plaque.

‘When we went into lockdown during Covid I was thinking to myself: I can’t perform any more, I need a project to keep me busy,’ explains Chivers, happily now resuming work as a freelance viola player. ‘I had cottoned on that it was Doreen Carwithen’s centenary in 2022, and I live in the village where Doreen was born. So it seemed like a really good opportunity.’

Having established that the building was indeed her actual birthplace, Chivers soon had financial backing for the festival from the William Alwyn Foundation, an organisation Carwithen had set up following the death of the composer. Alwyn had not only been her teacher at the Royal Academy of Music but also – after a 16-year secret affair and subsequent long elopement while Alwyn was still married to his first wife, Olive Pull – eventually became her husband.

According to Dr Leah Broad, junior research fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford and author of a forthcoming group biography including Carwithen, Alwyn was ‘absolutely formational for her whole life story and her career.’ The fact that Alwyn was himself a successful film composer surely encouraged her own interest in this direction, and in 1946 she was awarded a Rank Fellowship - a training programme for composers and conductors in the Rank Organisation. ‘She’s incredibly young to have that kind of success. She has her first feature credit in 1947 – that’s a big deal for a young woman, particularly at that time.’

Carwithen’s career at Denham Film Studios grew as she developed a reputation for fast, skilful work - she scored the official Pathé film of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in just three days. Often uncredited as she worked alongside her male counterparts, she was aware of her value, lobbying (albeit unsuccessfully) for her pay to match theirs. ‘She seems to have been ambitious, very driven,’ says Broad, ‘really very single-mindedly driven. She knows what she wants and is quite determined to get it. But also private, extremely private. She fascinates me because she’s so incredibly complicated’.

Broad describes her music as ‘having this combination of romantic melody and really piquant harmonies, driving rhythms and spicy dissonances that can be really quite surprising when you hear them. She’s got this interesting dual aspect to her music that makes her a born film composer. It’s there in her concert music too, this ability to keep you on the edge of your seat but also to write an incredible love theme as well.’

Ultimately, however, her relationship with Alwyn may have been one obstacle too many for her career, not only because she ended up having to look after him through later periods of ill-health but also because she herself possibly burnt out from combining an intense career with maintaining a secret relationship. Alwyn was, Broad notes, proud of his outsider status in the 1950s as musical modernism found favour; her tenacious association with him may have cost her in influences from elsewhere. She also observes that Carwithen rejected encouragement to study abroad and build a reputation there. ‘By that point she’s in this relationship with him and goes: no, he can give me everything I need; I don’t need to study abroad. Probably a big mistake! Having said that, she might not have got into film, had she been studying abroad. But then, maybe she would have hit Hollywood. Maybe she would have been really big in the States.’

The festival, which is also supported by the RVW Trust, Delius Trust and Ambache Charitable Trust, covers both her film and concert music, with performances by Fenella Humphreys and Nathan Williamson, who have recorded her Violin Sonata; Nicholas Stringfellow and Eleanor Hodgkinson in music for cello and piano; and pianist Clare Hammond, who has recently performed Carwithen’s Piano Concerto on BBC Radio 3. The Masquerade Quartet, featuring Chivers and Stringfellow, plays string arrangements of film scores by Carwithen, Alwyn and others in a programme that also includes music by Olive Pull.

Continuing Carwithen’s legacy, festival president Debbie Wiseman closes the festival with the Locrian Ensemble and music from her score to Wolf Hall. There will be also screenings of two of Carwithen’s films, Three Cases of Murder and Men of Sherwood Forest, probably her best-known film score. In addition, some of her music for documentary films will be heard in a special exhibition of Carwithen and Alwyn memorabilia and period artefacts from the Haddenham Museum.

‘There’s an amazingly titled information film, East Anglian Holiday,’ says Chivers, ‘which sounds like it’s going to be the most boring thing known to man, for Pathé News. But actually it’s a really beautiful score, and you watch the information film and it’s like something from a bygone era. I’d love to be there now – there’s no cars, just fishermen and people walking! That’s a lovely score and bits of it went on to be in her Suffolk Suite.’

Broad’s book Quartet is not due for publication by Faber & Faber until 2023. But the author will be at the festival, presenting extracts relating to Carwithen – her other subjects are three pioneers from a generation or two earlier than Carwithen: Ethel Smyth, Dorothy Howell and Rebecca Clarke.

‘Carwithen doesn’t really have that much association at all, in some ways, with the other three. Clarke, Howell and Smyth [in particular, fight] so hard for women’s place in the late 19th, early 20th century and yet you can have a composer born in 1922 when they were all still alive, all still working, and they don’t seem to have had much impact or overlap at all. I found that absolutely fascinating. So I wanted a complement to the other three in the book.’

She does mention one area of comparison, however: ‘With Rebecca Clarke, there is a parallel in some ways. She gets approached by her tutors quite frequently, and by her colleagues, and she always says no until her career is kind of done. Then she marries a guy who seems so lovely, who encourages her to compose and she says: no, I’m ready to retire. So for me they are an interesting example: Rebecca Clarke prioritises her career over everything else and does extremely well; Doreen, I think, gets so caught up in this relationship with Alwyn that it’s a really interesting counterbalance – when you don’t say no to your tutors, basically! But there are some very interesting questions there about power dynamics, about women’s ability to work unimpeded in the early 20th century.’

Dr Leah Broad will present a BBC Radio 3 programme discussing three marginalised women composers, including Doreen Carwithen, this Sunday (23 January) at 18.45 GMT.

The Carwithen Music Festival runs 30 June-3 July 2022; tickets are available online at the festival website.