From Australia’s Jewish past

Mirrie Irma Jaffa Hill, OBE – a prolific Australian composer of her time

Mirrie was born on 1 December 1889 at Randwick, Sydney.  She was the third child of Levien Jaffa Solomon, merchant, and his wife Kate Caroline, both born at Goulburn, New South Wales.

Mirrie attended Shirley School on Edgecliff Road, Edgecliff, which was known as the historic Shirley College and operated from around 1900 as a demonstration girls’ school.  She was born with perfect pitch, and she responded to dissonance in music from the age of three.  She would run from the room when her aunt played Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, crying, “They go wrong in the middle!”   The out-of-tune bells of a nearby church also distressed her greatly.  At the age of five, she began studying the piano with her aunt and started composing at fifteen.  She studied with two distinguished music teachers – Josef Kretschmann and Laurence Godfrey Smith. In 1914, her first major composition, Rhapsody for Piano and Full Orchestra, was performed at the Sydney Town Hall by Laurence Godfrey Smith, who became the forerunner of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, together with the Sydney Amateur Orchestral Society, conducted by Alfred Hill, an Australian-New Zealand composer, conductor, and teacher.  World War I forced Mirrie to cancel plans to study in Germany, and instead, in 1916, she enrolled at the newly opened New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, receiving a two-year scholarship for composition, chamber music, and the interpretation of piano music.

Mirrie had developed a relationship with Alfred Hill, and they married in 1921, living in Mosman throughout their almost forty years of married life.  Whilst she had no children of her own, Alfred had three from a previous marriage.

Immediately after completing her studies, she was appointed to the conservatorium staff as assistant professor of harmony, counterpoint, and composition.  She taught many young musicians, both at the Conservatorium and as a private piano teacher, some of whom later became composers, conductors, or performers with international reputations. She also taught aural training from 1935 and contributed greatly to music education in general, and to the work of the Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB), particularly as a composer of educational music and as an examiner, a position she held for seven years.  In 1935, she wrote a textbook, Aural and Rhythmic Training.  Mirrie retired from the Conservatorium in 1944.

She created over 500 works, with almost half of them published. Mirrie was one of the most prolific Australian composers of her time. A few of her compositions were published under male pseudonyms. She gained a reputation as a miniaturist because most of her published or broadcast compositions were for voice and piano or short piano works for educational purposes, but she also wrote many larger pieces for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, choir, and film. The conductor Henry Krips, composer and pianist, performed and recorded some of her orchestral works for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Mirrie accurately described her music as `not [in] the very modern idiom but entirely individual as to style and content’.  Her exploration into music was inspired by the indigenous peoples of Australia and commenced when anthropologist  Charles Mountford asked her to compose the score for the film he was making about Aboriginal life. For inspiration, Charles gave Mirrie recordings he had made of performances of indigenous Australian songs.  Mirrie drew from these recordings for both her suite, Three Aboriginal Dances (1950), Aborigines of the Sea Coast (1951) and Symphony in A: Arnhem Land (1954).  Although the indigenous songs influenced her symphony, she has explained that it was not meant to be specifically Aboriginal in its makeup.  Aborigines of the Sea Coast (1951) and Symphony in A: Arnhem Land (1954) were composed from traditional Hebrew melodies, including Avinu Malkenu (1971) and from verses by Australian poets such as  Dame Mary Gilmore, John Wheeler and Hugh McCrae.

The composer Dorothy Dodd observed: `With her innate sense of humour and serenity, she radiated such quiet happiness to those around her’. Shy and self-effacing, she found it difficult to promote her own work and willingly allowed Alfred’s composing career to come before her own.   She composed in many different genres, but her favourite was classical orchestral music.  She created over five hundred pieces, ranging from chamber music and film scores to elementary works for children.  Although she did create many longer pieces of music for orchestra and ensembles, it was not until several years after Alfred’s death, in 1960, that she began to receive appropriate recognition.  She established the Alfred Hill Award, an annual composition award for a student at the Conservatorium, at which they had both taught.

Mirrie believed that the string quartet was the most stringent test of a composer’s abilities, and correspondingly did not make any attempt to write for this ensemble before the age of eighty-seven. She maintained an extremely disciplined attitude towards composition throughout her life and always insisted that writing music did not come easily to her.

To mark the occasions of Mirrie’s eighty-fifth and ninetieth birthdays (these were celebrated in 1977 and 1982, special programmes devoted to the composer and her work were broadcast nationally on radio and television.  A documentary film about her was also produced for the Australia Council Archives.

She was appointed an honorary life member of the Fellowship of Australian Composers in 1975 and received an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1980.  Mirrie died on 1 May 1986 at the age of ninety-six.

The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:

Australian Dictionary of Biography – Meredith Lawn, Wikipedia, Beginning with Esther – Lysbeth Cohen, Australian Music Centre, National Library of Australia

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