greatest achievement, and gave birth to a daughter. Maconchy did much to improve the conditions of composers, being elected Chair of the Composers Guild of Great Britain in 1959, a position she held for a number of years. She was also President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. Maconchy was a socialist, and her activism extended to supporting the Democratic/Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and other causes. Maconchy's friends included the English composer Elisabeth Lutyens, the Welsh composer Grace Williams, the Irish composer Ina Boyle, and the Czech music critic . Maconchy once declared that: "for me, the best music is an impassioned argument". She died in Norwich, England. Compositions Maconchy is considered to be "one of the finest composers the British Isles have produced". Her work has been compared to that of Bartok, who was an acknowledged influence, and also to Beethoven and Mozart, as well as (favourably) to contemporaries such as Britten. She produced over 200 works. According to Ailie Bloony, Maconchy was "a gestural composer, concerning herself with short musical fragments, as opposed to large-scale concepts or templates", at least in part because of her "ideology" as a composer, so that "she never planned anything out, musically speaking, in any great detail in advance of composition, [and by using shorter formats] she could afford to explore the possibilities implicit in the ideas themselves as they arose". In terms of style, Maconchy had "a predilection for intervallic composition", and, "profoundly influenced by the resonances produced by certain intervals, [she] tended to build works around one or a small number of intervals, which varied according to the work in question". A favoured "harmonic device" was the "simultaneous use of major and minor sonorities", which "came to denote episodes of heightened emotion". It has been argued that her work is often "driven by rhythm", which gives it its characteristic confluence of "energy, dynamism and imagination". Maconchy's cycle of thirteen string quartets, composed between 1932 and 1983, is regarded as the peak of her musical achievements. Historian of music Anna Beer has contended that "Maconchy loved the quartet form because it represented a debate, a dialectic between four balanced, individual, impassioned voices." She also wrote for voice. Maconchy wrote three one-act operas, including the erotic comic opera The Sofa, based on an eighteenth century novel, and stylistically in "dialogue with Mozart", which shocked the audience for