The mother of the title is Emmeline Pankhurst, the two sisters her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. David Bedford’s piece about them is a short dramatic song-cycle (the text, by Allison Powell, includes stage directions) for three sopranos and pre-recorded tape. The tape evokes the sounds of the Pankhursts’ era (hymns, a barrel-organ, a waltz, martial trumpets as the First World War looms) but modulates it via the music of our own (a regular beat, sounding like a drum kit; ‘minimalist’ ostinato accompaniment figures) and the obvious models for political music, Weill and Eisler.
Mother and daughters were at first united in their struggle for women’s suffrage, but Sylvia’s work among the very poor in the East End led her politically leftwards, while her mother and sister felt that this might antagonize the influential people among whom they were campaigning. The story is dramatized in a sort of imaginary suffragette anthem, a confrontation between Sylvia and Christabel (who has taken refuge in Paris and a genteel lifestyle; Sylvia sings to a waltz melody while Christabel has a more determined 4/4), a lament for those who have died or suffered for the suffragette cause, a trio (in which Sylvia expresses her horror at poverty in a Weill-like arioso while her mother and sister gabble off the names of ‘establishment’ figures she should write to), the final break (Sylvia opposes the First World War – ‘War helps leaders, no one else’ – while Emmeline and Christabel reply ‘Our country comes before our cause’) and an epilogue in which Sylvia sorrowfully reflects on the gulf that has opened between them.
The music is tuneful and extremely direct; I can imagine it being effective and moving in a simple staging. My difficulty with the piece is those undertones of minimalism and pop, which sail perilously close to the banal and the bland. But to tell such a story to an audience wider than the ‘contemporary music public’ it may well be necessary to run that risk. Perhaps instead of deploring the fact that both pop and minimalism (which have reached that wider audience) are so melodically impoverished, I should be commending Bedford for his courage as well as his skill.'