Anthology of Piano Music Volume 1 — Solo Piano

Mary Chandler’s musical life began at the piano. She started lessons at the age of three, reportedly because she was jealous of the special attention her brother received for his own studies. After completing her secondary education, she spent several years studying composition and preparing for the piano LRAM, which she was awarded in 1931. Given this background as both pianist and composer, it was natural that she should write extensively for an instrument she knew so intimately. Her piano works span almost the whole of her career and reveal a wide range of styles and approaches.

The opening work in this anthology, Things to Do: Short Piano Pieces, was written in 1987 and appears to have been intended for young students. The music is relatively easy, and the manuscript includes numerous fingerings. From 1960 to 1971, Chandler served as Area Director of the Kent Music School, where she arranged and composed music for her pupils. After retiring to Gloucestershire in 1972, she continued to compose and perform, and Things to Do may represent a continuation of her work as a teacher.

Her early works — The Prelude and Fugue in D Minor and The English Suite in E Minor — reveal her interest in exploring older musical forms. The Prelude and Fugue in D Minor, written in April 1935, survives complete and is a substantial composition. The English Suite in E Minor similarly draws upon the Baroque suite, comprising a prelude, courante, sarabande, passepied and tambourin. Begun in 1933, it was completed in September 1935.

At the time these works were written, Chandler belonged to the Society of Women Musicians, a London-based organisation founded in 1911 in response to the limited professional opportunities then available to women musicians. She was an active member and performed at one of the Society’s concerts on 21 March 1936, where she may have included some of these early piano works.

The Petite Suite takes the exploration begun in the English Suite into the harmonic language of the mid-twentieth century. The Two Promenades are brief character pieces particularly well suited to chamber recitals, and Chandler may herself have performed them.

Written in 1977, A Suite of Variants represents the culmination of Chandler’s writing for solo piano. Rich and expansive, this work of almost fifteen minutes draws together ideas explored in the earlier English Suite and Petite Suite. The word “Chichevache” appears on both the cover and the first page of the manuscript. In medieval folklore, the Chichevache was a mythical, starving beast said to subsist upon patient, obedient and virtuous wives. Its name derives from the Middle French chicheface, meaning “thin face”. Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers replaced the latter part of the word with vache, the French for “cow”, producing the alternative meanings “lean cow” or “greedy cow”.