Leah Broad

The project:

This Woman’s War is a history of World War II told through the unsung lives of women musicians who entertained the troops, composed original work, fought for their country in secret, and kept hope alive on the home front. Crossing Britain, Europe, Russia, and the United States, it shows how women musicians shaped wartime culture, and how their lives changed because of the conflict. It brings together the stories of pianists Elly Ney and Myra Hess; dancers Josephine Baker and Tatiana Vecheslova; composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor; violinist Alma Rosé; and jazz band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
 

From This Woman's War:

Avril was well aware that the odds were stacked against her. It was difficult not to take the relentless criticisms personally, but she tried to maintain a belief in her abilities and her work. “Never be discouraged by criticism even if it means waiting years to gain real recognition,” she wrote, addressing herself as much as anybody else. “If you lay down your pen just because some critics have written scathing remarks about what you considered was your ‘masterpiece,’ you are admitting to yourself and everyone else that you are a failure.” So from her little blue house on a Scottish firth, Avril composed, accompanied by her white cat—and the cat’s five kittens, when they came.

As Japan attacked the Philippines in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Avril followed the movements of General Douglas MacArthur and his divisions closely in the British newspapers. Defense after defense fell, until MacArthur and his family were evacuated to Australia in March 1942. It was a catastrophic defeat and the largest US surrender in history, but the story of a plucky general standing up to the overwhelming might of the Japanese army appealed to a British and American public desperate for some good news. MacArthur was portrayed as a hero even as he was being flown out of the Philippines. He was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of America’s war strategists,” according to the British papers. This valorous image fired Avril’s imagination. In April 1942, she started writing MacArthur, an enormous choral and orchestral work that would be a sonic portrait of the “great soldier.”

There are traces of the military campaign that inspired the work in the form of a martial tune whistled by the men’s chorus, but for the most part Avril’s response focused on the human impact of the conflict. Behind violent, cacophonous music symbolizing “the tumult of war,” she puts a wordless woman’s chorus, never coming to the fore but always there in the background, like “a kind of prayer.” And then, after the maelstrom of these clashing voices, Avril brings in a child’s voice, a solo to imbue the work with “an atmosphere of calm and tranquility.” The child concludes the work, not the martial material. It’s a remarkable vision of shared humanity and compassion in an increasingly fractured world, and a plea for peace—quite different to the bombastic and brassy Epic March by John Ireland, composed in the same year as a joint commission from the BBC and the Ministry of Information. The Epic March opened the 1942 Proms in London and has since been recorded multiple times; MacArthur is yet to receive its world premiere. When the BBC considered MacArthur for performance—and John Ireland was on the judging panel—they rejected it on the grounds that her abilities were insufficient to do the composition justice.