Florence Ashton Marshall
Florence Ashton Marshall (Mrs Julian Marshall) née Thomas (30 March 1843 – 5 March 1922) was an English composer, conductor and author.
Life
[edit]She was born on 30 March 1843 in Rome, Italy, the daughter of Vicar Canon Thomas of All Hallows Barking by the Tower.[1] Her sisters were the novelist Bertha Thomas (author of The Violin Player, 1880) and the clarinettist Frances Thomas (after 1843-1925).[2] She studied (from the age of 30) at the Royal Academy of Music with William Sterndale Bennett, John Goss and G.A. Macfarren.[3]
Thomas married the businessman, writer, and music collector Julian Marshall on 7 October 1864 and had three daughters. She contributed to Grove's Dictionary, although to a lesser degree than her husband, and published a set of 70 Solfège exercises in 1885.[4] Her most successful composition was the operetta Prince Sprite for treble voices, written in 1891 while she was Head of Music at Dulwich School and published by Novello.[5][6] She later went on to help found a music school, the Hampstead Conservatoire.
She was elected an associate of the Philharmonic Society and conducted the South Hampstead Orchestra for over 30 years.[7] The orchestra was substantial enough to perform a Brahms symphony under her direction and the Saint-Saëns violin concerto with Mischa Elman as the soloist.[8] She and her husband were founding members of the Musical Association.[9]
Marshall died on 5 March 1922.[10]
Works
[edit]Florence Marshall composed solo songs, part songs, educational pieces, and operettas.[11] Selected works include:
- Symphony in B minor (Andante performed in 1874)
- Notturno for Orchestra (1875)
- Sweet and Low, song (words Tennyson, 1877)
- The Masked Shepherd, operetta (libretto Edwin Simpson-Baikie, 1879)
- 'Behold the sun in gold descending' (partsong from The Masked Shepherd)
- Piano Trio (1879)
- Ask Me No More, song (words Tennyson, 1880)
- Rest hath come, partsong (words Leyland Leigh, 1884)
- To sea! the calm is o’er, partsong (words T.L Beddoes, 1884)
- Choral Dances, stage work (1897)
- Prince Sprite, fairy operetta (libretto Bertha Thomas, 1897)
- Hohenlinden, choral (1892)
- Nocturne for clarinet and orchestra
Under the name Mrs Julian Marshall she published a biography of Handel in Hueffer's Great Musicians series in 1883, and Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1889.[12]
References
[edit]- ^ Sadie, Julie Anne; Samuel, Rhian (1994). The Norton/Grove dictionary of women composers. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393034875. Retrieved 7 January 2011.
- ^ Shannon Draucker. Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (2024)
- ^ Nigel Burton. 'Marshall, Florence Ashton' in Grove Music Online (2001)
- ^ F A Marshall, Solfeggi, Novello Music Primers (1885)
- ^ Novello's Original Octavo Editions, catalogue
- ^ 'Prince Sprite. A Fairy Operetta by Florence A. Marshall'. review in The Musical Times, Vol. 32, No. 578 (April 1891), p. 234
- ^ Houghton, Walter Edwards; Slingerland, Jean Harris (1989). The Wellesley index to Victorian periodicals, 1824-1900.
- ^ 'South Hampstead Orchestra', in The Times, 15 June, 1899, p.13
- ^ Obituary, The Times, 7 March 1922, p. 14
- ^ Arthur Searle (2004). "Marshall, Julian". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34897.
- ^ James Duff Brown, Stephen S Stratton. British Musical Biography (1897), p. 272
- ^ 'Mrs. Julian Marshall'. Online Books Page
External links
[edit]- Florence Marshall, by Silke Wenzel, Musik und Gender Im Internet (English translation)
- 'Florence Ashton Marshall 1843-1922', Salon Without Boundaries, 21 September 2022
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