Doreen Carwithen

Biography

Doreen Mary Carwithen (15 November 1922 – 5 January 2003) was an English composer of classical and film music. She was also known as Mary Alwyn following her marriage to William Alwyn.

Biography

Doreen Carwithen was born at 8 High Street, Haddenham, Buckinghamshire on 15 November 1922, in the house attached to her father's bakery and grocery. As a child, she received her first music lessons from her mother Dulcie, an aspiring concert pianist and pupil of Tobias Matthay, who gave up her wider ambitions to become a music teacher after her marriage in 1921. Doreen studied both piano and violin with her from the age of four. Her younger sister Barbara Carwithen (born 1926) received similar tuition and also became a talented musician and composer.
At the age of 16, Doreen Carwithen began composing by setting Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" for voice and piano. In 1938, she began taking cello lessons with Peers Coetmore, and in 1941, she entered the Royal Academy of Music and played the cello in a string quartet and with orchestras. She was a member of the harmony class of William Alwyn, who began to teach her composition. Her first orchestral work, the overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another), was premiered at Covent Garden by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Boult on 2 March 1947. The previous year she had become the first recipient of a J. Arthur Rank Film Scholarship.
In 1961, she became William Alwyn's devoted secretary and amanuensis, becoming his second wife in 1975, adopting Mary Alwyn as her married name, as she disliked the name Doreen, and Mary was her middle name. She later worked as a Sub Professor of Composition at the RAM. After her husband's death in 1985, she founded the William Alwyn Archive and William Alwyn Foundation to promote his music and facilitate related research projects.
She then also resumed interest in her own music. In 1999, a stroke left her paralysed on one side. She died at Forncett St Peter, near Norwich, on 5 January 2003.