“If anyone still believes that women composers are a species of zoological freak, here, in this concert of Helen Perkin’s music, is a corrective for his disorder.”
Today we are back on familiar ground.
It’s the story of a supremely talented woman whose story has been subsumed into that of a[n equally talented] man’s. Recognise the trope? It’s so familiar as to be a bit dreary by now, or even easily overlooked. As Judith Plaskow says in Standing Again at Sinai:
“Hearing silence is not easy. A silence so vast tends to fade into the natural order; it is easy to identify with reality[…] Over time, we learn to insert ourselves into silences. [… W]e do not look for ourselves in the narratives but assume our presence, peopling the gaps in the text with women’s shadowy forms. It is far easier to read ourselves into male stories than to ask how the foundational stories within which we live have been distorted by our absence. […] Silence can become an invitation to experiment and explore – but only after we have examined its terrain and begun to face its implications.”
The woman in question is Helen Perkin, dedicatee of John Ireland’s piano concerto until he got cross and removed her name. There are the usual reasons for her disappearance, ranging from the fact that she is first seen as a performer (we tend to allow performers to disappear even more than we do composers, gender aside), through to her motherhood, and her departure from Europe to live in Australia for some time, where her music-making was less “canonic” than it had been. And then there is the biggie – the looming figure of John Ireland himself, the male composer who confers recognition on Perkin’s name by his patronage (“Middle English: from Old French, from Latin patronus ‘protector of clients, defender’, from pater, patr-‘father’.” Hmm.), but which then means we don’t ‘see’ the rest of her life – her playing of Haydn at a time when he figured far less in other pianists’ repertoire; her explorations of old French music; her collaborative work with singers and instrumentalists; and most of all, her own compositions that ranged from piano to film to brass band.
Perkin’s life had several strands, and it’s interesting to see that some of these don’t really acknowledge Ireland at all. After all, a large proportion of her career was spent away from the influence of Ireland, so there’s a lot of material there. Although it must be said that many of these pieces about Perkin stem from her extensive time in the Gurdjieff movement, so it could very reasonably be argued that one male figure has simply been replaced by another.
We are told, variously, that Perkin was born in 1909 in London/Stoke Newington/Hackney. These conjure rather different pictures, given the differing neighbourhoods in question (and Stoke Newington did not join neighbouring Hackney until 1965, so only one of these can be technically true). Stoke Newington gets described by estate agents variously as “a chic, urban village”, “charming and family-friendly”, “hip and trendy”, while Hackney still has one of the highest rates of social deprivation in London (although as its official website points out, “ large housing estates in Dalston now sit side-by-side with gated communities”, such is the widening polarities of the city).
Perkin’s first teacher, as so often for women performers, was her mother, a pianist from the RCM whose musicianship has been lost (also as so often) to the demands of six children. These mother who teach children who then go on to great things, how much do we underestimate them! Over and over it has been proven that it’s the earliest education that really matters and these women clearly get it incredibly right. These children go on to other, more well-known teachers, in Perkin’s case the New Zealand-born Arthur Alexander. Nellie, the mother, tragically died in a car crash just before Perkin’s acceptance into the Royal College of Music at 16, the teenager having won a scholarship there to study both piano and composition. The first subject she studied with Alexander, the second with John Ireland. The rest, as they say, is history. Or would be, if there were enough recognition of Perkin the autonomous musician.
The relationship with Ireland which resulted in the piano concerto dedication was intense and intensive. Ireland wrote fulsomely to friends of Perkin’s pianistic and musical maturity and craft, while Perkin herself would later say that it was an experience of “one of the highest forms of love that I have ever known”. Not only did they spend musical time together, but they shared other cultural interests – books, art – and went for long walks in the English countryside. Perkin was clearly muse to Ireland, who wrote several pieces for her, beginning withHymn for a Child, set to the words of Sylvia Townsend Warner (and I will refrain from labouring the link between Perkin herself, thirty years Ireland’s junior, and the poem chosen as the text):
“Those he was amazing
Straightway broke out praising
Calling him a mild
Nicely brought up child.
Teach me, gentle Saviour,
Such discreet behaviour
That my elders be
Always pleased with me.”
Several pieces later, Ireland wrote his piano concerto for Perkin, apparently inspired by her playing of Prokofiev’s still-new third concerto, a piece that would remain a mainstay of her repertoire for decades to come. She gave the premiere of the Ireland in October 1930, to much acclaim; descriptive phrases included the ‘stamp of authenticity’, a ‘recognised interpreter’ of Ireland’s works, ‘Miss Helen Perkin, the pianist, played as if she had been brought up on M. Ireland’s music; she is also very proficient with her fingers.’
Of course, through all this, Perkin’s physical beauty also gets spoken about – usuallybeforeher ‘exceptional talent’, as in the case in John Longmire’s recollections of his friend Ireland – and she is positioned as the composer’s muse and inspiration. But Ireland, too, was muse to Perkin, a way of thinking about a relationship that never enters cultural consciousness when the sexes are reversed in this way, or in thinking about composer and performer. Perkin’s composing showed more than the influence of a teacher; her own compositional style is never subsumed. Her performing, too, bears the hallmark of an understanding of structure that stems from her close connection to Ireland’s works, both large and small.
The relationship started to wane when Perkin won an Octavia scholarship, travelling to Vienna to study with Anton Webern and Eduard Steuermann. This was the start of a successful Continental career, both as performer, particularly of Ireland, and as a composer. At this time, her music began to be published by Schott. Reviews of her playing were unanimously positive. She was called ‘the most famous of lady pianists’, ‘brilliant’ (despite being ‘a youthful slip of a girl’), the possessor of ‘a technical equipment that can produce pearly runs,’ and she was congratulated in her performance of the ‘as much on memorising such a long and psychologically discontinuous work as on the sympathetically modern spirit with which she played it.’ The bond between Perkin and Ireland disintegrated entirely when in 1934 Perkin declared her intention to marry the architect George Adie, and by 1945, was actively hostile, at least on Ireland’s side. For several years Perkin did not play much of Ireland’s music in her programmes, although by the 1950s, when Perkin’s career was back on a more even footing after a hiatus during which she bore three sons in the space of five years, and WWII created its difficulties, it was again making an appearance.
Her own music was always very much evident. For example, her cello sonata was broadcast on BBC in 1957, with Florence Hooton on cello and Perkin herself at the piano. Perkin had had a long and regular relationship with the BBC, starting in 1928 with a performance of her Theme and Variations for piano. She was 19 years old at the time. Her broadcasts would continue into the 1960s, the last appearance in 1961 being as the composer for a ballet for deaf children,The Wonder Bird; the previous year she had taken part in a series on piano studies, while in 1959, she gave the premiere broadcast of fellow-RCMer Freda Swain’s second piano sonata, in a programme that included Ireland and two of Perkin’s own preludes, from the set of four. Other of her works that were broadcast included the piano trio, which has been premiered in Paris, and was broadcast in 1937, with Antonio Brosa playing violin and Livio Mannucci on cello. The remainder of the programme, which was dedicated to Perkin’s music, consisted of the four piano preludes and the Spring Rhapsody for violin and piano. Brosa, a Spanish violinist who taught at the RCM, was instrumental in championing the performances of new British works in the early twentieth-century, while the Italian Mannucci divided his time between playing cello in Britain and conducting opera on the Continent.
These chamber/instrumental pieces demonstrate one of the three faces that Perkin donned as composer throughout her life. They received positive critical reviews:
“From the first, Helen Perkin seems to have had a personal, distinctive style; her invention springs readily, her ideas are graceful, and she expresses them with good taste. The dexterity of her workmanship is a constant factor – visible in the Phantasy for string quartet (1929) […] and in the Trio for violin, ‘cello and piano (1931). If the latter is more effective, it is because Miss Perkin, as a pianist, instinctively has greater sympathy with the genius of her instrument than with strings.”
The second face of the composer, which appeared in the same year as the Cello Sonata broadcast, was as brass band composer. Perkin wrote several pieces for this ensemble, the first of which, Carnival, was the winning entry by Black Dyke in the Open Championships in 1957. A contemporary review said that ‘The most interesting number was the Belle-Vue test piece, a three-movement Carnival suite by Helen Perkin. This sacrifices some consistency of style to its diversity of technical problems, but it is by no means lacking in music interest. The metrical twists and tricky balances of its opening Cavalcade are fascinating.’ All of Perkin’s band repertoire turns up in competitions right up to the present day (the last mention I find of Carnival is a win in 2013 by the Svogerslev Brass Band in the Danish National Championship). On a sidenote, one article on her questions whether she orchestrated these pieces herself. Why would a well-trained and talented composer need someone else to do this for her? It wouldn’t be because she’s a woman composer at all, would it?...
The third face of Perkin the composer is tied up with her whole focus in the last decades of her life, i.e. the Gurdjieff movement. Perkin and her husband George had become fascinated with the philosopher’s teachings after WWII, when they visited him in Paris. Part of the philosophy was the idea of “movements”, a series of sacred dances designed to assist in attaining knowledge and the awakened state sought by followers, and Perkin began writing for these. She had her husband eventually moved to Australia, where they became pivotal figures in the Gurdjieff Society there, and her compositions in this line would take over her output. Once she became important in this area, she sank into oblivion in the mainstream classical music circles of Europe; motherhood, emigration and retirement from performance were the waters that closed over her head, until the Ireland piano concerto was the only pebble causing ripples in the pond of her told biography.
I have a score of the four Preludes in front of me as I write. I’ve played them, and fallen for their harmonic language, Perkin’s descriptive way of writing, the pianistic feeling under my fingers. And again, I am angry at the loss of this voice. We need really good recordings. We need really good biographical information that puts Perkin forefront, not her colleagues. And we need the scores. As always, we need the scores. How can people play this stuff, or even know it exists, if the scores aren’t easily available?
We are working towards this. Let’s keep speaking out for historical women. I have barely scratched the surface of Perkin’s life in this pieces, and have chosen to be fairly selective in what I have written about. There is room for so much more – including programming her works back into concert halls and galleries.
