Biography of
Elinor Remick Warren
Page 5

Throughout her career, Warren made highly individualistic choices which tended to remove her from the musical mainstream in America, but which allowed her to remain creatively independent. Aware that most composers left the Western United States to live and work in New York, the center of American musical life, Warren chose instead to spend her creative life in Los Angeles, where she had earlier found her inspiration. When she married happily and had three children, she combined her life as wife and mother with her work as a composer - vowing that each nurtured the other. When many composers were moving towards more "modern" idioms, Warren remained true to the neo-Romantic vision which remarkably mirrored her own personality. Advised that a composer would be wise to work in the smaller forms in order to get more performances, Warren ignored the advice, continuing to compose on the grand orchestral scale that she loved. Her music, accessible to audiences and characterized by well-crafted, emotionally intense and colorful compositions, had few detractors during her lifetime.

An early marriage in 1925 ended in divorce. Warren's second marriage in 1936 to film producer and businessman Z. Wayne Griffin lasted until Griffin's death in 1981. They had two sons and a daughter.

The composer continued to work until shortly before her death, from cancer, at age 91. Her career remains one of the longest and most prolific in American musical history.

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