Modernism's Missing Link: The Musical Work of Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark

The composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83) and her husband, the conductor and music administrator Edward Clark (1888-1962) - the Virginia and Leonard Woolf of twentieth-century musical modernism - represent an unexplored link between Britain and Europe in composition and music performance. By examining their music-making, the project rethinks several music-historical paradigms: that women are muses and men composers, that institutional history is the only alternative to history of composition as progress, and that British musical modernism is scattered and isolated. Instead, the study offers a radical, holistic approach to issues of gender, music production, and twentieth-century music historiography.