CB
81 Bells (Rpt)
Intro 1:
Voluntary for Organ, MJ Burrows
(Froso Church,
Jamtland, Sweden)
Intro 2:
Carillon by Sibelius - Kallion Kirkon Kallot - Bells of Kallio Church
Hello and welcome to Classical Break on
Somer Valley FM. I’m Mike Burrows.
Introduced by a Carillon written for Kallio
Church by Sibelius, today’s programme has the theme of bells in music.
Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942) and
born in Sweden was a composer of wide accomplishment whose cause was perhaps
not best served by his day job of music critic.
His acidulous reviews earned him at least one public boxing of the ears
and he was as much despised as feared.
When one comes to his own music the picture is a lot more
interesting. He wrote piano pieces
inspired by and on a par with Grieg’s and symphonies and incidental music that
repay attention. He lacked originality
rather than a good style, and chose his models with real self-knowledge. At least one of his Symphonies, the Third, Same
Ätnam or Lapland should be well-known.
Our first piece today is one from his first
book of Flowers of Frösö which were lyric pieces associated with life at
his country home, Sommerhagen. Vid
Frösö Kyrka. At Frösö Church.
Track One: Peterson Berger: Vid Frösö Kyrka.
Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) was a
Modernist in modern times. He was not
wholly uncritical of the German and Austrian composers who dominated the
Modernist movement, while despising the contemporary domination of Italian
music by modish composers of verismo opera, men like Puccini, Mascagni and
Leoncavallo, who saw themselves as heirs of Verdi. He worked as a teacher, a thorough-going
editor of the music of long-forgotten Italian composers, polyphonists and
instrumentalists including Monteverdi and Vivaldi, while developing his own
quite individual and often bafflingly complex style. He was in some ways a forerunner of Post-Modernism, mixing idioms ancient and modern
and also writing symphonies that defy any conventional analysis and whose moods
are often the only thread holding them together. Famous and successful among international
groupings of composers, he felt unappreciated at home although he rose to some
eminence; his maturity coincided with the rise of Fascism and he had a poor and
bitter relationship with the Party, where he was sometimes found embarrassing
to the cause and at other times too independent-minded; very probably his
talent and aesthetic were not understood by the Leader who was always right,
let alone many of Mussolini’s court, and he was an unreliable sycophant.
Although the plum jobs and commissions
never came his way, his reputation suffered greatly by his association with the
regime. His Third Symphony is entitled Of
The Bells. It was written in
reaction to the occupation of Italy by Nazi troops after the fall of
Mussolini’s government and Italy’s aligning herself with the Allies. To him, bells symbolised an eternal power
against which earthly tyranny could do nothing, as in much else in his life he
defeated his temporal despair by a faith in religious or aesthetic tradition. He was a very strange - or normal - kind of
Modernist for the times. Let’s hear the
third movement, a Scherzo, marked Vivace or Lively.
Track Two: Malipiero:
Symphony No 3, ‘Delle Compane’.
Now, a Breton Adaptation for choir of a
Russian folksong, Une Cloche Dans Le Matin. A sleigh-bell is heard... We leave off everything to sing a song in the
wind - wait for the noise of black horses who long for the gallop. It is a choir of a million voices on the
wind, the song of those who can only dream of being riders. The sun will return, the spring will bloom
again. The bell heard in the night is
the song of until we meet again - it dies in the distance more completely than songs
in the wind...
Track
Three: Folksong: Une Cloche Dans Le Matin.
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM,
and I’m Mike Burrows. The theme of
today’s programme is of bells in music.
William Alwyn (1905-1985), a writer and
painter as well as composer, wrote music in many genres and is most famous for
his film music. He was an
under-appreciated symphonist, writing five symphonies, a sinfonietta and
numerous concertante pieces. For his
Fifth Symphony he wrote a short work taking its inspiration but no programme
from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, a favourite work on ancient
customs of urn-burial. The finale is perhaps
the most arresting section of the piece which seems a bitter expression of
mortality and as such dominated by a representation of tolling bells in the
brass. Building from a quiet opening,
this is a more concise and affecting movement perhaps than Holst’s Saturn, the
Bringer of Old Age, certainly it is colder and crueller and rises to a
paradoxically strong, keening protest only for a dying fall of acceptance to
find reconciliation a benignant influence.
It seems that fear or grief has nowhere else to run but down. They have travelled a via dolorosa; or
perhaps we have witnessed the rites of burial of Celtic or Roman Britain, a
lonely procession, final tributes of tears and ululation, and interment. The scoring warms, the violins and brass,
which have been so powerful, pass with the soul’s fear and striving after
survival - or grief at an unbearable loss.
In the consolatory thought of returning to the earth from which one
came, there is something as warm as the sun.
The very terseness of this movement provides its close with real,
hard-won room for pathos and pity, the sections of the orchestra interplaying
at last and at something like peace -
catharsis of terror and pity occurs; the tragedy is over, its crimes forgiven,
its misfortunes understood with humanity and accepted - and forms only a part
of the Symphony’s claim on one’s memory.
Track Four:
William Alwyn: Symphony Number
Five, Hydriotaphia, Finale.
Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote a Symphony, The
Bells, based on a poem by Poe, but his output is haunted by the deep and
tinny jostling of Orthodox bells - like its znamenniy, or chant, a
symbol of the Church’s Byzantine traditions of ritual - from his teenage
C-sharp Prelude to his last, greatest work, the Symphonic Dances. There is something wild, uncontrolled and yet
unrelenting about this sound: one might
almost think of it as a nightmare for overworked pianists, which the young
Rachmaninoff certainly was from an unconscionably early age! As summons to or signal of liberation - or New
Life - after, highly stipulative
observance, it is not to be ignored or subsumed in secular life. It dins itself into one’s consciousness in
joy or merciless clangour, hope or condemnation. Something of the fixity of its purpose is
caught in the fourth of his Etude-Tableaux for Two Pianos, Opus Five, written when
he was eighteen and a student at Moscow Conservatoire.
The twice-played chant, Christ Is Risen is
accompanied by an ostinato from the belfry. Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, an expert in
Orthodox music, was impressed by the piece at a perfomance given in the home of
Beleiev, the important publisher. He was
impressed, with the proviso that the bells-figuration wearied the ear as never
still; perhaps reserved for the repetition of the chant it would be more
effective. Rachmaninoff shrugged. “’I was very stuck-up back then,’” he
later wrote, “and I simply said, “Why,when in
life it always comes together with the bells?!’ And I never changed a note.”
Track Five:
Rachmaninoff: Etude Tableau, Opus
Five, Number Four, Paques (Easter)
According to Balinese lore, improvisatory
Indonesian gong-music, gamelan, may have had its origins in Japan. It is based on traditional elements - led by
double-headed drum, played on a mixed ensemble of large and small gongs,
metallaphones - a kind of glockenspiel made up of metal bars - other drums,
stringed and even blown instruments, in complex yet insistent time composed of
several individual rhythms and melodies; there is no display of ego, the improvization
a blend, conflicting or fitting according to what it accompanies in dance or
spoken theatre - one genre accompanies all-night productions! - at work or at
village- and family-festivities. It is
not a music of academic harmonic, tonal relations or formal balance as they
were once understood in the West and must at first have seemed utterly
primitive and alien to the crowds who witnessed performances at Exhibitions in
Europe in the late Nineteenth Century, but since, it has become an influence on
Classical musicians as far apart as Debussy and the Reichian minimalists, and
on jazz- and popular music.
Gamelan has a number of forms and
instrumental variations of its own, all with terms, down to the use of
particular kinds of hard- and soft-headed stick, and has distinct Courtly and
rural styles.
Here is Puspa Wresti, which
accompanies a ritual dance - as
offerings are brought to a shrine.
Track Six:
Gamelan, Puspa Wresti
Claude Debussy wrote La Cathedrale Engloutie,
The Engulfed Cathedral as the tenth of his first Book of Preludes,
completed in Nineteen Ten, when he was forty-eight. Rather than with keys, he headed these pieces
with highly symbolic, not to say self-conscious, subtitles, a daring innovation
as recently as the age of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. These are - he would sneeringly have said -
‘impressions’ for imbeciles, and what he would prefer to call ‘realities’,
poetic in the Baudelairian sense of ‘correspondances’ between the Arts
rather than easy evasions of the
conventional, clearly-hewn walk through the twenty-four keys. Innovation is not the only aim. New, valid expression of the spiritual
joint-relationship between images, poetry, music and life itself, between
conscious Art and the eternal beauty and truth that are veiled by what we more
or less take for real. They leave
classical harmony far behind, influenced by Russian whole-tone and Balinese
Gamelan-music, but are no less complex and skilfully-made for that: as a dandyish student, he had enjoyed
improvizing before lectures for his classmates at the Paris Conservatoire, his
harmonic progressions shamelessly undoctrinaire on the professorial piano on
which would be played examples from the approved piece analysed during the
lecture!
On a solitary Breton bay, amid sounds of
the upper world and highly coloured waves the body of a cathedral, ruined or by some miracle,
whole, is pictured in the reverberance of deep, solemn bells, which rises to
its loudest and fades into silence, tantalizing those who have ears to hear
them for a few short minutes and may never hear them again: can one imagine the holiness made of a proud
cathedral lost forever to the ultimate otherness of the sea, now that the bells
are mute...?
Perhaps music paints and verbalizes
something of this.
Track Seven: Debussy: Preludes, First Book, No 10, La Cathedral Engloutie
In most Christian National cultures, the
driving off of evil or the otherworld of earthbound spirits can be achieved by
the sound of Church-bells. Our next
piece illustrates this phenomenon.
Everyone knows In The Hall of The Mountain King, by Edvard Grieg,
characterized by him as a piece of cow-dung, so ultra-Norwegian Nationalist in
tone that he couldn’t bear to hear it.
It is a number from his incidental music to Peer Gynt, the most
inspired shaggy dog-story told in verse by modern man.
The peasant, Peer, is an irresponsible
dreamer descended from a once-wealthy family of the same. His vain, idle life of tall tales, more
filled with stretchers than any medical man’s, is plunged into existentialist
drama when he abducts a not exceptionally reluctant girl who is about to be
married. After ruining and leaving her
on the mountain-side, he encounters three cow-herdesses with meadow-morals, and
after this runs his head against a rock; after which, he meets the Woman In
Green. He rides off to her home with her
on a pig. She turns out to be the
daughter of the Dovre-Gubben - the King, literally, the Gaffer of the
Trolls.
He likes their complacent motto - it could
be his - Unto thyself be...enough, but after entertainment, he refuses
to scratch his eye out and wear a tail in order to see the world as the
huldra-folk do and thus be fit to marry a troll. This is unfortunate. The trolls pursue him from their hall
shouting, “Slaughter him!”.
At the height of this action, church bells
are heard and they cause the hall to collapse in unholy confusion and cacophony
- in the panic, he escapes. For
now. His life of travel and a long,
empty search for his soul is just beginning.
There is a menace and malicious energy to
Grieg’s music that gives the unanswerable lie to all who believe his incidental
music to be sweet and sentimental, or its writer to have been any less daring
in his chosen field than was his dramatist in his. Peer
Gynt Chased By the Trolls.
Track Eight: Grieg:
Incidental Music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Peer Gynt Chased By the
Trolls.
Our last track is one I remember from
childhood and the B-side of a forty-five that redeemed whatever Side A
was. It is by Ronald Binge, (1910-1979),
a composer of light music which reminds
one of the truth of Tchaikovsky’s remark that there is no light music, only
good or bad music.Sailing By, Elizabethan Serenade, The Watermill,
Inamorata, Autumn Dream were once well-known. Cornet Carillon has been a staple of
Christmas brass-band programmes for many years, and with good reason. It is quiet, beautifully-written in its
simplicity and not for trolls. To write
good music in any idiom is given to few composers; this is a masterly airing of
scale-phrases and common chords ending on a final bluesy discord - the perfect
cadence, given that bells are hypnotic in their resonance, a matter of
partials, overtones and undertones, each bell emitting a jumble of notes, and
can clash with a quiet sweetness as strange and memorable as any New Year’s Eve
full peal heard from the standpoint of those pulling on the sallies.
This was Classical Break on Somer Valley
FM, presented by Mike Burrows. I hope
you liked this programme and will join me for the next. Cheers.
Track Nine: Ronald Binge: Cornet Carillon
Play-out Track: Musette Francaise for church organ, MJ Burrows
