Hullo,
this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. Today, our subject is the portrayal of
children and childhood in music.
Very
probably, what we think of as childhood, a magical time of innocence, intuitive
wisdom, light responsibilities and inexhaustible fantasy, has its origins more in
religion or secular idealism and the wishful imagination of careworn adults than
in anything we felt at the time. With
unprecedented zeal, in the face of the Industrial Revolution and hard-faced
economic thinking on society, on utility, on rationalization, artists created a
blessed time when man and woman could exist in a kind of Eden, where Good co-existed
with the Evil and Knowledge of Evil about it, and only slowly lost its innocent
vision in the face of what used to be called ‘custom’. Custom and financial profit had nothing to do
with it... One could learn from
children, one could become like a child and enter however fleetingly the
earthly Heaven of living however fleetingly according to one’s nature where
nothing was forced, false or pettifogging, where one could be fanciful,
unaffected, free from adult narrow-mindedness, pride and material greed,
philosophical in the truest, most free-spirited and visionary manner. On the other hand, in the same age, shy dons
could pursue upper-middle-class children into an ‘artistic’ state of nakedness
with the camera-lens, and most employers could exploit a working-class child,
body and soul, in the blackest depths of poverty and squalor, for money.
Sir
Edward Elgar (1857--1934) was one who expressed the marital and parental
longing that was de rigeur in the
industrial age. It was one’s duty to marry and have children, in a world where
there was much still to do. One who remained a bachelor and never fathered a
child was the writer Charles Lamb; he expressed his longings in an essay, Dream Children - A Reverie, in which he
met the girl and boy who might have been.
Elgar, a loving husband and father, found resonances in this - he
responded to dreams of romantic love and childhood - or what might have been -
all his life. He headed his two little
pieces for orchestra, Dream-Children with the conclusion of
the essay: “We are not of Alice, nor of thee...
We are nothing and less than
nothing, and dreams. We are only what
might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of
ages before we have existence and a name.”
Track One: Elgar, Dream-Children, Op 43.
Alice
was the middle name of Elgar’s wife.
Before concluding that he was discontented in marriage, one should bear
in mind that the two pieces entitled Dream
Children were originally intended to
be the middle movements of a Symphony, and thus, were a mirage of the kind of music
he wished most to write Perhaps, at forty-five, two years older than male
life-expectancy in Britain in Nineteen Oh-Two, he felt that he would never
write that most significant and worthy of works, a Symphony.
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM. Stay with us as we explore music with a theme of children and childhood.
Robert
Schumann, 1810-1856, was one of the family-men of music. He not only wrote
music for children to play and sing, but fostered much more, as he was the
first great composer to write such music with the intention of beguiling the
nursery-musician. Hitherto, piano-music
for children had been mechanical, scalic, functional, designed to promote
flexibility of the fingers and command of articulation, tone and dynamics.
As
might be expected, Schumann was concerned to promote the poetic sensibility
that expresses the soul of music.
As
the father of a large family, he played with his children and made notes on
their behaviour for their and his amusement - with no thoughts of creating a data--base,
incidentally. True, on one occasion in
later life his extreme short--sightedness caused him to lift his lorgnette to a
group of children in the street; ask them vaguely what they wanted and leave
them apparently unaware that in asking them, “What is it, children?” he had been
addressing his own.
Spring Song is be found at the more
elementary end of the two-part Album of
Childhood, a quickly-written book of pieces composed full-heartedly during
a time of varied projects.
Track Two, Schumann: Spring Song, from Album Fur Die Jugend.
Charles
Williams was possibly the most gifted of British composers of light music in
the last century, his talent cognate with that of the American, Leroy
Anderson. The Old Clock-maker was also famously used by BBC radio, as the signatune-tune
for a popular series drawn from the Jennings School-books. The sleepy, well-regulated world of Linbury
Court School, the village of Linbury and town of Dunhambury, and the world-view
of a quirky, happy-go-lucky schoolboy destined somehow always to derange the
routine of uncomprehending adults, seem expressed perfectly in this miniature
for orchestra that is, by the way, beautifully-written, its constituents so
impressive that the means are never noticed for themselves.
Track Three: Charles Williams: The Old Clock-maker.
Our
fourth piece is by Max Steiner, from his glorious music for the film The Adventures of Mark Twain. This is music of great sweep and also moments
of comedy, humour in the truest sense and in addition - at moments of pathos connected
with destiny and the passing of Halley’s comet at the author’s birth and death
- intimate beauty. It is a locus classicus
of music composed in an accessible, romantic, picturesque manner that yet
suggests far more than indebtedness to any model. Mark Twain was a man who despised notions of
‘growing up’, and whose boy-characters tend to ‘light out’ at any sign of ‘sivilisation’. To Steiner’s music one can feel a lifetime
touched - for better or worse - by the genius of childhood, by a fascination
with life, a love for what people are even as the absurdities - and tragedies -
of life are played out. I first listened
prepared to hate Hollywood hokum. The self-congratulatory regard for
funny-man-become-monument born of sentiments such as ‘only in America’, etc, etc,
must have inspired tedium dotted with worse, but listening, I realized that
this soundtrack, with all its genre-qualities, was a masterpiece that resounds
in mind at any moment of the day or night.
The joke was on me. The melodies
and their treatment demand a big, romantic orchestra and Straussian
orchestration, and get it. It is
astonishing not to have seen a film, but to see it by listening to a soundtrack
composed moment to moment.
I
almost hope never to watch the film for which this music was composed. If one heard it in a concert and billed as a
Symphonic Poem, it would send one home thinking many art-composers of the
greatest reputation outdone.
Here
is The Toy-shop.
Track Four, Max Steiner: from The Adventures of Mark Twain
Next,
we come to Debbie Wiseman’s music for a more recent movie, Tom’s Midnight Garden. The story of a boy who goes to live in an
old house, steps back in time at the grandfather clock’s striking thirteen, and
befriends a young Victorian girl, is very touchingly treated - free--wheeling
piano and clarinet give way to dark tones of woodwind, low strings and brass
that represent the mystery of the gloomy old house and Time passing, and
nothing is quite the same again... Here
is the first movement of a three movement suite, the orchestra conducted by the
composer...
Track Five: Debbie Wiseman: Music for Tom’s Midnight Garden
Time No Longer.
One
has to move on – and up.
The
great enemies of childhood will always include utilitarian talk of how to
overcome the idleness of the work-force, and of how to train children up most
cheaply and quickly to serve capital.
All the same, some say that school
grants one the happiest days of one’s life.
Our next piece is a part-song by Sibelius. Kouluti,
The Way To School. The words, by the
Finnish poet, Koskenniemi, paint one a picture of the path the poet took to
school, which he sees in his dreams to this day; the girl with whom he fell in
love and for whom he wrote his first poem.
He remembers his headmaster, who strode always with his head held high. He will never forget that path till the day
he dies, perhaps because back then, he thought that
‘Somewhere far off
A wonderful life is waiting for
me...’
Track
Six, Sibelius: Kouluti
Our
seventh piece is by Gabriel Fauré 1845-192-4, taken from his Dolly Suite. Written for piano duet and the children of a
friend, it was later orchestrated by his pupil, Henri Rabaud.
The Berceuse is well-known, owing
to its use in piano-duet arrangement on BBC Radio as the signature tune for Listen With Mother. It is hard to say whether it works better as
a piano-duet or orchestral piece.
Possibly, familiarity with the style of orchestration used causes the Rabaud
confection to seem too smooth, the mixed scoring blending in fatal rhythmical and harmonic indeterminateness. Or nostalgia makes me prefer the piano-duet.
Track Seven, Fauré: Berceuse
from Dolly Suite
Now, I know of only one composer who
also wrote a manual on the use of grenades.
George Dyson was born in Halifax in 1883 and died in 1964. A fellow of the Royal College of Organists
from the age of sixteen, he was taught by Stanford at the Royal College of Music
and held posts at Rugby, Marlborough and Winchester
before becoming director of the College in 1937. He wrote much choral, instrumental and
orchestral music in a style that owes most to Parry, Richard Strauss, Delius,
and what Vaughan Williams in connection with his own music referred to as ‘French
polish’. The Children’s Suite, After
Walter De La Mare, was probably written
in about 1920, four years after Dyson had been invalided home as a shell-shock case
from France. There are four movements,
of which we shall hear the last, Whirligig: Di Ballo.
The outright carefreeness of this piece expresses something of the exultancy
of childhood - having momentum, a good tune wrapped in folds of brass and
strings à la Strauss or D’Indy, some Edward German in the working-out and more
than a touch of Fauré and Dolly in
the pathos-laden moments before the brisk close. Dyson was more at home with large-scale choral
and orchestral writing, but here shows a gift for the miniature.
Track
8, Dyson: The Children’s Suite, Movt lV,
Whirligig: Di Ballo
Now, we turn to the composer of a fine
requiem and many film-scores, Zbigniew Preisner. He wrote a magical work in his music for Fairy-Tale:
A True Story, a film based loosely on events that occurred in the Yorkshire
mill-town of Cottingley, on the outskirts of Leeds: when two young girls photographed fairies by
the beck near their cottage, to the excitement, when they saw the unfakable photographic
record, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Psychical Research Society luminary,
Edward Gardner. Conan Doyle was moved to
write a book, The Coming of The Fairies. For many decades, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths
insisted that they had captured the likenesses of fairy-folk with a Box-Brownie,
and it became nationally important to the wisest of adults as to well-meaning
cranks that they had done... Preisner captures the magic of childhood in
fine webs of gossamer-sound. The edge of
modern dissonance and unmasked use of bare
timbres of instruments within the orchestra accompany a primitive order of
melody that possesses a certain quality of naive art in addition.
Children are not fools and only the more
skilful composer can express with an appearance of truth how they feel and
think in a world that only reveals more of its unaccountable mysteries of
reality and justice as one’s stock of knowledge and experience and, in turn, ability to judge, increase. Let’s hear Preisner’s treatment of how Frances
first meets Yorkshire fairies down by the wooded beck on a bright afternoon,
after School.
Track
9, Preisner: Fairy-tale, A True Story -
Number 7, The Beck
A programme with a guarded reference to
shy dons at the outset ought to make mention of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, or Alice Through The Looking-glass - and The Rev Charles Dodgson, aka,
Lewis Carroll.
Here to end our concert is a piece
connected with the latter book. Jabberwocky is based on a grimly edifying
ballad that has been translated into German amongst other languages, and tells
the tale of a youth who goes forth on a quest, meets a terrifying monster and overcomes
it, to return home to his proud Father with its head...
Jabberwocky, as portrayed
with orchestra for a theatre-production by the Liverpool-born composer, Alfred
Reynolds.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that
only a child can wield a vorpal sword!
This is Mike Burrows saying, see you
again soon!
Track
Ten, Alfred Reynolds: Alice Through The
Looking-glass, Jabberwocky.
