by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hello everyone!
This month, I’d like to introduce you to a composer I’ve only learned about very recently, Radie Britain. Born in 1899 in rural Texas, Radie (pronounced RAY-dee) was a highly successful composer during her lifetime who specialized in orchestral music with a Southwestern flair. Originally a pianist and organist, by the time she was in her mid-twenties, Radie had traveled to Europe to study composition with German composer Albert Noelte. Britain’s works for orchestra are very much in the style of late-Romantic German music while featuring subjects from the United States. Among her output are pieces such as Southern Symphony, Cowboy Rhapsody, Cactus Rhapsody, and Musical Portrait of Thomas Jefferson which would later be renamed Epic Poem. One of my favorites of her recorded orchestral compositions is her Heroic Poem, written in 1948; it features a lovely horn solo at around the 7-minute mark that is well worth a listen!
Although many of her works are for large ensembles, Radie also composed an impressive number of chamber works for a wide variety of groupings, several of which involve or feature the horn. First and most notably is a piece entitled In the Beginning, which is available both for unaccompanied horn and for horn quartet. It is unclear at the time of this writing whether the piece began as the solo version or vice versa, but, luckily for us, both are published and available for purchase online. Britain also composed a brass quartet called Adoration, several brass quintets including Ode to NASA (yes, the American space agency NASA!) and Awake to Life, and at least one woodwind quintet, Four Sarabandes. Although, to my knowledge, none of these chamber pieces has been recorded, if they are even half the quality of her outstanding orchestral pieces, any intrepid horn player who wants to dust off these long-neglected works is sure to be in for a wonderful treat.
