A work friend from Edinburgh who calls herself a “Fermanagh girl” recently posted a note on LinkedIn that caught my attention. It was the weekend, and Ruthanne suggested that one “may be having a lazy breakfast and seeking company that will drift you off to places of tranquility or provide some lesser-known heritage stories.” Her recommendation? The music, voices and sounds of nature from that morning’s Radio 3’s Breakfast tour of Northern Ireland’s loughs. Among the offerings from the pastoral setting of Crom Castle on Upper Lough Erne, was the Irish pianist and composer Joan Trimble. I listened, was mesmerized, and wanted to share some of what I heard on this MTC Saturday Soundtrack.

Born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in 1915, Trimble studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and Trinity College in Dublin before going to the Royal College of Music in London to study piano with Arthur Benjamin and composition with Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. As the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland notes, recognition as a composer first came with the publication in 1938 of songs and two-piano music.

Buttermilk Point, heard below in a studio setting and also in this live version, is a beautiful example of her folk-influenced sensibilities.

Trimble’s father “was a distinguished folksong collector, starting Trimble on a lifetime of immersion in Irish folk music.” You can hear that influence in her compositions The Green Bough and The Humors of Carrick.

The Coolin, her composition of a traditional Irish Air for cello and piano, is performed in this interesting arrangement by cello and accordion.

After studying composition with Howells and Vaughan Williams, Trimble’s Phantasy for Piano Trio won the 1940 Cobbett competition for English chamber music.

During World War II,

Trimble’s 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.

In works such as her Suite for Strings, the tunes “sound completely folk-like even though they are Trimble’s own.” As Mark Arnest writes for the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs,

Some of the most fearsomely modern music ever composed comes from the decades following World War II, 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 . . . 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.

Trimble passed away in 2000 in her hometown of Enniskillen. On this fall Saturday morning, take time to enjoy this beautiful music, written by a very talented pianist and composer who was inspired by the folk tunes of her native Ireland.

More to come . . .

DJB

Image of Crom Castle, County Fermanagh by Chris Lacey via National Trust