Known after marriage as Alice Mary Meadows White
(London 19 May 1839 - 4 December 1884)
Smith was born in London, the third child of a well-being family. She showed an attitude for music since her early years and took private lessons from William Sternale Bennett and George Alexander MacFarren, publishing her first song in 1857. In November 1867, the year of her wedding to a lawyer, Frederick Meadows White, was elected professional associated woman of the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1884, she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music. The same year, after a period of illness in which he went abroad to try to recover, he died of typhoid fever in London.
Among her chamber compositions, there are four quartets for piano, three string quartets, and a sonata for clarinet (1870). Her orchestral compositions include six concert-by-concerts and two symphonies. Her first symphony, in Do Minore, was written at the age of 24 and performed by the Musical Society of London in 1863; The second, in Do Minore, was written for the Alexandra Palace competition from 1876 but was never performed.
Smith composed two large songs for the stage: an operetta, Gisela of Rüdesheim, for choir, orchestra, and soloists, performed in 1865 at the Fitzwilliam Music Society, Cambridge, and The Masque of Pandora (1875), for which the orchestration was never completed.
Smith's work includes one of the greatest collections of sacred choral music of a composer and six hymns, three songs (and the beginning of a quarter), as well as a short sacred cantata of exile, based on episodes of Esther by Jean Racine. Her hymns that have the goods of this world and from the waters of Babylon were performed in a liturgical context to St. Andrew's, Wells Street by Sir Joseph Barnby in February 1864, making them the first recorded example of a composer to be used for the liturgy of the Church of England.
In 1880, she paid her attention to the writing of sang on a large scale, all published by Novello and Co. These included Ode to the North-East Wind for choir and orchestra, Ode to the Passioni (1882), her longest work, performed at the Hereford Festival in that year, and two songs for male voices in the last two years of her life. In her obituary, her husband says that she was working on a setting of the poetry The Valley of Remorse by Louisa Sarah Bervington for choir, soloists, and orchestra, however, there is no manuscript in support of this statement. Of her forty songs, her most popular work was the vocal duet or that we were singing the two of us.
According to an obituary in The Athenaeum of 13 December 1884: "Her music is characterized by elegance and grace ... Power and energy. Her forms were always clear and her ideas free from eccentricity; her sympathies were evidently for the classic rather than for the romantic school".
The symphony in do minor consists of winds in pairs, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, eardrums, and arches. It is in four movements:
I. Grave - allegro ma non troppo - Smith used Mendelssohn's symphonies as models. The movement begins with a melancholy introduction followed by an increase in time and an entrance of 4 jokes to the first theme played by the violets.
This short motif in Do Minore is passed through the ropes before being expanded. Other tools take her back until a transition section brings out the second theme in Mi Bemolle Maggiore, played in the first violins.
The reason is repeated and expanded before leading directly to another theme, a reason played by the horns and responded by the woods: this theme is also expanded and repeated until it leads directly to the first theme, which appears briefly in greater until the initial introduction of the movement announces the repetition of the exposure. The development section begins with the first theme, and Smith undergoes many key changes when some fragments of the theme are emphasized. The second theme also passes through an elaboration that is invaded by segments of the first theme. A transition section brings the recapitulation of themes. The first theme returns to the tail and leads to an increase in time and in the empathetic end of the movement.
II. Allegretto amorevole - The second movement eliminates trumpets and tympans, in music similar to the works for piano of the Signorile Victorian living room. Smith uses the modifier of loving time, a term used by Mendelssohn for the music of a similar feeling.
III. Allegro ma non troppo - little less rough - Smith does not use repetitions in this short movement, similar to a joke. The quality of writing for winds in this movement, as well as the other three, show that Smith had a good feeling for the color of the orchestra.
IV. Allegro Maestoso - A Rondò with the main theme in Do Maggiore. There are fleeting moments of drama and about a solo for Oboe in the middle of the movement that returns to a theme in the first movement. The arches enter and play a pinched accompaniment to the cadenced section, there is a partial closure and the main theme returns. A tail envelops the movement in the good Mendelssohnian tradition.
Smith continued to compose many other works for orchestra, including another symphony in the minor. In 1883, she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music, a prize that was awarded only to the most illustrious and established composers. She continued to compose the most orchestral works of any English composer in the 19th century.
She was not known only in England, since her fame was such that in the United States, the New York Times published a long obituary when she died in 1884 of typhoid fever at the age of 45.
