Life and Music of Alice Mary Smith (1839 to 1884)"This study of the nineteenth-century British composer Alice Mary Smith's life and music draws on newly discovered documents and manuscripts. The volume also includes information on other women composers from this era. At a time when women were thought to succeed only in composing drawing-room songs or lightweight piano pieces, Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884) wrote by far the greatest number of larger-scale art works of any British woman composer in the nineteenth century. She was most probably the first woman to have written - and had performed - a symphony, composed in 1863 at the age of twenty-four. Two of her six concert overtures were regularly performed by distinguished conductors of the time, and her four cantatas for choir and orchestra achieved some popularity in the last years of her short life. This study also briefly outlines the work of twelve further British female composers who attempted the higher forms of the art, and examines, from contemporary sources, the argument, current at the time, as to whether a woman could ever compose a 'great' work."
In the end Alice Smith and Oliveria Prescott produced
two symphonies each.
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