CB
Gurney And Milford
This
is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I'm Rupert Kirkham. We weren't sure whether to call this programmeTwo
British Outsiders, or Two British Composers Who Regarded Themselves
As Outsiders?
Ivor
Gurney's Cello Sonata went unknown, unplayed, for over 90 years. It
was written sometime after his return from war-service and a year
before he was certified, perhaps in about 1921. It was just one of
the many works that he composed at the time, stimulated by return to
studies at the RCM, and latterly, by defiance when those studies
lapsed. Its single movement-structure is unusual in the genre. Some
hold that it was the first movement of a multi-movement piece left
incomplete, others that it was intended to be self-standing in a
tripartite, possibly part-dissolved sonata- or fantasia-form. As
with Sibelius' later experiments in symphony, argument among
commentators seems vain. Music was not made for form; form was made
for music.
Hints
of Gurney's own E flat Violin-Sonata first and third movement and
setting of Housman's poem Into
My Heart an Air That Kills haunt
this piece.
The
outset is calm – the cello and piano exchanging opposing brief
phrases that hold a wealth of shared trouble and stoicism, also,
beauty - the folkish cello's question answered by quizzically
ambling piano, whose part is deceptively casual in effect. Deceptive
because continuation – continuous development - soon becomes
impassioned, though not violent, in canon, block chords and
filling-out from the piano. There are at least two climaxes between
asides of brown study, in which the baleful implications of theme or
harmony are revealed – in the second climax, one seems to arrive at
the cold clay bleakness through bare harmonic instability of parts of
Butterworth's Rhapsody:
A Shropshire Lad,
or Vaughan Williams' Pastoral
Symphony, a
collision between academic, diatonic or chromatic, and more
down-to-earth modal, procedures.
Consistent growth causes it to be most effective. Canon and
imitations, though not fugue, suggest the influence of Brahms. The
piece is very tightly argued throughout, the elliptical cello line
abetted by insistent rhythm in the piano in which stress tends to be
heavier on the second beat. The music tends to involve sequences of
three steps answered by three steps. Much appears enigmatic
even after the last climax. The close is sudden, with the sense of
having come full-circle: as in the slow movement of the Sonata in E
flat, this music seems to steal into the major only at the last
moment.
It
is as far into austere, interval-generated, organic development as
one may ever have heard Gurney go. It sounds like a near-thirteen
minute cipher, and fascinates by such means, rather than by the
contrast between outer and “inner” dynamics found in the Violin
Sonata in E flat, or any other piece from Ivor Gurney's lamplit room.
There are very few high notes for the cello – it is abetted by the
piano that rambles with two hands on either side of its line.
The
restricted rhythm adds to the sense of intriguing mystery. One seeks
and knows to go on seeking. One senses open air, whether or not one
has one's thought amid the severe grandeur of Cotswold hills or their
deep, stealthily aromatic woods. The moments of release are rare,
and the eyes may see for miles but the mind dwells on the thoughts of
one's setting out.
Track
One: Cello Sonata, Gurney (12.50min)
That
was Ivor Gurney's Cello Sonata, music
of a lonely, powerfully thoughtful man. A close friend said of him,
"Ivor
could only ever do things in his own way..." - but that
was his, not our, misfortune.
Throughout
much of his life, Gurney was a lonely walker, often by choice. On
Service in wartime, he loved nothing better than writing letters home
– real free rambles of letters – or of seeking flowers, wildlife
and ancient works in the French countryside behind the British lines,
the Somme plain and hills standing in, one feels, for the loveliness
to him of the Severn Plain and Cotswold steeps that rear up with
suddenness, yet all on a smaller scale. It would have been his habit
to go accompanied when in France, of course: and, surely, one could
have had no better companion as talker, naturalist and poetic
historian. Mostly, in peacetime, few were free to walk with him. In
the asylum, he walked in imagination, save when taken out to see the
sea, or a visitor (Helen, the widow of Edward, Thomas) brought him
Ordnance Survey maps to look at... Another view may be that the
music of works like the cello sonata has the regularity of detail of
church architecture – narrow-spaced intervals opening out in sweeps
of stone in three planes for those who choose.
Now,
music by another lonely, thoughtful man, one perhaps less confidently
powerful! Robin Milford was born 13 years after Ivor Gurney. Where
Gurney had been the first son and second child of a tailor, Milford
was born late to the affluent family of a founder of the Oxford
University Press. Where Gurney's family had been nonplussed, even
thunderstruck, to be the kin of a musical genius – or bloody
resentful as they were scarcely fools themselves, but had never been
afforded his advantages – Milford's kin were public-school- and
Oxbridge-educated academics and top civil servants, high-achieving,
well-known and well-regarded in their upland fields. Robin sang to
himself in such an environment, where, whenever possible, Gurney had
lit out,
to use Huck Finn's expression, even when attending King's School,
Gloucester and serving as an articled pupil of the organist of
Gloucester Cathedral.
No,
Milford was “sivillised” - to use Huck Finn's word of dread. All
the same, he learned the flute and piano whilst at Rugby and studied
with Holst and Vaughan Williams at the RCM – lucky not to be a
pupil of Gurney's nemesis, the bluff, exacting and rancorous
Professor Stanford - Gurney had written of this mighty
establishment-figure as“That
python!” After
his studies, and having friends like Ralph Vaughan Williams and
Gerald Finzi, to back him, he wrote first songs, then works of
increasing length and ambition. He fairly quickly made
his name when he turned to full-time composing; received regular
commissions from local festivals, his works published and performed
to acceptance as Gurney's had rarely been - yet continued to see
himself as the family failure. Milford's music is a study in subtle
tones, marrying modal folkishness and, through the example of Warlock
and Grieg, if not Delius or Moeran, expressive chromatic harmony.
There's use of certain courtly features of a baroque or earlier
fantasia and arioso-style, though the counterpoint is less developed
than that found in Finzi or Rubbra, less, therefore, of a principle
that dictates form. Melodic transformation is underpinned by
traditional working out of intervals within contrasting themes,
exploring their kinship,
working from contrast to unity. Milford's style is anything but
obvious; often, its spell remains strong and pleasant after a
hearing, but it's precise turns are hard for the unpractised musician
to memorize. It is melodious, wistful, haunting, well-proportioned,
occasionally attempting a darker effect, whereat its inhibitions are
plain. Assuredly logical in working out, it is rarely emphatic, its
courtesies extending to exquisite – but practical – scoring, the
influence of Holst.
The
themes of his Phantasy for Clarinet and String Quartet, Opus33,
dating from the period of his maturity, in 1933, contrasts its first
major theme for violin over other strings – the clarinet
birdcall-like then in urging a moment of exquisite sadness - and the
second for clarinet with strings-accompaniment from the beginning.
The first is incisive, utilizing Scotch snaps (and, as polite as it
is, oddly related to the brusque first subject of
Sibelius' First Symphony), the second utterly original in its
half-wistful, half-humorous jog-trot, whose overall effect is
ingeniously innocent. There had been nothing quite like that second
theme anywhere in chamber-music, in 1933! Its idiom recurred in the
work of Bernard Herrmann. Improvisatory, related themes abound
between the two, all with a sweetly reflective or active folkish air,
one with an Appalachian flavour, another, more brief, with downright
shades of Vaughan-Williams – and Milford proceeds to extract the
most that
he can out of them all in variation, segmenting, juxtaposition and
ordering, in the shortest possible time. All
ends very suddenly, hushedly, but not unhappily. A lovely work.
Track
2: Phantasy Quintet, Op 33, For Clarinet and String Quartet
(11.29min)
A
depressive, he was never confident or outgoing, and enlistment in
the Army brought on a breakdown in
1940.
After prompt discharge, he returned home, but the following
year,lost his only son, Barnaby, to a car-crash. Somehow, with the
help of his wife and friends, he lived for some years longer, but the
deaths of Finzi, in 1956 and Vaughan-Williams, in1958, were great
blows – Finzi was only two years older than he was, and his closest
confidant. In 1959, life dealt him a last cruelty: his works were
dropped from the
Oxford
University Press catalogue. He committed suicide shortly afterwards.
The
Welshman from Balham, Edward Thomas, was the poet closest to Ivor
Gurney's vision. Gurney was a fine poet himself, but, in words, did
not always have Thomas' ability to nail a profound philosophical idea
with
the
use of simple, universal images from nature and unpretentious diction
whose natural observations and conversational cadences owed much to
country life and the sayings of countrymen. Manner disguised the
truth that Thomas was one of the more scholarly and widely-read poets
– and literary critics - of his generation:the matter - and
self-critical acuity behind its shaping – did not.
A
lover of many forms of poetry, Gurney set the work of most of his
contemporaries of note, outside the Imagist or Vorticist camp,
creating lovely songs that demonstrated the strength of the English
poetic tradition. He
found a continuity between Elizabethans and Jacobeans and his
as-beloved 20th Century Georgians and older, perhaps unwitting,
associates of Georgians.
Thomas
died before he could become a Georgian. As an ex-soldier, Gurney
proceeded to set Second-LieutenantThomas's poetry with a will.
Nevertheless, his cycle, Lights
Out, for Baritone, Piano and String Quartet took
seven years to gather, and was completed three years into his
confinement at The Stone House, Dartford, Kent, far from the
Gloucestershire that had been his only real home.
The
cycle was once recorded in the 1960s, but among critics, there were
felt to be too many places in which Gurney's mind failed to shed
light on his or Thomas' purpose, or in which he failed to remember
even the text of the poems – changing odd words as seems to have
been his practice – he learned a phenomenal number of poems by
heart and travelled light - the odd line was missed out altogether.
Here,
the texts have been corrected, if you enjoy the pointillistic, yet
continuous orchestration made by Jeremy Dibble, object-lesson of its
kind though it is, you may wonder why the cycle was not given in its
original dress in this new recording, in which the misrememberings
and omissions perpetrated by the composer have been made good. As
Schumann said of a Liszt transcription of a song by Schubert:
“Wonderful!
So wonderful, indeed, that one was left in no doubt of how good the
original must have been.”
The
first song of the cycle is The
Penny Whistle,
an evocation of a charcoal-burners'-encampment. Since the days of
George Borrow, gipsies, vagabonds, charcoal-burners and other livers
in the out-of-doors had exerted a powerful charm over writers
horrifiedat the materialistic and worseningly illiberal development
of urban, industrial Britain in the 19th
and early 20th
Centuries. In the pincers of “regular employment” and
Workhouse,
Self-Help
and villa--vulgarity, this was understandable. Here is a symbolistic
yet utterly down-to-earth picture of a girl and boy sitting by the
charcoal-burners' caravan-hut in a forest-clearing, the boy playing
the penny-whistle of the title, the girl reading a letter by the
light of an ivory bugle-like crescent moon. They may be
charcoal--burners, but the washing on the line and letter are white,
the caravan-hut gleams like a kingfisher amid the darkness of Winter
and charcoal-burning. Gurney's treatment of this beautiful poem is
characteristically free, feeling and idealistic; the drone-effect
under a trilling piccolo at the opening, and flecks and mixed-scoring
swells of orchestral tone provided by Dibble may well be like the
colourizing of a black and white photograph or etching. The
free-wheeling, moment-by-moment setting is characteristic; it may be noted that it is also
shapely and touching, its accompaniment harmonically complex, but
pin-sharp.
Track 3: The Penny
Whistle, Gurney (2.53min)
Thomas and Gurney loved
the very idea of husbandry of garden or farm. Both used physical
labour – or
long
walks - to ward off, palliate or overcome attacks of depression and
debility. In Scents
– Thomas's
own
title
for this poem of Autumn was Digging
- the gardener-singer thinks only in scents, but a Thomas or Gurney
recollecting without four of his five senses is unimaginable! This
poignant piece hymns the attraction of soil, the lovely distinctness
of living things that grow in it in season – and all that goes to
the fire, come Autumn... The fullness of a life so simple and yet
life- and earth-aware! In his work, Gurney's tenderness never
failed.
Track 4: Scents,
Gurney (2.27min)
Bright
Clouds:
Reflections in a pond on a bright Spring day – like a Chinese or
Japanese poet, Thomas and Gurney, in verse and music, summoned up
brilliant, deeply-felt lyrics in response to a little bright-clouded
sunniness on water.
Track 5: Bright
Clouds, Gurney (1.32min)
Lights
Out. Poet
and composer knew equally the pain of overwork, anxiety and longing
for rest. Thomas wrote as a soldier of the Royal Artillery, hearing
the last bugle-call of the day at Lydd, honestly tired, on the
borders of sleep, sinking without choice into its shelf on shelf of
forest – losing his way, and
himself...
As an ex-soldier, Gurney tried to go without sleep, perhaps owing to
nightmares. In this metaphysical song, he finds a harmonic resource
and drooping form of strophic song-speech that may anticipate the
method of Benjamin Britten. The nobility of Thomas was honest,
self-testingly backed-into – an attitude that Gurney understood
well.
Track 6: Lights Out,
Gurney (4.27min)
Will
You Come, a
teasing love-song is given dry but charming treatment by Gurney, the
disappointed lover. Nothing involving the
heart or mind was simple for the happily-unhappily-married Thomas,
either, even for the sake of a folkish love-song! Gurney doesn't
ignore the shrewd if not awkward clauses of this piece, but finds the
ideal melodic touch.
Track 7: Will You
Come, Gurney (1.42min)
If
you noticed the ivory bugle in The
Penny Whistle, so,
no doubt, did Private Gurney. Thomas' poem on the subject of
Reveille, The
Trumpet, prompted
not one but two settings by him, one for choir and instruments, and
this one to conclude his Thomas-cycle. Edward Thomas found himself
in the army, at the expense of his wife and children, all the doubts
and physical suffering caused by discontented marriage, commissioned literary work and a
pre-diabetic condition that caused blistered feet when forced to wear
standard-issue boots, at last receding to his
something-like-satisfaction. The purging of the aesthete and hack
left the makings of a fine, highly professional officer of immaculate
uniform, shaven head and clipped moustache, though he wrote verses in
the mess (setting them out like prose on the page to conceal his
eccentricity), and retained his habitual clay-pipe to the end.
Gurney
found another self, the perfect blend of the subversive squaddie and
capable fighter, smart, learned and readily excused by his Sergeant
for his outrageous scarecrow-appearance at an inspection in the line:
“He's
a musician, sir.”
On active service, and well-aware that they were not alone, neither
Thomas nor Gurney showed fear when in danger. The
Trumpet, the
anticipation of danger as experienced in the
old wars is
a rousing poem. Gurney's late setting, wayward, veering and yet
ultimately trenchant and thrilling, shows the old fire and defiance
of terrors that had ruined his every hope of health or happiness.
Neither Gurney nor
Milford would have wanted to be remembered for their tragic lives,
and when you hear their music, you hear
much that is strong, honest and transcendently beautiful – the
music of two highly individual, brave and believing souls, to whom
the acquisition and use of musical technique was worth giving up
their lives to, come what might. This was Classical Break on Somer
Valley FM; I'm Rupert Kirkham. Today's programme on music by Ivor
Gurney and Robin Milford was researched and written by Mike Burrows.
We hope you liked it and will join us again soon. Goodbye!
Track 8: The Trumpet,
Gurney (2.02min)
