Musical Modernism and the Émigré Experience in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Music of Priaulx Rainier, Mátyás Seiber, and Erika Fox

Abstract

During the mid to late twentieth century, the British musical scene was increasingly populated by émigré composers. Coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, they participated in and shaped the nature and direction of musical life. At the same time, the process of migration influenced their work. This project interrogates the relationship between music and migration in the lives and work of a small group of composers who emigrated to Britain between 1920 and 1939. And it contributes to musicological efforts to theorize and analyze music in migration, to understand the role and function of musical networks (both social and professional), and to tell the stories of émigré composers. This study makes two interventions in the field of music and migration studies. Central to my project is the comparative study of émigré composers from diverse national backgrounds who emigrated at different times and at different ages. Further, the focus on women broadens musicological studies of migration, whose subjects are most often male. My subjects are Priaulx Rainier (1903–1986) who emigrated from South Africa as a teenager in 1920, Mátyás Seiber (1905–1960) who emigrated from Hungary as an adult in 1935, and Erika Fox (b. 1936) who was brought to Britain from Austria as a small child in 1939. In studies of each composer’s life and music, the project employs archival research conducted in the UK, musical analyses, and biographical contributions. The ensuing readings of pieces such as Rainier’s Barbaric Dance Suite (1950), Seiber’s Ulysses (1947), and Fox’s Café. Warsaw 1944 (2005) offer a perspective on the composers’ situations in a post-colonial moment, as the British empire waned. Recent musicological contributions to studies of migration, gender, and networks frame this work. The concept of cultural translation serves as a metaphor for the movement and transformation of art, aesthetics, and ideas between cultures. And the notion of a “migratory aesthetic,” a term used to theorize a mode of creation marked by characteristics of migration (e.g., mobility, multi-temporality, and memory), helps to relate compositional practice to migratory experiences. From the historical, cultural, and musical analyses that structure this study, what emerges is music and careers that elude neat categorization of present place and personal background. Though hybrid artistic expressions are a collective response to migration, each individual moves between cultures in their own way. Their work contributes to a picture of mid- to late-twentieth-century British musical life that was itself increasingly hybrid.