CB Remembrance
This programme is a repeat from last November. At the close of the script, we append a 7 poem-sequence written by Mike Burrows for Remembrance Weekend, of which this sonnet forms a part:
(Homes
Fit For Heroes)
They march towards me, in fours of all hope
To now, crumpled and muddy, their helmets
Dipped or level-brimmed, their rifles a-slope
On pack-blistered shoulders, and bayonets
Hanging in scabbard: they swing the free arm,
Their spare figures upright to the pale neck,
Some with undone collars. They swing by farm
And up streets, and the push goes without
check.
No snipers, no mortars, no machine-guns -
No booby-traps. They will take the country.
God knows, they did not expect it - it stuns
So that they do not ask how silently
They sing, tread or banter - or how the land
Ignores them. They will never understand.
Intro:
Gas-bombardment and Tipperary
This
is Classical Break on SomerValley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme is an anthology of music
inspired by war and dedicated in respectful remembrance to the armed forces
personnel and civilians of all nations who have endured the conflicts of the
past ninety-seven years.
Let’s
go back to the year that the First World War, the Great War, broke out, and
hear a patriotic song of the period, performed by Helen Clarke and Chorus and
recorded in 1914. Your King And Country Want you. Such a gulf of experience lies between it and
the art-music that came of this terrible time and successive decades, even
though many would face up to the end of Britain’s policy of appeasement in 1939
with a sense of moral release, and popular songs then spoke, for instance, of
hanging out our washing on the Siegfried Line.
Your King And Country Want You.
Track One:
Your King And Country Want You
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley
FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
programme is an anthology of music inspired by war and remembrance.
By 1918, Goodbye-ee was the kind
of song that appealed to those about to go overseas. No contemporary patriotic song was popular in
the British armed forces at any time during the War. They sang nostalgic songs, they sang dirty
songs, they sang folksongs, music-hall songs, and, most of all, songs of futility
and getting through somehow - or not. We’re
here because we’re here was sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne -
just those words, none other, repeated with dull insistence on the rhythm of
the old tune, and they loved the sardonic Goodbyee. Sadly, those who marched out to Goodbyee
faired as badly as those who had gone before them: it was Spring, 1918, the Eastern front had
closed and the Germans were about to launch their last great offensive.
Track Two: Goodby-ee
Here is Cortege, a movement of a
projected Suite for Small Orchestra, Behind The Lines, by the Scottish composer, Bandmaster Cecil Coles (1888-1918). It had to be scored for performance by Martyn
Brabbins to be performed; the
blood-spattered manuscript was sent home with other personal effects from
France, after its largely German-trained composer, a friend of Gustav Holst,
died from wounds received in an ttempt to bring in wounded from no-mans-land.
Track Three: Behind The Lines - Cortege -
Cecil Coles
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth (1885-1916)
was a friend of Vaughan Williams, an Old Etonian who studied Classics at
Oxford. He was briefly music master at
Radley College, a collector of folk-music and talented morris-dancer. As a composer, he knew a brief period of maturity
and served as a 2nd Lt in the Durham Light Infantry. Recommended for award of the Military Cross during
service during the Somme Campaign, he was shot through the head by a sniper
before he could receive his medal. A
brief attendance at the Royal College of Music in 1911 perhaps told him that he
knew what he needed to know; certainly, Vaughan Williams never got over the
death of a staunch friend whose guidance in musical matters had always been
fruitful and whose own slender output - four orchestral pieces - three of them
based on folksongs - three song-cycles and arrangements of 21 Sussex Folksongs
- remain works of sheer and profound inspiration to this day.
Here is his song from his second cycle
of Housaman settings, Bredon Hill And Other Songs, On The Idle Hill
Of Summer: it tells of how manhood
answers the summons of army drums heard however distantly, leaving
idleness and a beloved behind. Of all
the War’s killed musicians, Butterworth was our greatest loss.
Track Four: On The Idle Hill of Summer, Butterworth
Ivor Bertie Gurney (1890-1937) was the
casualty who did not die. His wounds were slight, but the damage to his personality
and welfare were incalculable. He joined
the army in the same year that Coles did and served for a year in the trenches,
narrowly missing the bloody Paschendaele campaign of late 1917, when he inhaled
gas and was invalided home. Like Coles,
he achieved composition in the front-line, in his case, four songs, instinct
with either nostalgia for prewar Gloucestershire or close personal identification
with the poets of his day and of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. His style is hard to describe. He was capable of writing light
parlour-songs, songs that owe much to Stanford - his teacher - and Elgar, and songs in the arioso
style of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, but all his songs justify the
use of the word Gurneyesque. He took
what he found and made it anew. He can conjure
up an astonishing vivid simplicity, as in his setting of the poem, At A
Bierside, by Masefield. This
processional aches with humanity and nobility:
if anyone has to ask why Gurney and his generation chose to fight, this
song written to the low trembling light of a candle-dip as he worked when he
could and his neighbours turned over and slept where they lay, may at least
serve to show what was believed in. An
elegy to all who fell, all who lived, fought and slept about him, all who lived
to drag on disabled lives in peacetime and support their loved ones if they
could. The sanity of art was the sanity
of compassion, deep feeling, the impulse to seek and create beauty out of what
Keats called the holiness of the heart’s affections. With good reason, Gurney is perhaps the best-loved
as well as more--admired of our soldier-muscian casualties.
Track Five: By A Bierside, Gurney
(4.06 min)
If Gurney cited the folk- and army
songs of his fellow-soldiers in letters and poems, there was no doubt as to
which Ivor won the war so far as Gurney’s tailor- and ex-soldier-brother Ronald
was concerned. Why couldn’t Ivor be like
Ivor Novello, and make money?
“His mind is a huge unwieldy mess,” he told one of Gurney’s London
friends after the poet--composer was committed to a mental hospital in
September, 1922.
Let’s hear the wartime hit, Keep The
Home-fires Burning on penny-piano, a popular mechanical music-maker.
Track Six: Keep The Home-fires burning, Ivor Novello
Remembrance Day falls on November the 11th,
the eleventh hour of the eleventh day.
For over ninety years we have placed poppy-wreathes and sounded bugles
over local monuments and war-cemeteries.
On that date and at that time, the Armistice ended 1hostilities. Even so, some soldiers died in sporadic
actions after silence had fallen on the many sectors of Europe’s greatest bid
for mass-suicide. others lived on,
horribly torn and disfigured or living with the deepening despair of lung and
heart-damage brought on by breathing poison gas. Mental injuries, shellshock, paranoia,
speech-problems and unwanted thoughts prevented the resettlement in peacetime
society of others. The War ended for
most, to be followed by a period of harsh social and economic conditions during
which wealth reestablished methods of predatory capitalism, In many countries,
failure of investment brought on by self-preservation of capital and the problems of national
debt and reparations caused mass-unemployment, homelessness and the punishment
of so-called idleness by a refusal to assist the needy with finance. There were no progressive social programmes of
social insurance and healthcare in Britain, while, as in wartime, the wealthy
coined it and avoided all the real material and spiritual privations visited on
the lower orders. The defeated lands, reconfigured to form
new independent countries and forced to pay huge reparations by peace-treaties
endured endless suffering, but austerity ruled in even lands that called
themselves victors, nowhere more cruelly than in ours. It was as though huge wagers had been made
and lost; the man in the street must work off the debts - if he could find
work. If the poor were angry, they were
brave; the rich led them and were mad. In unreconstructed nation-states and
economies such as Imperial Great Britain’s, worse fiscal stringency and
stock-market irresponsibility were on the way, and true Slump. Do you recognize this world?
Track Six:
Symphony No 6 in E Minor, 1st Movt, Vaughan Williams
That was the first movement of Vaughan
Williams Symphony No 6 in E Minor, of 1947.
At the time of its first performance, the Second World War had just ended,
a time of austerity and resettlement begun; former allies sat in two vast camps
and confronted eachother with the assurance that they would destroy their enemy
morally or militarily. To end the Second
World war, whose mechanized character, logistics, scope and savagery had quite
eclipsed that of the First, conventional bombing had devastated Germany and
Japan, and atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, possibly to
inform the Soviet Union of the Western Allies’ means of predominance in any
post-war settlement. As in this music,
songs of brotherhood, however beautiful, however humane and aspiring, were
crushed.
Many heard in the Symphony’s cruel violence,
raging, twisted compound-time rhythms, obsessive fanfares, jazz-inflected
satire and ultimate long-drawn-out hushedness that ends on alternating major
and minor chords, the hubris and apocalyptic horror of an atomic war. The critic Frank Howes described it as a ‘War
Symphony’. The composer retorted that it
never seemed to occur to some people that a man might just want to write a
piece of music! One can be on both sides
in this matter. He had written a 4th
Symphony, full of the 1930’s nightmare and the cantata, Dona Nobis Pacem
for peace. In 1943, he had written his
autumnally glowing 5th Symphony, a vision that owed something to that soul of
England, the John Bunyan of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and in 1945, a
Song of Thanksgiving. Now, the 6th
seemed minatory as had the 4th, if anything, it seemed more frightening still:
so was the age.
In 1939, the First World War had seemed
European Man’s best effort to destroy himself.
Few of those who had known it could stomach the idea of a second If it
could be avoided. In Britain and her
dominions alone, they remembered the loss of nearly nine hundred thousand
lives. Perhaps the world’s losses stood
at ten million, perhaps they had been higher.
That there was optimism during the Second World War was partly down to
popular 1songs - anyone middle-aged or older can reel off the names of a
half-dozen of these even after seventy years - popular classical concerts by
figures such as Myra Hess and military-sponsored musicians, leaders of dance-bands
mostly, and newsreel, documentary- and feature-film music. Recorded music became public during war-years
in which armed forces personnel and war-workers were beguiled by cinema, radio
and tannoy as they relaxed or strove.
An example of popular war-music from
those days is Eric Coates’ brightly-scored march, Calling All Workers. Similarities between its material and working-out and
those of the same composer’s Dambusters March are
instructive. The Dambusters
has a far better trio.
Track Seven: Calling All Workers, Eric Coates
Clifton Parker’s Seascape, from
his score for the Crown Film Unit’s Western Approaches -which was
unusual in being made in colour - shows another face of music for a purpose,
finely evocative and mysterious in its wash of sound: it invites the long view,
as in 1944.
Track Eight: Seascape, Clifton Parker
Even before the end of the War, the
British - many under arms - chose overwhelmingly for the future - the National Coalition fell and was
replaced by Labour: to create a welfare state
in which all were supported by the nation and the judgement of deserving and
undeserving that had permitted the rich to tyrannize the less-well-off seemed to die; private
speculation, estates and ownership were strictly regulated and taxed; living
conditions, health and safety and employment rights were strictly regulated;
strategic industries, the railways, the public utilities, too,
would be controlled by the people through the ballot-box - and funds for education, social services, social and medical
insurance were made good by progressive central taxation based on the ability
to pay, surely the only logical method if public welfare is the aim. Everyone’s allegiance might ultimately be to
the King, but now, there was a commonwealth within this country’s borders as
well as without. This was perhaps a land fit for the heroes of 1945, certainly,
it seemed worthy of the British lawyers who drew up the UN’s Human Rights
Accord - the basis of the European Court - in the post-war period. Those who stand for two minutes of silence in
remembrance of primitive modern man should contemplate the millions of people
throughout the world who have paid with their lives for our empires and wars. It has been a long way to where we are, a long
way further than that to Tipperary. What
did the dead die for? How many must be
reduced to Gurney’s words:
“Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers -
Hide that red wet
Thing that I must somehow forget.”
To end, here is the lento moderato
slow movement of Vaughan Williams’ 3rd Symphony, The Pastoral,
completed in 1920. This was
Vaughan Williams’ War Symphony.
Predominantly slow-moving and developed from pentatonic motifs strongly of
folksong, this contains at least one very definite attempt at reportage: He served as an ambulance-driver and later
artillery-officer, though forty--two at the outbreak of war. At sunset, from a hill above camp near
Ecoivres, he viewed a Corot-like landscape and heard a bugler practise; every
time the man sounded his call, he played a seventh instead of an octave. In prosaic life one finds the uncanny, the
poetic, the meaningful. The trumpet in C
sounds this tommy’s peculiar variation on the official call; in the
restatement, the more shady French horn replaces the trumpet - dusk is further
advanced. The modal implication of the
flattened note is the stubborn refusal of folk-scales to be academic. Also, it is like an early kind of blues and a
statement of the personal, peculiarly sombre, heard clearly amid a war of
unprecedented mechanization, organization and slaughter. A fallen distortion of
the expected octave expresses a reaction to where Man in his pride has
fallen. The portrayal of dusk is as cool
and subduedly colourful; a bugle in light, a French horn in last light;
trees rustle in the strings, their rising, then hushing sounds are almost like
a nurse’s tending voice and hands; birdcall-like, woodwind wind about the calls
of the bugler, answering a little in canon - all rises to a passion twice, and
falls away, at last falling away into night, sleep, rest. Wherever the Lord is, the countryside and bugler
seem to be with us.
This was Classical Break on Somer Valley
FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
script was written and researched by Mike Burrows.
Keep the two-minute silence with your own counsel and join us again
soon.
Goodbye!
Track Nine: A Pastoral Symphony, 2nd Movt, Lento
Moderato, Vaughan Williams
And His Glosters
Branches, he was one scared of, yet made
glad
By loneliness, his marching stride deferred
For this or that solitude in a place
Found rarely and commonly. There is
His thin figure, his restless, thinking pace
Eating up the miles on good days, and his
Own burning pride not eating. Autumn air
Inspirited the ethics that drove him;
Seems grey on baring trees whose leaf-tints
share
Copper or gold as freely. Vision aswim
Knows this for illusion - the sky is blue
On lane’s and trees’ darkness and mysteries
Of who knows whose tangle shadowed to
view,
But green and stubborn in earth, though
berries
Choke shrivelled in mould for the not-
picking.
Cloud is sweeping so that one thinks at
times
From a cursory glance that from sticking
Nothing gathers above rooks or clear
chimes -
A far clock whose hour is ever at hand
Made watery by damp air. Though the
land
Is wet and leaves blacken as yesterday’s
Fallen or those of a week or hours past,
One need not expect rain and see the
rays
Of white sun in time turn to sunset’s steadfast
Yellow fireshine sink, man’s work-room
forestalled
. Or redoubled in associate glory.
The hardness of hobnails and soles meets
metalled
Lanes here with every step, in history
Flanked in the four and with full equipment,
Swinging on down broad ways, the cap-badge
flashing
Brass Gloucestershire in a magnificent
Everyone. In the worst of sky-gashing
Darkness, fire and burning-cold rain,
unsure
Of step on greasy mud or wood, the Sphinx
Was a memory with formal censure
Of muttered songs or still-here, gap-toothed
winks -
As helmet-brims dipped or stayed level in
Shifting: but an honour. He feels them
still,
To be his four’s forty-stone, and so win
There amid fours with the same toiling will.
Let the badge flame and the Sphinx smile
as all
March home out of trodden-down black,
spotless
And neat from cap to boots - unnatural
Neatness come to tight-wound puttees -
their dress
Under a mystery the truth of their Shire,
Yet none have to find honour under fire.
Such as nothing here knows; light at the crown
Streams gold under a broad, storm-grey sky
to Wales.
Here he lies in the crowded churchyard next
To a friend’s son in the green but bleak plain,
Facing away, the slim-spired church
unperplexed,
Close though no New Life shows in light and
rain.
Dipped or level-brimmed, their rifles a-slope
On pack-blistered shoulders, and bayonets
Hanging in scabbard: they swing the free arm,
Their spare figures upright to the pale neck,
Some with undone collars. They swing by farm
And up streets, and the push goes without
check.
No snipers, no mortars, no machine-guns -
No booby-traps. They will take the country.
God knows, they did not expect it - it stuns
So that they do not ask how silently
They sing, tread or banter - or how the land
Ignores them. They will never understand.
And cypresses wave to him, and their scorning
Others is no surprize as all teaches
Him to let fellows go their way and feel
Pleasure at friendliness. Behind him is
His shade, its ported rifle tipped with steel,
Its helmeted physique the form once his.
Trim and tough to the gaitered boots, its pace
Is his, and the yarn of it fully grown
Would startle even him if he could face
It as he does his age now he’s alone,
But he totters clubward East and then West
Early and at sunset at the latest.
No-one need post them at rest, and
the sun
And snatched sleep are nothing to do with it;
There is a point where too smartly begun
Must end without those who, in the spirit
Of the times, had no sure notion of what
They served, but served to the utmost of
breath.
In stone or bronze, their soul is and is not -
Or in each face tumbled to muddy death.
Stone and bronze harden from the shade of clay
Or fire - from discolouration whose stench
Swelled after half-closed eyes had sunk away -
And feel nothing of a departure’s wrench,
Or the warm hand nipped by a cheap
tag-chain -
And still, poppies bloody the winter rain.
One’s best efforts with rain; the humdrum
street
Mirrors grey cloud and masonry; the town
Cuts all it does not know. Head bowed, he
stands,
Water dripping from the brim of his helmet,
The barrel of his rifle grasped in hands
Of the same bronze. His face is lean and set.
He cannot blink; his eyes are averted
But open to whomever soul confronts
And shames; on plaques below are concerted
All those whose gaze is focusless and blunts
Ennui or confusion with this: the dead
Ward the nameless who must live in their
stead.
You were brave to come through,
And not because you wished to fight.
You witness how we are and long
To see your kind well-rid of fear,
To outmatch death, too strong
Not to strive and come through here.
Ghosts do not cower beneath thunder,
And the armour of crowd-control
Wrought by brutes goes under,
Crushed by their impalpable soul.
Condemned, kettled, beaten or shot
As is our fundamental right,
We see shapes who are not -
The souls that haunt all soulless might.
You millions who went under!
Evil will fall without the word
Of bugles and thunder
Of guns, when your silence is heard.
Seven Poems For Remembrance Weekend
1-2 Two Poems In Memory of
Ivor Gurney,
Musician and War-poet,
1890-37, And His Glosters
Gurney?
I remember him. Queer ways he
had.
As the wind whoops again in
unsplinteredBranches, he was one scared of, yet made
glad
By loneliness, his marching stride deferred
For this or that solitude in a place
Found rarely and commonly. There is
His thin figure, his restless, thinking pace
Eating up the miles on good days, and his
Own burning pride not eating. Autumn air
Inspirited the ethics that drove him;
Seems grey on baring trees whose leaf-tints
share
Copper or gold as freely. Vision aswim
Knows this for illusion - the sky is blue
On lane’s and trees’ darkness and mysteries
Of who knows whose tangle shadowed to
view,
But green and stubborn in earth, though
berries
Choke shrivelled in mould for the not-
picking.
Cloud is sweeping so that one thinks at
times
From a cursory glance that from sticking
Nothing gathers above rooks or clear
chimes -
A far clock whose hour is ever at hand
Made watery by damp air. Though the
land
Is wet and leaves blacken as yesterday’s
Fallen or those of a week or hours past,
One need not expect rain and see the
rays
Of white sun in time turn to sunset’s steadfast
Yellow fireshine sink, man’s work-room
forestalled
. Or redoubled in associate glory.
The hardness of hobnails and soles meets
metalled
Lanes here with every step, in history
Flanked in the four and with full equipment,
Swinging on down broad ways, the cap-badge
flashing
Brass Gloucestershire in a magnificent
Everyone. In the worst of sky-gashing
Darkness, fire and burning-cold rain,
unsure
Of step on greasy mud or wood, the Sphinx
Was a memory with formal censure
Of muttered songs or still-here, gap-toothed
winks -
As helmet-brims dipped or stayed level in
Shifting: but an honour. He feels them
still,
To be his four’s forty-stone, and so win
There amid fours with the same toiling will.
Let the badge flame and the Sphinx smile
as all
March home out of trodden-down black,
spotless
And neat from cap to boots - unnatural
Neatness come to tight-wound puttees -
their dress
Under a mystery the truth of their Shire,
Yet none have to find honour under fire.
2 Ivor Beegy
A small Celtic cross of
stone, with sundown
Behind it and, on the stepped
plinth, detailsSuch as nothing here knows; light at the crown
Streams gold under a broad, storm-grey sky
to Wales.
Here he lies in the crowded churchyard next
To a friend’s son in the green but bleak plain,
Facing away, the slim-spired church
unperplexed,
Close though no New Life shows in light and
rain.
3 (Homes
Fit For Heroes)
They march towards me, in fours of
all hope
To now, crumpled and muddy, their
helmetsDipped or level-brimmed, their rifles a-slope
On pack-blistered shoulders, and bayonets
Hanging in scabbard: they swing the free arm,
Their spare figures upright to the pale neck,
Some with undone collars. They swing by farm
And up streets, and the push goes without
check.
No snipers, no mortars, no machine-guns -
No booby-traps. They will take the country.
God knows, they did not expect it - it stuns
So that they do not ask how silently
They sing, tread or banter - or how the land
Ignores them. They will never understand.
4 (On
A Cartoon)
His dreams now down to a Sunday
morning,
He has no real complaint. Planes and beechesAnd cypresses wave to him, and their scorning
Others is no surprize as all teaches
Him to let fellows go their way and feel
Pleasure at friendliness. Behind him is
His shade, its ported rifle tipped with steel,
Its helmeted physique the form once his.
Trim and tough to the gaitered boots, its pace
Is his, and the yarn of it fully grown
Would startle even him if he could face
It as he does his age now he’s alone,
But he totters clubward East and then West
Early and at sunset at the latest.
5
(For The Fallen 1)
And snatched sleep are nothing to do with it;
There is a point where too smartly begun
Must end without those who, in the spirit
Of the times, had no sure notion of what
They served, but served to the utmost of
breath.
In stone or bronze, their soul is and is not -
Or in each face tumbled to muddy death.
Stone and bronze harden from the shade of clay
Or fire - from discolouration whose stench
Swelled after half-closed eyes had sunk away -
And feel nothing of a departure’s wrench,
Or the warm hand nipped by a cheap
tag-chain -
And still, poppies bloody the winter rain.
6 (For
The Fallen, 2)
Freedom can seem worse than even
defeat.
Sorrow or sense of futility crownOne’s best efforts with rain; the humdrum
street
Mirrors grey cloud and masonry; the town
Cuts all it does not know. Head bowed, he
stands,
Water dripping from the brim of his helmet,
The barrel of his rifle grasped in hands
Of the same bronze. His face is lean and set.
He cannot blink; his eyes are averted
But open to whomever soul confronts
And shames; on plaques below are concerted
All those whose gaze is focusless and blunts
Ennui or confusion with this: the dead
Ward the nameless who must live in their
stead.
7
Envoi: Elegy
A
two-minute letter to you:
By dawn or noon or flare-lit night,You were brave to come through,
And not because you wished to fight.
You witness how we are and long
To see your kind well-rid of fear,
To outmatch death, too strong
Not to strive and come through here.
Ghosts do not cower beneath thunder,
And the armour of crowd-control
Wrought by brutes goes under,
Crushed by their impalpable soul.
Condemned, kettled, beaten or shot
As is our fundamental right,
We see shapes who are not -
The souls that haunt all soulless might.
You millions who went under!
Evil will fall without the word
Of bugles and thunder
Of guns, when your silence is heard.
Copyright, Mike Burrows, 11-13/11/11
