What the wise-acres would have said, had a “woman-composer” and one of your personal friends in Pittsfield won the prize, I do not dare to contemplate, but I am sure that suspicions of a “frame-up” between you and the judges would have been endless, and that we might have had a great deal of other trouble besides. —Frederick Stock, former Chicago Symphony conductor and one of the judges of the 1919 Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music competition, in which Clarke’s Viola Sonata tied Ernest Bloch’s Suite for Viola and Piano, in a letter to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge

Born and raised in England, with a German mother and an American father, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) spent much of her adulthood in the United States and claimed both English and American nationality. Her late-Victorian childhood and her father's cruelty are described in her memoir written in 1969-73, but it is also clear that her family was artistically inclined and her musical studies were encouraged. Clarke enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in 1903, where she studied violin. She was abruptly withdrawn in 1905 when her harmony teacher, Percy Miles, proposed marriage. In 1907, she began a composition course at the Royal Conservatory of Music, where she was Stanford's first female student. She was unable to finish her studies, as her father suddenly banished her from the family home.
To support herself, Clarke embarked on an active performing career as a violist, and in 1912 she became one of the first female musicians in a fully professional (and formerly male) ensemble, the Queen's Hall orchestra. In 1916 she began a U.S. residency that included extensive travel, concertizing and visits with her two brothers. She performed extensively in Hawaii in 1918-1919 and on a round-the-world tour of the British colonies in 1923.
Clarke achieved fame as a composer with her Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921), both runners up in competitions that were part of the Berkshire (Mass.) Festival of Chamber Music, sponsored by the American patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.
Clarke settled in London in 1924, performing as a soloist and ensemble musician. The quantity of her compositional output decreased in the late 1920s and 30s, possibly because of the discouragement she faced as a composer.
With the onset of World War II, Clarke found herself in the United States, where she lived alternately with her two brothers and their families. She returned to composing, but her productivity ended when she accepted a position as a nanny in 1942. In the early 1940s Clarke became reacquainted with James Friskin, a member of the piano department at the Juilliard School, whom she had first known as a student at the RCM; the couple married in 1944. Her last compositions include God Made a Tree (1954), an arrangement of her song Down by the Salley Garden, and revisions of earlier scores.
Clarke’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (1919) originates from her most famous composition, the Sonata for Viola and Piano. Clarke orchestrated some of her compositions near the end of her life, and composer Ruth Lomon, in conjunction with the Rebecca Clarke Society, orchestrated the Sonata in 2006, making it a full-fledged concerto. The Sonata has a remarkable origin: Composed for the Berkshire (Mass.) Festival of Chamber Music, the Sonata was submitted anonymously, which was a requirement for the competition. Clarke had met Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, patron of the competition, and Coolidge had encouraged her to enter. Seventy-three compositions were submitted. The six judges deadlocked between two works: Clarke’s Sonata and Ernest Bloch’s Suite for Viola and Piano. Coolidge herself had to break the tie, choosing the Bloch. When it was revealed that the Sonata was composed by a woman, the judges were flabbergasted. The quote above by Frederick Stock suggests that had Coolidge chosen Clarke’s Sonata, she might have been accused of favoritism. However Bloch was also a personal friend of Coolidge's, and Stock may reveal bias on his part by ignoring that fact.

Ruth Lomon (b. 1930 in Montreal) completed the orchestration of Clarke's Sonata for Viola in 2006. A prolific composer in a wide range of genres, Lomon is Composer/Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. Her orchestral works Terra Incognita, and her Bassoon Concerto have been recorded on the MMC label, and her “Songs of Remembrance” setting poetry of the Holocaust, was released in 2002 on CRI. Several movements of her oratorio "Testimony of Witnesses" have been recorded by the Boston Secession Vocal Ensemble.

The Chamber Orchestra of the Springs would like to acknowledge the Rebecca Clarke Society, Inc. for their generous commision of this orchestration and for making the material available to us.