Margaret Sutherland

Margaret Ada Sutherland (20 November 189712 August 1984) was an Australian composer, among the best-known female musicians her country has produced. Career Margaret Sutherland’s father was George Sutherland, a journalist and writer and member of a prominent Scottish-Australian family. The painter Jane Sutherland was her aunt and the physicist and mathematician William Sutherland was her uncle. Her sister, Ruth Sutherland was a painter and writer. Her first piano teacher was another aunt, Julia Sutherland (1861-1930), a pupil of Louis Pabst, a German émigré then considered to be Melbourne’s leading piano teacher (himself a pupil of Anton Rubinstein, and Percy Grainger’s first teacher). The Four Temperaments (orchestrated by Robert W. Hughes in 1964), concertos for various instruments (including violin), a symphonic poem entitled Haunted Hills (1953), and the chamber opera The Young Kabbarli (1964; libretto by Maie Casey). A severe stroke in 1969 ended her composing career. Despite the emphasis on non-vocal works in her total output, one of Sutherland’s most recognised pieces is “In the Dim Counties” (1936) for voice and piano accompaniment from Five Songs. Sutherland sets her music