A Note on Missing Links and an Invitation to Writers
from Signature's Editor Pam Blevins

As the biographer of Marion Scott and Ivor Gurney, I am keenly aware that research is a never-ending part of music scholarship and related subjects. Just when we think that we have learned all there is to know about a subject, new information comes to light.  Thanks to the internet, we now have access to libraries, archives and other resources throughout the world that enhance scholarship and add to knowledge.  

Our readers are continuing to discover and write about women in music who deserve to be recognized for their achievements.  Although we have suspended publication of Signature magazine in journal format, we feel it is important to continue to publish individually articles of interest to our readers.

Consequently, we have added a new page -- "New Articles" -- to our website for the purpose of publishing recent and ongoing scholarship in pdf format.  

WE INVITE YOU to submit for consideration articles you have written about women in music that you wish to make available to others.  For inquiries and information, contact me at pjblevins77@gmail.com .

We look forward to hearing from you and in the meantime, scroll down to my "Missing Links" article to see just what I mean when I talk about making new discoveries.  With all good wishes,

Pamela Blevins, Editor, Signature, Women in Music

IVOR GURNEY: MISSING LINKS
The Hunt Sisters, Winthrop and Calista Rogers, and Valentine Fane
  by Pamela Blevins
My biography Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty was published in 2008. Gurney was an English composer and poet: Scott was a writer, critic, editor, musicologist, violinist and composer. They met at the Royal College of Music in 1911, when Gurney arrived from his native Gloucestershire as a scholarship student. They soon formed a friendship that eventually evolved into a life-long partnership that saw Gurney through the First World War, his productive post-war endeavors and difficult struggle with bipolar illness that left him incarcerated in an asylum for the last 15 years of his life. While tending to her own life, her different careers and multiple demands on her time, Scott remained Gurney’s greatest champion, and it is to her that we owe the existence of his musical and poetic legacies. While I tell their stories in depth in my dual biography, there were other people in Gurney’s life who remained in the shadows when I finally handed in the manuscript to my publisher in England. 

At the time I was distressed that I had not been able to learn more about several individuals
 who played significant roles in Gurney’s life: his close friends Emily and Margaret Hunt; his supportive publisher Winthrop Rogers and Rogers daughter Calista, who took charge of her father’s business immediately after his unexpected death; and Valentine Fane, a name that appeared on a very late asylum poem assumed to be the last coherent poem composed by Gurney. However, Valentine Fane was not a name drawn from the well of Gurney’s imagination; she was a contemporary of Gurney’s and a poet whose work began appearing in publications as early as 1912.  

CLICK HERE to read the stories of these "Missing Links" in Ivor Gurney’s life.

Margaret Hunt Valentine Fane