Listen to
the music
now!
| Los
Angeles Daily News, 1952 "She works with a knowing pen, however, and while there is plenty of imagination and poesy in the score [The Crystal Lake], there is coherence as well, and the result is a piece of shimmering timbres that resolves surely into an integrated whole." Mildred Norton |
Discography
Centenary
Reviews
Audio, Video
Biography
Bibliography
Contact/Signup
Scrapbook
Compositions
Books
Publications
Society Information
Biography of
Elinor Remick Warren
Page
3
After graduation from Westlake School, Elinor spent one year at home, studying with Ross and taking piano master classes with Harold Bauer and Leopold Godowsky. In 1919, she entered Mills College as a music major. However, after completing the freshman year, so anxious was she to get on with her career that she prevailed upon extremely reluctant parents to let her go East for further study. At the age of 20, she arrived in New York, where she spent the next five years working with the musicians she had already chosen to be her mentors: well-known art song composer and accompanist, Frank LaForge and composer/organist Dr Clarence Dickinson, head of the music department at Union Theological Seminary.
Through LaForge, the young composer was introduced to many of the important singers of the day. At the age of 21, she accompanied the great Metropolitan Opera contralto Margaret Matzenauer at New York's Carnegie Hall as she sang one of the young composer's early songs, Heart of a Rose. Soon Warren was in demand by singers both as composer and accompanist. In her early 20s, she toured with Matzenauer and with stars such as Florence Easton, Richard Crooks, and Lawrence Tibbett, the latter a childhood friend from Los Angeles.
Warren had brought with her to New York a sheaf of songs and choruses which promptly found favor with New York publishers. In one year -- 1922 -- eleven of her songs and choral pieces were published by various major music firms. These publications prompted composer Deems Taylor, writing in a New York newspaper, to comment, "The composer, Elinor Remick Warren, has ideas, and an undeniable gift for song writing."
Along with composing, Warren also found herself in demand as a piano soloist. In 1923 and again in 1025, she made a successful series of recordings for a New York record firm of piano solos from her tours as assisting artist with singers. In 1923 and 1926, she appeared as piano soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This phase of her career continued until the 1940s, when she gave up touring to concentrate solely on her career as a composer.