Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003)

"The music recording sessions are tremendously exciting. It is always thrilling for a composer to hear his music played for the first time... - Doreen Carwithen

​Doreen Carwithen was one of the first British women to make a career as a film composer. In 1946 she became the only woman selected for an apprenticeship scheme for composers run by the J. Arthur Rank production company, and from there she went on to score over thirty films, including British Pathé’s official film of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Her flair for film scoring is evident even in her concert works, which are full of drama and memorable melodies.

Carwithen started her musical education as a pianist. Her mother was a piano teacher, and gave her daughter her first music lessons. She went on to study piano and cello at the Royal Academy of Music, and while there shifted her focus from performance to composition. Many of her concert pieces feature the piano or cello prominently — most obviously in her 1948 Concerto for Piano and Strings.

While at the Royal Academy Carwithen fell in love with her harmony tutor, the composer William Alwyn. He was already married to another pianist, so he and Carwithen conducted a secret, passionate love affair for nearly seventeen years. This had a serious impact on Carwithen's career. The majority of her compositions were written within a single decade, 1944-1954, after which she focused mostly on her relationship with Alwyn. The couple eloped to Suffolk in 1961, and Carwithen withdrew from composition to become Alwyn's amanuensis, changing her name to "Mary Alwyn".

It was only much later, after Alwyn's death, that Carwithen allowed herself to think of herself as a composer again. Towards the end of her life she started composing a new string quartet, an oboe concerto, a romance for cello and orchestra, and a symphony. 'I am not Mary,' she told a friend shortly before she died. 'I am Doreen.'

Discover Doreen Carwithen

'In her early years she was one of the stars of the Royal Academy of Music where...she studied piano and composition. She was one of the first students to be accepted on to a scholarship programme to score films, and was the only woman in her cohort. She would become one of the first British women to work predominantly as a film composer. And yet by the 1960s Doreen's name had all but vanished from concert programmes, and by the 1970s she had stopped composing altogether. What happened?'
Buy Leah's biography of Doreen Carwithen here.

'It's unsurprising that Carwithen's music is enjoying a renaissance. Her style is utterly captivating. She can just as easily write energetic, rhythmically driven music as she can intimate, introspective pieces built on luminous harmonies and lingering chords. And shining through in all her works is a pure, unadulterated love of melody. She never embraced atonality or experimentalism - she belongs to the same brand of 20th-century British composition as William Walton, Grace Williams and Benjamin Britten.' 
Read about Carwithen's life and music in BBC Music Magazine.

'She manages to combine post-war austerity with a real romanticism and lyricism... There's something quite mechanical about the way the piece opens, and then you have glorious melodic lines that blossom out... It's an astonishing piece.'
Listen to Carwithen's Piano Concerto on BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week.

'You'll see Carwithen at the back here, having a cup of tea...'
Listen to Leah's BBC Radio 3 documentary about Carwithen, Coleridge-Taylor and Howell here.

Scores and other recordings

Carwithen's music is published by Faber Music. All her manuscripts and correspondence are held at Cambridge University Library. For copyright information, please contact the William Alwyn Foundation.

Carwithen has a slowly growing discography - partly thanks to the Piano Concerto, which has proved popular with soloists. Some select recordings include: