When I am working with old music I always look to find out more about the composers. Some are well known familiar names; others have slipped away out of not only popularity but out of history. There are those who clearly had successful careers in music and yet they fall into the category of forgotten names. Recently I started work on a painting where I used a surface I had prepared last year. The music was titled Youth and composed by Frances Allitsen. I had chosen to paint a baby donkey on this surface. While I am painting, I will try and find recordings of them to listen to but on this occasion, there was nothing at all for this particular piece of music.
In terms of the composer, it is not surprising that a woman composer was little known at the time and also has since been long forgotten. A quick check online gave a few details as well as an older post with what I then found was inaccurate information in it. I am grateful there for my family history researching background and my need to check information for myself. Even in the last 10 years the amount of available firsthand information available online has continued to increase... with the 1921 census and 1939 list of people living in the UK as well as many digitised newspapers, research on people such as Frances is made much easier. BUT it still depends on what was recorded at the time and any coverage in papers.
So, who was Frances Allitsen? She was actually born Mary Frances Bumpus in 1848 and died in 1912. Was her choice of her gender-neutral middle name deliberate to compete with the man centric world she was living in? Someone may be happier to buy a piece of music by Frances, assuming it was a man, than someone called Mary? I would think this would have worked to her advantage, but I guess we will never know for sure.
Frances never married and never had children, perhaps this is part of the reason she is not better known. Living her life in London she was buried in Hampstead cemetery.
I recently bought the 1893 book of the Music Journal. Although it was something else that caught my eye as I browsed the pages it also included an advert for some of Frances work.
A bit of further enquiry found a feature in The Gentlewoman of 1895 (September 7th)
But there are musicians and musicians! There are glorious scholars and brilliant mathematicians, there are creative giants who come Prometheus-laden from the sunflame of art, there are inspired minstrels who outpour like the nightingale, because it is their nature and the nature of the Godgift within them.
Amonst these latter must be classed Miss Frances Allitsen a home-born, home bred British genius, who has slowly but surely been advancing into the very centre of our musical arena.
How wonderful to discover her work. I have barely scratched the surface but I’m happy to have found her, listened to some of her more well known works and I'm looking forward to spending time in the future learning more about her. Please get in touch if you can add more to her history or better still play or sing her music! .... I'd love to hear it .
Comments