Chris van Rhyn: Finding the masculine and White African gay woman in Priaulx Rainier’s Art Songs

Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986) was born in Howick, in the Natal colony, now the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. She won a scholarship in 1919 to further her violin studies at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) and permanently settled in England. A car accident at thirty mandated her career change to composing. She studied with Nadia Boulanger in 1937 and came to prominence as a composer with her 1939 String Quartet. Rainier became a professor at the RAM in 1944. Rainier wrote seven art songs or song cycles for solo voice with accompaniment: Three Greek Epigrams (1937), Fair is the Water (1938), Dance of the Rain (1947), Ubunzima (1948), Bee Oracles (1969), Vision and Prayer (1973) and Prayers from the Ark (1947-75). Critics considered her music masculine, describing it in casually sexist terms: “not lady music” (San José Mercury News, 1962). William Walton remarked that she must be wearing “barbed-wire underwear”. Furthermore, Rainier suggested that Zulu music and the natural environment surrounding her childhood home significantly influenced her works. These influences are said to have unconsciously manifested in her compositions rather than being explicit emulations of Zulu music. Despite enjoying high-profile performances of her works during her lifetime by the likes of Peter Pears, Jacqueline du Pré, and Yehudi Menuhin, Rainier fell into relative obscurity following her death, leaving journalistic statements, self-characterisations, and the unspoken (she was gay) largely unexamined through scholarly inquiry. In this paper, I will unpack musical characteristics in Rainier’s songs that could potentially shed light on how these characterisations of her as a White African gay woman and masculine composer intersect, position her within a particular socio-historical and aesthetic landscape, and how it shaped her artistic choices and how others viewed them.

Chris van Rhyn is an associate professor of Music Theory and Composition, and the director of the research entity Musical Arts in South Africa: Resources and Applications, at North-West University, South Africa. He holds a PhD from Stellenbosch University. His research focuses on the works of South African and other composers of art music from Anglophone Africa, with a special interest in the British-South African composer Priaulx Rainier. Chris is also engaged in practice-based research in Composition. His works have been performed locally and abroad, including Harvard University’s Paine Hall and the ISCM World New Music Days in Johannesburg. Chris is the associate editor for Africa for the US-based journal Perspectives of New Music.

Chris van Rhyn: Finding the masculine and White African gay woman in Priaulx Rainier’s Art Songs

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