Joan Trimble Suite for Strings

Overview: Joan Trimble
Born June 18, 1915, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland; died August 6, 2000, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland
Work Composed: 1951
During her lifetime, Joan Trimble was better known as a pianist and teacher than as a composer. Her father was a distinguished folksong collector, starting Trimble on a lifetime of immersion in Irish folk music - to the point that, in such works as this Suite for Strings, the tunes sound completely folk-like even though they are Trimble’s own.
In the 1930s, she studied composition with Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and her Phantasy for Piano Trio won the 1940 Cobbett competition for English chamber music. But World War 2 intervened, and her career as a duo-pianist with her sister Valerie took precedence; during the war, they regularly performed on BBC radio and at Myra Hess’s legendary National Gallery concerts. (Trimble also managed to work full time for the Red Cross.) The sisters’ success continued after the war, when they premiered two-piano concertos by English composers Arthur Bliss and Lennox Berkeley.
In addition to her career as a pianist and teacher, she raised three children. As a result, Trimble’s compositional output was small; but it is well crafted, and she lived long enough to be recognized as Ireland’s most prominent female composer.
Some of the most fearsomely modern music ever composed comes from the decades following World War 2, when faith in and respect for the traditions that had culminated in the war were at an all-time low; but Trimble’s music is untouched by these experiments - “I am free to be myself, regardless of fashion,” she wrote - and is closer in spirit to the music her teacher Vaughan Williams composed several decades earlier.
The suite is in three movements. The opening Prelude is in duple meter and features strong rhythm and sophisticated, very unfolk-song-like harmonies that occasionally suggest Impressionism. A lovely lyrical theme about a minute in is immediately repeated in the cellos underneath an airy accompaniment, and then never heard again, although the second movement’s main theme is related to it. Aside from this theme’s non-recurrence, the form is a sonata.
The slow second movement features a sweet and sad melody in triple meter. It’s further contrasted from the first movement by its simple harmonies - though they get more chromatic in the piece’s second half. A violin solo two-thirds of the way through is reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.
The Finale features several sprightly tunes. The string writing throughout the suite is assured and effective, and justifies Trimble’s reputation as a composer whose works deserve wider hearing.
Audio and Video Engineer: Michael Lascuola
Program notes: Mark Arnest