Ethel Barns

Ethel Barns was born in London in 1873. Her father was a merchant. She had her first violin lessons at a music school in Watford, a town near London. According to her own account, her teacher once took her to play for Joseph Joachim, the most famous violinist of the day and a close friend of Brahms. Joachim advised her to go to Berlin to study. Her parents said no, and at 13 she entered the Royal Academy of Music in London instead. There she studied the violin, the piano and composition.

She became a fine violinist and a good pianist too. In 1895 she played in the first season of the Proms, the big summer concerts in London, and she played there for thirty years, often her own music. In 1899, at 25, she married the singer Charles Phillips. For many years the two of them ran their own series of chamber music concerts in London, where she played her own works. She always performed under her own name.

About fifteen years after she had played for him as a child, Joachim himself played her second violin sonata in Germany. Other great violinists played her music too. The young star Mischa Elman recorded her most popular piece, Swing Song, in 1907. Sleep, Weary Heart was published in 1911. In 1903 an American book about women in music said that she “heads the list of violin composers among women.” She died in 1948 in Maidenhead, a town west of London, at 75.

Ethel Barns wrote mainly for her own instrument, and she played it herself. Today young violinists still play her pieces in their exams.