Joan Trimble (18 June 1915 – 6 August 2000) was an Irish composer and pianist, and one of the most distinguished musicians to come from Ulster in the 20th century. She studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London, and she and her sister performed for many years as a celebrated piano duo. In later years she inherited her father's newspaper and became its proprietor and editor.
Education and career
Joan Trimble was born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (now Northern Ireland), a daughter of William Egbert Trimble, the proprietor of one of Ulster's best-known regional newspapers, and Marie Dowse from Dublin. Joan grew up in an intensely musical household: her mother was a distinguished solo violinist from a famous Dublin family of musicians, from which all eleven children had attended the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and her father was a talented musician, a fine bass-baritone and a noted collector of folksong. She attended Enniskillen Royal School for Girls and was the school's first Head Girl. In 1931, Joan and her sister Valerie (1917–1980), commenced studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.
Joan studied composition with John F. Larchet and won a scholarship to the University of Dublin, from where she graduated with a BA degree in 1936. She was awarded piano, violin and composition scholarships and studied piano with Annie Lord and music at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1936, BMus 1937). In 1936, the tenor John McCormack chose her to play piano solos during one of his tours. She moved to London and joined her sister at the Royal College of Music, where her mentor was the Australian composer and pianist Arthur Benjamin, and where she studied composition with two of England's leading composers, Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Joan composed a total of twenty-four works in a creative career of twenty years, sixteen of them in the period 1937-1943, including Buttermilk Point (1938), settings of Irish folksong (1939-40), and the Sonatina for Two Pianos (1940); and a further six, including The Heather Glen (1949) and a Suite for Strings (1951), in the period 1949-1953. Her Phantasy for Piano trio (1940), which she wrote at the suggestion of Vaughan Williams, won the Cobbett Prize for chamber music and the Sullivan Prize for composition. The County Mayo (1949) was an unusual combination of two pianos and baritone voice which had been suggested by the singer Robert Irwin. Commissions for the BBC included Ulster Airs (1939–40) for the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra, and Erin Go Bragh, a march-rhapsody for brass band (1943). Her setting for voice and orchestra, How Dear to Me the Hour, won the Radio Éireann Centenary Prize in 1953.
In 1957, the BBC commissioned an opera from her, and she chose the 1924 Blind Raftery by Donn Byrne (1889-1928), the story of a wandering Irish bard set in the west of Ireland in the 17th century. She asked Cedric Cliffe, who had worked with Arthur Benjamin, to write the libretto. It was the second opera commissioned by the BBC for television, the first having been the one-act Manana in 1956 by Benjamin, Trimble's piano teacher at the Royal College of Music; and it was the first television opera written by a female composer
Between 1959 and 1977 Trimble was professor of accompaniment and musicianship at the Royal College of Music, for ten years after 1967 commuting between London and Enniskillen.
Joan Trimble married in June 1942 in London, John Greenwood Gant (1917–2000), a Royal Army Medical Corps officer, with whom she had a son and two daughters.
Piano duo
Trimble first gained notice performing in a piano duo with her sister Valerie. Their partnership had a long and distinguished history, having won first prize at a Belfast music competition in 1925. Joan later composed works for two pianos which they performed together, including the Sonatina (1940). They gave their first professional recital as a duo in the evening of September 28, 1938, at the Royal College of Music in London, as war was about to be declared with Germany. One of their audience said he had come to hear them "as it might be the last music he would ever hear." They performed three of Joan's new compositions, Buttermilk Point, The Bard Of Lisgoole and The Humours of Carrick, Arnold Bax's Irish tone-poem for two pianos, Moy Mell, and the four-hand Jamaican Rumba, which had been composed for them by Arthur Benjamin for their debut performance. It was Benjamin who had encouraged Joan and her sister, whose principal instrument was the cello, to play piano together, and this piece became their signature tune.