Writing Women In: Susannah Collier, and the year was 1823

The Salon is starting a new blog series, on women musicians of the nineteenth century who were students of the Academy, and who went on to have interesting and often varied careers. Starting in 1823, with the first intake of students, we will choose one student per year. Occasionally there is a year where there are fewer in the intake who went on to musical lives that have left a trace; other years, it’s hard to choose only one amongst a veritable tranche of performers, composers and writers.

Why are we doing this? The reason is both historical and current. In 1866, the Society of Arts held an inquiry into the state of music education in Britain. One of the men (it was all men) who gave evidence at the inquiry was Henry Chorley, one of the biggest music critics of the time. Chorley was known for his forthright views, both positive and negative, with a style of writing that caused composer Clara Macirone to uncharacteristically lose her cool and term him ‘ugly’. Often sharply perceptive in his observations, Chorley could also come across as petulant, as he does in his evidence when he complained that ‘there has not been one commanding English artist turned out of the Academy in the past twenty-five years.’ Someone on the listening committee challenged him on this, whereupon he reluctantly conceded that perhaps Madame Charlotte Dolby should make the cut, but otherwise he stood by his statement. And so, unfortunately, have many writers since – there is an ingrained belief in many versions of music history that if a canonic person says something about a non-canonic person, it must be true. It’s an easy way of rendering women invisible.

We start with Susannah Collier, one of the first ten girls to enter the new Royal Academy of Music in March 1823. Collier was 13, having been born in 1809 to parents Richard and Susannah. Her mother had died in 1821, and in October of Susannah’s first year at the Academy, her father remarried. Collier’s entry to the Academy, at this point a boarding school, and with a concentration on moral standards through the presence of a governess, was thus perhaps even more meaningful to her than for most of the others.

Collier was a first study pianist, although she also studied singing and harmony, rapidly becoming top of the class for the last subject. Her teacher, principal William Crotch, wrote to the Academy founder Lord Burghersh, ‘As to my own Pupils, I beg leave to inform your lordship, that I am satisfied with them all. Lucas and Mudie amongst the boys, and the Misses Chancellor and Collier, are the most advanced, being employed at present in writing canons.’ July of her first year she won first prize in harmony, following this up the next year with a first prize in composition. One of the direcotrs, Sir Arthur Barnard, reported that ‘Miss Collier gained the prize amongst the girls for a canon. There were no faults in it.’ This piece along with seven others from her pen were entered into the two volumes of compositions written by the early students of the Academy. To be permitted to write one’s piece in these books was a great honour, only accorded to a few, who had been given express approval by a professor. Collier’s contributions, the most of any of the girls, ranged from fugues to vocal canons on English and Italian texts.

Susannah Collier’s Canon 2 in 1, 15th above, ‘Viva Otello’: Royal Academy of Music Students’ Compositions, GB-Lam_MS204, Royal Academy of Music Special Collections

Collier also took part in several Academy ‘exhibitions’, or concerts. These were given at the Hanover Square Rooms, just down the road from the premises at Tenterden Street. She played organ, accompanied singers, sang in a quartet, and even had an overture of her own composition played, a rare occurrence for a female student. She left the Academy in 1827, coming back later to join the chorus for the 1832 Royal Festival.

A list of ‘pupils received into the Academy since its foundation in 1822-3’ that was published in 1837 catalogued Collier as ‘Distinguished as a Composer, also in other professional acquirements; An Associate Honorary Member.’ It is clear that she became an active member of the London musical scene, but other than composing, her presence is difficult to find. She published songs, several in The Harmonicon and some as stand-alone publications, receiving good reviews. This 1836 review of the song ‘Spirit all Limitless!’ is an example:

“An invocation to the genius of Shakespeare in the Ettrick Shepherd’s happiest vein of poetic inspiration, has called into action a corresponding feeling on the part of the composer, who, in the music before us, has displayed a pure and elegant taste, beautiful in its simplicity, combined with a degree of judgment and scientific tact, highly creditable to herself and the institution (the Academy) to which she is an honor, and of which she has been one of the worthiest ornaments. Here are no borrowed Rossinian passages, thrust in without sense or reason, but precisely the notes and the chords appropriate to the subject, and aptly fitted for the more especially legitimate object of vocal music—a direct appeal to the sympathies of our nature, and the noblest feelings of the heart.”

Collier also wrote several large-scale works for the Philanthropic Society, where her father was the Superintendent. The purpose of the Society was to support ‘the offspring of convicts and criminal male children,’ so they gave several fundraising concerts. Susannah’s works appeared annually from 1828 to 1833, starting with a setting of verses from Corinthians, ‘Though I Speak with the Tongues of Men,’ and culminating in her final multi-movement work, ‘Bless The Lord, O My Soul’, which included recitatives, arias quartets and choruses.

It seems clear that Susannah Collier thought of herself foremost as a composer, and who knows where this might have led her if she had not died at the early age of 29, on 25 April 1839? In 1922, when Frederick Corder wrote the centenary history of the Academy, he echoed Chorley’s sentiments when he wrote that ‘Nearly all the boys [of the first intake] distinguished themselves in after life, but not one of the girls, a fact for which I offer no explanation.’ This is a statement that can be unpicked to demonstrate many undercurrents, but here we only point to its supreme inaccuracy, allowing Collier to resurface as the “shining star” she was described as during her lifetime.

Susannah Collier, ‘The Swiss Cowherd’s Song’, in The Harmonicon 1830.