Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Peggy Winsome Glanville-Hicks (29 December 1912 – 25 June 1990) was an Australian composer.

Peggy Glanville Hicks was born in Melbourne in 1912 (she later hyphenated her surname). At age 15 she began studying composition with Fritz Hart in Melbourne. She also studied the piano under Waldemar Seidel. She spent the years from 1931 to 1936 as a student at the Royal College of Music in London, where she studied piano with Arthur Benjamin, conducting with Constant Lambert and Malcolm Sargent, and composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams. (She later asserted that the idea that opens Vaughan Williams' 4th Symphony was taken from her Sinfonietta for Small Orchestra (1935), and it reappears in her 1953 opera The Transposed Heads.) Her teachers also included Egon Wellesz.

She was the first Australian composer whose work was performed at an International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival (1938). This was her Choral Suite.

From 1949 to 1958 she served as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, succeeding Paul Bowles, working under Virgil Thompson. She took out U.S. citizenship during this time. After leaving America, she lived in Greece from 1957 to 1976. In the United States she asked George Antheil to revise his Ballet Mécanique for a modern percussion ensemble for a concert she helped to organize before returning to Australia in the late 1970s. She lost her sight in the last years of living in the U.S. as a result of a brain tumour. She had this tumour successfully removed in a marathon operation and regained her sight. However, a result of this operation was her loss of a sense of smell.

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