Johnson Quinn, A. and Whitfield, S. K. (2024) Musical ghosts: re-instating Elsie April in historical narratives of the British musical. In: The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Routledge Music Companions . Routledge, Abingdon. ISBN 9780367456764 (hardback) 9781003024767 (e-book)
Abstract
At once a pianist, arranger, accompanist, and musical mastermind, Elsie April (1884–1950) has long been ignored by scholars. Despite her many collaborations with some of the most significant forces in the musical world of London's West End –– spanning several decades from the 1920s onward –– her contributions have been, at most, a footnote in historical accounts of musical theatre. She has been politely dismissed by Coward's biographers as ‘an important assistant to his success’, a statement clearly based on assumptions about the life of female musicians in British theatre. Even a cursory search for compositions written under the name of Elsie April in such major archival repositories as the British Library's catalogues reveals the numerous songs she composed and copyrighted, beyond the published Coward arrangements. Somehow, the full scope of her working practices has never made it into the historical record, despite the high regard in which her contemporaries held her. As theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran (1872–1951) once noted: 'If you got near enough to inspect a pair of twinkling eyes, in a very expressive face, and delicate hands, it could be her. If you stopped the bike, and found the rider carrying a great quantity of manuscript music, and wearing an extraordinary hat, it must have been our Elsie . . . As a musician, she had few equals and her composers [i.e. those she worked with], orchestras, conductors, singers and arrangers bowed to her superiority . . . it was always a source of wonderment to observe this small person, so mistress of her art.' Given the recognition by Cochran, one of Britain's most influential producers, her absence in the historical record is puzzling. However, it speaks to common industry practices and mechanisms of gendered erasure. In 1932, Peter Burnup asked in the theatrical newspaper The Era, ‘Why doesn't Elsie April get a credit on the programme? [She] contributes as much as any man to the success of Cochran shows . . . is someone afraid of ghosts?’ His use of the term ‘ghost’ is telling; the answer to this lies in a complex cultural web of market forces, gender parity, and lack of attention to female creators.
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