Music, Life and Changing Times: Selected Correspondence Between British Composers Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, 1927-77

Jenny Doctor is a musicologist intrigued by social aspects of British culture in the twentieth century. After being awarded a Fulbright Grant to the UK in 1989-90, when she was affiliated with the Music Department at King's College London, she later was affiliated with St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she archived and catalogued the music manuscripts of Elizabeth Maconchy, which are held in the College Library. She has researched and written on British music and composers of the twentieth century, in particular Benjamin Britten, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Vaughan Williams, and Edward Elgar, often investigating their relationships with the BBC and other sound technologies of their day. Her investigations led to The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-36: Shaping a Nation's Tastes (Cambridge University Press, 1999). With Sir Nicholas Kenyon and David Wright, she co-edited The Proms: A New History (Thames & Hudson, 2007), contributing an essay on the interwar period. More recently, she co-edited with Bjoern Heile and Peter Elsdon Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz on Screen (Oxford University Press, 2013), contributing an essay on jazz on early BBC television. She is currently the Head of the Albino Gorno Memorial Library and Associate Professor of Musicology at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati.

Sophie Fuller studied music at King's College London and works at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. She is the author of The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629-Present (1994). Her research interests and writings explore many different aspects of music, gender, and sexuality but focus in particular on musical life in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Her work in this area includes essays on the significance of the private musical world in the life and career of Edward Elgar and on women musicians and professionalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Together with Phyllis Weliver, she has established the digital resource 'Sounding Victorian' (www.soundingvictorian.org).