The subject of this chapter is an Irish female composer who died in 1945 without leaving any major impact on Irish musical history or its corresponding historiography. Given these circumstances, the question as to why she would be of interest to readers in the twenty-first century is not unjustified. The facts are that Alicia Adélaïde Needham used to be a household name in musical circles on both sides of the Irish Sea from about the 1890s to 1920. In terms of how frequently her works were performed, she may have equalled or perhaps surpassed male colleagues such as Charles Villiers Stanford or Hamilton Harty – who remained incomparably more famous than her, not least because they wrote more large-scale music, whereas Needham preferred the small forms of songs and piano music. In contrast to her reputation one hundred years ago, knowledge today about this composer and her work is very limited. This alone justifies her rescue from oblivion.

Needham was born on 31 October 1863 in Oldcastle, County Meath; her maiden name was Montgomery. She attended Victoria High School, a boarding school in Derry, for four years, the exact period of which is unknown. Following this, she spent a year in Castletown on the Isle of Man. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London, at first for one year only, most likely the academic year 1880–81: her teachers included Frank Davenport (harmony and counterpoint) and the Irish pianist and composer Arthur O’Leary (piano); occasionally, she received lessons from George Macfarren and Ebenezer Prout. It is not known what she did in the intervening three years before she resumed her studies at the RAM in 1884; in any case, she graduated in 1887 and became a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (LRAM) in 1889. In 1893 she further passed the examinations to the Associateship of the Royal College of Music (ARCM). In the meantime, she married the London-based physician Joseph Needham in 1892 and gave birth to their only child, also called Joseph, in 1900.

Actively supported by her husband who organised concerts for her and secured her earliest publications, Needham began her professional musical career in 1894 with a number of publications and recitals of piano music and songs.