Abstract
Maud MacCarthy was born in 1882 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland. Her father Dr. Charles William MacCarthy made a name for himself as a physician, surgeon, painter, sculptor, and musician. Her mother was MacCarthy’s second wife, the contralto, Marion Cuddihy. Because of Charles’s ill health, the family moved to Australia in 1885, where Maud spent her early childhood. She later wrote about her Irish Roman Catholic parents that they were talented amateur musicians “gifted with inborn psychism.”1 In Australia, Charles composed several comic operas and patriotic war songs like Our Boys, You Bet!: Recruiting Song (ca. 1915), Oh Mother, Asthore!: A Soldier’s Parting (1916), and The Boys of the Dardanelles (ca. 1915). His best-known piece remains The Lyceum Valse (1895) for piano, “dedicated with much affection to his little daughter Maud MacCarthy,” who is pictured on the sheet music’s cover with her violin. He also lectured and wrote on music. A child prodigy on the violin, Maud practiced “for some six hours a day for fourteen years” and had no time to read or to go to school.2 Yet, she had “visions,” “wonderful dreams,” and “natural psychic experiences,” and overall was “thrilled” by religion: “not a religion, not any study of books” but a longing “for alignment with Cosmic Consciousness.”3 During her youth, she also became familiar with the Bhagavad Gita and Theosophy, about which over the years she became “more convinced than ever of its underlying truth.”4
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Notes
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John Foulds, “An East and West Concert,” The Musical Times, 79, no. 1146, 1938, 623.
Cyril Scott, “Introduction,” in Through the Eyes of the Masters, ed. David Anrias, London: Routledge, 1932.
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© 2013 Bob van der Linden
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van der Linden, B. (2013). John Foulds and Maud MacCarthy: Internationalism, Theosophy, and Indian Music. In: Music and Empire in Britain and India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311641_4
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