Elisabeth Lutyens

(Agnes) Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 1906 – 14 April 1983) was an English composer.

Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London in 1906. She was one of the five children of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and his wife Emily, who was involved in the Theosophical Movement. From 1911 the young Jiddu Krishnamurti was living in their London house as a friend of Elisabeth and her sisters. At age nine she began to aspire to be a composer. In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, before accompanying her mother to India in 1923. On her return she studied with John Foulds and subsequently continued her musical education from 1926 to 1930 at the Royal College of Music in London as a pupil of Harold Darke.

Lutyens is credited with bringing Schoenbergian serial technique (albeit her own very personal interpretation of it) to Britain. She disapproved of the 'overblown sound' of Gustav Mahler and similar composers, and instead chose to work with sparse textures and develop her own type of serialism; she first used a 12-note series in Chamber Concerto I for 9 instruments (1939), but earlier than this she had been using the techniques of inversion and retrograde fundamental to a serial idiom, and she stated she had been inspired to this by precedents she found in older British music, especially Henry Purcell.

She did not always employ or limit herself to 12-note series; some works use a self-created 14-note progression, for instance. She was very fond of the music of Claude Debussy, and she became close friends with Luigi Dallapiccola. However, her negative opinions of strict serialism caused an ideological rift between herself and her serialist colleagues.

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