Mirrie Hill

Mirrie Irma Hill (née Solomon) (1 December 18891 May 1986) was an Australian composer. Early life Mirrie Irma Jaffa Hill was born on 1 December 1889 in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. She was the youngest of three, born to Levien Jaffa Solomon and Kate Caroline. She had a good ear early on, detecting dissonance and running out of the room whenever her aunt would play Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. She studied composition with Alfred Hill, who would later become her husband, at Shirley School, Edgecliff. With Alfred Hill as conductor, Godfrey Smith and the Sydney Amateur Orchestral Society performed Mirrie Hill’s first orchestral work, Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra, in 1914 at the Sydney Town Hall. She was unable to study in Germany because of World War I, so she instead went to the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music, where she was awarded a scholarship by the director, Henri Verbrugghen. Mirrie Hill described her own music as “not in the very modern idiom but entirely individual as to style and content.” Although she did create many longer pieces of music for orchestra and ensembles, Hill became known as a miniaturist because a great deal of her published works wer