Kitty Whately on Rebecca Clarke

This Friday sees the release of the complete songs of British composer Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) on Signum Classics, with pianist Anna Tilbrook joining a line-up of singers headed by Kitty Whately and Nicholas Phan (plus guests including Roderick Williams, Gweneth Ann Rand, and violinist and viola-player Max Baillie). Best known today for her Viola Sonata and 'The Seal Man', Clarke composed an incredible range of songs throughout her career, from responses to traditional English and Irish ballads to settings of texts by Goethe, Richard Dehmel, William Blake, AE Housman, and the Chinese poet Ssu-K'ung T'u.

For Whately, the album is part of a much larger mission to shine a light on hitherto neglected songs by women and by Clarke in particular, with a focus-day on her music coming up at Wigmore Hall this weekend and a major new song competition in the works for January 2026. I spoke to her last month about Clarke's remarkable life and work, what inspired her quest to champion female composers through her own recitals and her charity work, and why she believes that the next generation are moving in the right direction in their approach to gender-balanced programming...

When did Rebecca Clarke and her songs come into your life?

I’m pretty sure that she was the first female composer whose music I ever performed. About ten years ago I was asked to do a recital for Iain Burnside’s Ludlow English Song Weekend; Iain prescribed the programme, which included Rebecca Clarke’s song 'Lethe'. I’m ashamed to say that when I saw it I thought ‘Ooh a woman composer!’. Up until then it had never occurred to me that everything I sang was by men, mostly dead ones!

We’re all waking up to gender-balanced programming now, but right through college it didn’t enter my head. I’ve always thought of myself as a feminist and there was a time when I was keen to perform songs that were settings of female poets, but the only female composers I’d heard of were the ones that are related to a male composer in some way…I loved singing 'Lethe', and then I kept coming across 'The Seal Man' when I was adjudicating competitions in colleges: it’s almost like a miniature opera, and I decided I had to bring it into my own repertoire.

Did that experience kickstart your wider interest in exploring music by women?

I co-run a charity called SWAP’ra, and it was through my work with them that I got really invested in all of this: as well as pushing to make the opera industry a more supportive environment for women and parents, part of our mission is to advocate for equal gender representation in many roles throughout the classical music industry. For me that has led to a passionate interest in championing female composers of the past. A few years ago we ran a workshop where we got a bunch of singers who were great sight-readers together with the pianist Anna Tilbrook; we’d collected a huge stack of repertoire that had been gathering dust in libraries for decades and spent a day going through it all to see if any of it was worth bringing down from the shelf. 

Clarke featured in that, and in the Forgotten Voices project which we launched during the 2020 lockdown. The aim was to create a big database of recordings of songs by women composers that weren’t otherwise available, so we got students from all the UK music colleges to record songs by women composers - no fancy equipment, just a smartphone and an open mind!

How did that work blossom into a full-scale commercial recording project?

Somehow I got hold of an email address for Chris Johnson, who is Rebecca Clarke’s great-nephew and the executor of her musical estate, and asked him if there were any songs by her that hadn’t already been recorded. He very generously sent me a few early ones that hadn’t even been published, and I’m delighted that we’ve been able to include them on the album.

Through my conversations with Chris I was looped into his Rebecca Clarke newsletter where he said they were about to publish some of her early songs - they’ll be coming out next year, and I wanted to be the first one to record them! Chris put me in touch with the American tenor Nicholas Phan, who was helping him with the editing, and we got to work pitching the idea to record-labels. It seems like the ideal time to document her whole output: more and more duos are programming her songs, and we think these new ones will be of great interest, particularly to academics.

We made the choice to record everything she wrote. We did think carefully about that, because there are some previously unpublished things that she composed as a teenager and wasn’t particularly proud of, but eventually we decided that it’s such an interesting thing to catalogue. And it’s something that we do for all the men – not everything by Mozart, Schubert and Brahms etc is a work of genius!

Did you gain any insights as to why composition took a back seat after her marriage?

Chris is very keen that the narrative isn’t that she was downtrodden by sexism and erased from history because of her gender: he vehemently believes that she had some autonomy in that decision to step back from composition. She married quite late in life, and her husband was very supportive; they made their home in America where they ran a festival together, she focused a lot of her energy on teaching, and it seems she genuinely wanted to settle down.

Whether that’s something that she was conditioned to do as a woman in the 1950s is hard to know, but it’s a shame for us that she didn’t continue to compose or write any larger-scale works. I do wish she’d written a full-scale opera because the theatrical flair is right there in her songs - but why would you bother if nobody was commissioning you and you didn’t have the resources to stage it yourself? Look at the efforts that Ethel Smyth had to go through to get her works performed…

Clarke was also enjoying such success as a player, as well as writing new works for her own ensemble and having her existing chamber music and songs performed quite regularly. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how satisfied she really was in later life, and how honest she was about that. From our 2025, post-MeToo standpoint it’s easy to assume that she must have been incredibly frustrated, but perhaps that’s projection on our part…

So is it fair to say that her music got a reasonable amount of exposure during her lifetime?

Her pieces were played on the radio quite a lot and there was a big Wigmore concert of her music a hundred years ago, which is part of what we’re celebrating at our focus day there on Saturday 8th November. It’s part of a larger project to shine a light on her life and work, and is happening the day after the album comes out: we’ll be performing a lot of her songs, the Viola Sonata and some other chamber works, and bringing them to life through talks and interviews. 

Leah Broad will interview Chris about what Clarke was like as a person, then Natasha Loges is going to give a talk about where she slotted into that English Song Mafia of Vaughan Williams, Howells, Gurney and other British composers of the period to emerge from the Royal College of Music. It’s hard to sell a whole day of music by a composer who’s still only known for a couple of pieces, and I’m so grateful to Wigmore Hall for giving us this nice shop-window! 

And what do you have planned to continue spreading the love for her music in 2026?

In January SWAP’ra will launch the Rebecca Clarke Song Competition, which is open to any professional classical singers based in the UK – there’s no age-limit, and we’ve managed to raise 13k to be spread over four cash prizes (equal prizes for pianists and singers, which is fairly unusual). The deadline for applications is 28th November: for the first round we ask for two English-language songs by women composers, then for the semi-finals and finals we have a set list of songs by Clarke to choose from alongside a free choice of songs by British women of the past 150 years.

A lot of competitions set out to support young artists, but that isn’t really my aim here – the main thing is to shine a light on Clarke and her female contemporaries, and in order to do that we need to ensure that the audiences who come to the public rounds will hear the best possible performances of this repertoire. 

The Viola Sonata and 'The Seal Man' are still the only pieces of hers that are widely known, but there’s so much treasure to be discovered. It’s fascinating to see the variety of poets that she chose to set and how she responded to them – it’s as if she morphed herself into a different composer for each poet. 

Do you detect any stylistic similarities with that ‘English Song Mafia’ you mentioned earlier?

You do hear influences, but she really does have her own distinctive voice. Sometimes she reminds me of John Ireland or Ernest Moeran, although a lot of her stuff isn’t based around simple folk-like melodies. It's always fascinating to see how composers developed and learned, and I think there was a real turning point for her around the time she wrote her Chinese settings in 1910. Looking at her songs before and after that point, she seems to have really found her voice, style and harmonic world from then on...

I loved learning about her time at the Royal College of Music and exploring the letters she wrote. And she gave a lovely speech on the radio when Vaughan Williams died, talking about what he’d meant to her and her contemporaries. It’s such a travesty that she’s not included with him, Gurney and Howells in that pantheon of English song composers which we all grew up on when we were at college: she deserves to be there, along with her fellow Royal College of Music alumni Elizabeth Maconchy, Madeleine Dring and many other women composers who graduated from the RCM in the early part of the twentieth century.

My generation is in a kind of transition-period, I think: we aren’t going to see totally gender-balanced programming in our lifetime, but we’re moving in the right direction…I feel that things are still a bit ghettoised, and I do roll my eyes when I see season brochures with things called ‘Women’s Voices’ because in my opinion we need to just start programming women alongside men.

I’m aware of the irony of saying that when I’m here promoting a single-composer project - and I also have an album of Madeleine Dring’s songs coming up next year - but for live performances I aim for a gender-balance rather than all-women programmes. It’s so exciting to see the next generation of singers making a point of being inclusive; it’s going to be gradually normalised, and that’s a great thing.