Elizabeth Maconchy was born in Hertfordshire and trained at the Royal College of Music, London, where one of her teachers was Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although regarded as one of the most brilliant students at the RCM, Maconchy did not win the prestigious Mendelssohn Scholarship for study overseas because, in the director's opinion, "You will only get married and never write another note".However, Maconchy did study overseas, working in Prague in 1929 with Karel Jirak, and in 1930 Jirak conducted the premiè re of her Piano Concerto with the Prague Philarmonic Orchestra. In the same year, Maconchy got married and saw the first performance of her orchestral suite, The Land, at the London Promenade Concerts, conducted to great acclaim by Sir Henry Wood.
In the 1930s, Maconchy suffered from tuberculosis, but continued to work. In 1933, she composed String Quartet No.1, the first of her justly famous series of 13 string quartets. She referred to her quartet writing as "an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion".
In the 1940s and 1950s, Maconchy's output increased and she received many commissions. Her String Quartet No.4, composed during World War 2, was highly acclaimed. Her String Quartet No.5 (1948) was the first to be recorded and it attracted a really wide audience. Maconchy's mastery of music for strings is also seen in her Symphony for Double String Orchestra (1945-48) and her Concertino for Clarinet and String Orchestra (1945). Her overture Proud Thames won a competition for Coronation overture in 1953.
In subsequent decades, she widened her repertoire to include opera and choral music. Between 1957 and 1967 she wrote 3 one-act operas: The Sofa (1957), The Departure (1961) and The Three Strangers (1967). Her work for voices includes her settings of Dylan Thomas' And Death Shall Have No Dominion (1969) and Louis MacNeice's Prayer Before Birth (1971), both receiving recognition as deeply-felt and moving works. In 1969, her String Quartet No.9 mourned the Soviet occupation of Prague, the city she had once known so well.
Maconchy devoted much time and energy to encouraging younger composers and served as president of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. She was the first woman Chair of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain and became a Dame of the British Empire in 1987.
