Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens (1906 – 1983)
Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London. Her father was architect Edwin Lutyens and her mother was Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, the granddaughter of prolific Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Last Days of Pompeii). From the Bulwer-Lytton line of the family, Elizabeth Lutyens acquired in interest in the mystical and occultist strain of Christianity known as Theosophy.
Elisabeth Lutyens showed an early interest in composition. She attended the École Normale de Musique in Paris and the Royal College of Music in London. She married twice and had four children, but for decades struggled with depression and alcoholism.
Elisabeth Lutyens revolted against the pastoral folk tradition prevalent in English music. In a lecture she gave in the 1950s, she referred to English composers such as Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Arnold Bax, and Frederick Delius as the “cowpat school” whose compositions were characterized by “folky‐wolky melodies on the cor anglaise.”
Her own compositions — which stretch from the late 1930s to the early 1980s and include everything from piano music to opera — were much less compromising and often incorporate distinctive modernist idioms, including atonality and ragged rhythms.
She moonlighted as a composer of movie music and became the first British woman to score a feature film. She came to specialize in horror films, including Paranoic (1963), The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965), and Theatre of Death (1967). Some of these soundtracks are available on YouTube. Here’s music from The Earth Dies Screaming:
The Valley of Hatsu-Se (Opus 62) from 1965 is a marvelous setting of Japanese poetry for soprano accompanied by flute, clarinet, cello, and piano, here performed by the Manchester-based Psappha Ensemble.