Despite the intermittent nature of Elizabeth Maconchy’s orchestral writing, her lifelong commitment to the art demonstrates an extraordinary level of variety, which maintains an ongoing technical focus on specific issues: dialogues between instruments (through a concentration on counterpoint and forms of concerto grosso), a general economy of thematic material (particularly with the repetition and continuing development of single motifs and intervals), the use of short and condensed formal structures, a commitment to tonality and rhythmic energy, and an increasing concern with sonority. This chapter frames Maconchy’s orchestral works in the context of Charles Stanford’s Anglo-Irish formalist legacy. The question of ‘evolution or revolution’ is a recurring one in early twentieth-century British music history, and while Maconchy’s compositional development through empirical experimentation (a form of gradual evolution) is in line with a great many British composers of the era, the commentary on European ‘revolutionary’ modernism(s) that her orchestral works provide is a prodigious one.