Barbara Hepworth and Music

‘in these very brief notes I seem to have omitted everything that goes to make up my usual working day. These things are immensely important to me [...] My home and my children; listening to music, and thinking about its relation to the life of forms, the need for dancing as recreation, and where dancing links with the actual physical rhythm of carving [...] all these things are daily expressions of the whole.
 
~Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, 1952

From a young age, music and dance formed important parts of Hepworth’s life. At school she excelled at the piano and won several prizes, including the Higher Certificate of the Associated Board of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. At Wakefield Girl’s High School Dalcroze Eurythmics also formed part of the curriculum, physical movements  pioneered by the Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze to express the rhythmical aspects of music. 

By the 1950s music had come to have an even greater presence in Hepworth’s work, as she began to title many of her sculptures after musical forms. This coincided with her meeting with the South African composer, Priaulx Rainier, who became an important friend.  

In the summer of 1950 Hepworth invited Rainier to stay with her in St Ives, establishing a pattern of Rainier splitting her time between London and St Ives. At the time of Rainier’s stay, Hepworth was working on her Festival of Britain commission Contrapuntal Forms. Rainier composed a fragment entitled Rhythms of the Stones, notating the rhythms of Hepworth and her assistants carving Contrapuntal Forms.

Rainier introduced Hepworth to early English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which was undergoing a revival in musical circles. In her correspondence with Hepworth, Rainier would notate short fragments of music and bring scores and records when she came to visit.             

Hepworth’s titles make specific reference to these musical forms, as in the related 1956 works Curved Forms (Pavan) and Forms in Movement (Galliard). A pavan was a stately court dance, often paired with the more lively galliard.

Through Rainier, Hepworth was introduced to the composers Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten. In 1953, Hepworth, Rainier and Tippett founded the St Ives Festival of Music and the Arts. 

Partially based on the model of the Aldeburgh Festival which had been established in 1948 by Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, the St Ives Festival coincided with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and offered a celebration of the two  Elizabethan ages. Early English music was programmed alongside contemporary works, including those by Tippett, Rainier and Britten.

The use of the ‘Orpheus’ title marks the continuation of Greek allusions in Hepworth’s work. Orpheus, the mythical poet and musician, was said to be able to tame wild beats while playing his lyre. The myth of Orpheus also informs Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, with ‘Sonnet I’ opening:
 
‘A tree ascending. O pure transcension / O Orphic song!’

Hepworth’s friendships with composers and musicians has led to her work being sited in a number of different musical settings. During her lifetime she lent works to be shown at the Aldeburgh Festival, including Dual Form in 1959. Today, casts of three of the figures from her Family of Man sculptures are sited at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall as a memorial to Britten and Pears.