Margaret Sutherland

Margaret Ada Sutherland AO OBE (20 November 189712 August 1984) was an Australian composer, among the best-known female musicians her country has produced.

Career
Margaret Sutherland's father was  George Sutherland, a journalist and writer and member of a prominent Scottish-Australian family.  The painter Jane Sutherland was her aunt and the physicist and mathematician William Sutherland was her uncle. Her sister, Ruth Sutherland was a painter and writer.

Her first piano teacher was another aunt, Julia Sutherland (1861-1930), a pupil of Louis Pabst, a German émigré then considered to be Melbourne's leading piano teacher (himself a pupil of Anton Rubinstein, and Percy Grainger's first teacher). A student of Edward Goll in Australia and of Sir Arnold Bax in London during the 1920s, Sutherland wrote pieces in almost all forms, but particularly concentrated on the genre of chamber music. Her major works include a symphony, The Four Temperaments (orchestrated by Robert W. Hughes in 1964), concertos for various instruments (including violin), a symphonic poem entitled Haunted Hills (1953), and the chamber opera The Young Kabbarli (1964; libretto by Maie Casey). A severe stroke in 1969 ended her composing career.

Despite the emphasis on non-vocal works in her total output, one of Margaret Sutherland's most recognised pieces is "In the Dim Counties" (1936) for voice and piano accompaniment from Five Songs. Sutherland sets her music to the poetry of Shaw Neilson, considered a ‘"pastoral" lyric poet’ from Australia whose verse has ‘simplicity of form and restraint of utterance’.   Sutherland captures this through sharp rhythms, light instrumentation and ‘even musical balance’.  Five Songs has been recorded by numerous Australian female artists such as Helen Noonan.

Personal life
In 1927 Margaret Sutherland married a Melbourne physician and psychiatrist, Norman Arthur Albiston. They had a son (Mark, 1928) and a daughter (Jennifer, 1930, who predeceased her mother). The marriage did not last, and they divorced in 1948.  Although Norman was a music lover, he believed that a woman aspiring to be a composer was an indicator of mental derangement, and at one time he discussed his wife's mental state with Felix Werder.

Honours
The University of Melbourne conferred an honorary doctorate of music on Margaret Sutherland in 1969.

She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1970 Queen's Birthday Honours.  She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 1981 Queen's Birthday Honours.

Selected works not mentioned above
6 Australian Songs, for 1 voice and piano, settings of poems by Judith Wright (1950-1962)
Midnight
Winter Kestrel
The Old Prison
Woman's Song
The Twins
Bullocky
Extension, for solo piano (1967)
Four Blake Songs, for 1 voice and piano (1957)
Two Chorale Preludes on Bach's Chorales, for solo piano (1935)
Herzliebster Jesu
Jesu, meine Freude
Suite on a Theme by Purcell, for orchestra (1938)
Concertino for Piano and Orchestra (1940)
Quartet in G minor, for clarinet, horn, piano and viola (1942)
String Quartet No. 1 (ca1937)
String Quartet No. 3 (1967)
6 Profiles, for solo piano (1947)
With Animation
Expressively
Cool and Detached
A Little Fussily
Quietly Flowing
Rhythmically
Clarinet Sonata, for clarinet or viola and piano (ca1948)
Concerto for String Orchestra (1953)
 Contrasts, for 2 violins (1953)
Discussion (String Quartet No. 2) (1954)
Violin Concerto, for violin and orchestra (1960)
 The World and the Child, for mezzo voice and piano or string trio, text by Judith Wright (1959)
Chiaroscuro I & II, for solo piano (1967)

References

 David Symons (1997). "The music of Margaret Sutherland". Currency Press, Sydney.
 Cliff Hanna quoted in David Symons, The Music of Margaret Sutherland (Sydney: Currency Press, 1997), 47; David Symons The Music of Margaret Sutherland (Sydney: Currency Press, 1997), 47. Symons does not state when Hanna made this comment.
Thérèse Radic, ‘Margaret Sutherland (1897-1984)’, liner notes to Helen Noonan, Woman's Song: Songs by Australian Woman Composers, Newmarket Music, NEW 1042.2, c. 1994.

External links
 Biography of Margaret Sutherland
 Australian Music Centre link about Sutherland
 Margaret Sutherland's Australian theatre credits at AusStage

Category:1897 births
Category:1984 deaths
Category:Australian female classical composers
Category:Australian opera composers
Category:Australian classical composers
Category:20th-century classical composers
Category:20th-century Australian musicians
Category:Officers of the Order of Australia
Category:Australian Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Category:Female opera composers
Category:20th-century women musicians