30 & 31 March: Easter

(Easter, a revised broadcast from 2012)

Is it wrong, Lord, to ask you to spare all

Such a night as this, in Gethsemane,

Or let them never taste the cup of gall?

Lost in despair, they pass from company

And earn judgement of even their last hours

By those whom they leave, or worse in our eyes,

Perish alone and unremarked, though flowers

Or brief-blooming innocence fall or rise.

In our hearts we know more than we admit

Of how we have travelled to where we are;

And yet, still less than yours can our spirit

Bear what comes of all thought familiar.

Our journey leads to a shrine raised to chance

Outgloried by true cures in acceptance.

(Copyright Mike Burrows 3/4/2012)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  Today’s programme is a celebration of Easter.  We had hoped to bring you a new anthology, but sadly, Rupert Kirkham, who usually presents Classical Break, is unable to be here in the studio.  Our thoughts and best wishes are with him. Spring Pilgrimage culminates in the observance of Easter:  something of the feelings on setting out is evoked in Allan Gray’s music for the Powell and Pressburger film, A Canterbury Tale, the story of a latterday pilgrimage to Canterbury made at the height of the Second World War by two soldiers, one British, one from Oregon, and a land-girl, all seeking some rite of spiritual healing.  Here, one has the Canterbury peal, the traditional pilgrim’s hymn, Angelus ad Virginem, and a reading from the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, read by Esmonde Knight. 

A Canterbury Tale, Prelude, Gray

 

As for me, it is one thing to write for Classical Break, but quite another to voice it; so here is an edited version of last year’s Easter programme, spoken by Rupert.  

 

Track One:  Kod Bethlehema, Trad

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is a celebration of Easter.  You have just heard Kod Bethlehema, a song of pilgrims to Bethlehem, a Christmas song, but not the less apt for that.  Easter is a time of rebirth after a time of fasting and other observances of atonement, including pilgrimage.  Spring is here:  the very derivation of the word Easter has to do with Spring, rather than Christ - Eostre or Eastre was the Saxon or German goddess of fertility.  At Easter, we give chocolate eggs and hares and perhaps rich, spicy fruit-cakes when we do because the Christian Church seized unto itself symbols of procreation and an important religious festival,thus superimposing the sufferings and death of Christ, and His rising again from the dead on the tremendous mood-swing of renewal represented by this season of the year.  Those who fasted and sought forgiveness for their sins through Lenten self-punishment and the turning away of the mind from distractions of the flesh, found Easter Day at last.    

Easter is a time of rebirth after fasting and other observances of atonement, including pilgrimage.  Spring is here:  the very derivation of the word Easter has to do with Spring, rather than Christ - Eostre or Eastre was the Saxon or German goddess of fertility.  At Easter, we give chocolate eggs and hares and perhaps rich, spicy fruit-cakes when we do because the Christian Church seized unto itself symbols of procreation and an important religious festival, thus superimposing the sufferings and death of Christ, and His rising again from the dead on the tremendous mood-swing of renewal represented by this season of the year.  Those who fasted and sought forgiveness for their sins through Lenten self-punishment and the turning away of the mind from distractions of the flesh, found Easter Day at last.  

  

In the years of Jesus’ ministry in Palestine, Jerusalem was the gig for any travelling preacher.  Christ prepared himself for it just as any pilgrim was to do.  Then, what happened was going to happen.  His arrival in the City on a donkey was greeted by a greater or lesser showing of popular support, but by the time of his arrest, he must have seemed a danger to smooth governance by King, Priests, merchants, the financial services-sector, if not the occupying power.

Ride On Ride On In Majesty is a favoured Victorian hymn for Palm Sunday, with words by HH Milman and a tune, Winchester New, adapted from a chorale from a Lutheran Handbuch of 1690.

Track Two:  Ride On Ride On In Majesty

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is one of music that evokes Easter. It is not always the case that a nationalist-supported figure who stirs up trouble in an unhappy province is unpopular with Empire, if he divides satisfactorily the religious, cultural and political forces that pose a threat to the continued, lucrative occupation of his country.  By the time of his condemnation, the crowd, given a choice of pardoning Christ or a known bandit and murderer preferred to see released the bandit and murderer.  This must have been a defining moment in itself.  Perhaps Barabbas was simply someone who - in the eyes of ordinary people - would make life the more interesting for the Romans and ruling classes of Judah.  Wielding argument - and once, a whip - Christ had offended the rich, powerful and corrupt of his own land, but not defeated neither them - nor the Romans.

Let’s remind ourselves of the nature of God, The Son.  If Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd - often associated with Christ and Easter - has been set by many composers.  John Blow (1649-1708), was one of the first intake of choir boys at the Chapel Royal after the Restoration.  So began a largely successful career that culminated in the position of organist at Westminster Abbey, at St Pauls and again at Westminster Abbey after the death of the younger man who had replaced him there, Purcell.  After a brief introductory passage, a theme in triple time that Blow re-employed in chamber music is played through repeatedly on the accompanying instruments, two violins, viola, bass violin, theorbo (a kind of lute) and organ.  Alto, Tenor, Bass and Bass voices sing the first verse, Soprano, alto, tenor, Bass and the second, the full choir entering for the latter stages:  the piece has the feel of a passacaglia or chacony, the ‘spirit’ of the chief melodic idea always present, variations taking place in voice and instrumentation, involving the opening idea in addition.  It is a lovely piece, courtly in sound, but full of clever touches in layout, to ensure that even the organ, functioning as a supernumery bass, is noticed for its own sake as much for its sustaining tone.  Apparently, Charles The Second approved of the minuet-rhythm in this and other anthems of the time:  not only for its lively associations, but because he could beat time to it.  To my ears, it harks back to the days of La Folia, a one-time favourite for instrumental treatments in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.  The spare counterpoint is undoubtedly due to a fashion for block chord harmonizing in contrast to the older polyphonic tendency in church music - perhaps Charles the Second preferred this simpler approach, too.       

Track Three:  23rd Psalm, John Blow

Easter is a time when man craves forgiveness and seeks to express gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice.  To be brought face to face with the sufferings and death of the Shepherd and appointer of Fishers of Men is a personal thing; to be worthy is an impossibility; to be a doubter is to suffer in turn, and all men have done enough evil in their lives to be a doubter of both self and God’s capacity for forgiveness.

A piece that seems to go to the heart of spiritual boldness and helpless suffering is The Dream of Gerontius, which sets passages from a poem by Cardinal Newman. It tells of a soul’s passage from deathbed to purgatory.  The word Gerontius is from Latinized Ancient Greek and means literally, Old Man.  No end of a sinner brought to book, was Elgar’s own view.  As in no previous British Oratorio, the orchestra sings, prays, agonises, praises along with the choir and a sub-chorus - another innovation.  The style is operatic, the melodic lines, harmonies and tonal relations would in 1900 have seemed those of a Wagner or Verdi.  Arias, conversations in recitative, leading motives standing for Sickness, Death, Judgement and various aspects of doubt, love, fear and forgiveness, grip the listener and compel him to suspend his disbelief.   The sheer force of a vision, of every thought, musical or poetic, strikes home in a manner that grips one from beginning to end, on a journey into eternity.

Let’s hear the prayer of the dying man, a mixed firm credo and appeal for strength to face death and judgement that are certain.  Sanctus Fortis: “Strong Spirit, Spirit of God, from the depths I pray to You, pity me, my Judge, spare me, Lord!”

Track Four:  Sanctus Fortis from The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar 

Elgar’s next Oratorio, The Apostles, is one of two that he completed on the theme of Christ’s ministry and the Acts of The Apostles.  The second was called The Kingdom.  He intended a third, The Judgement, but first, the strain of completing the first two and later, the First World War and death of his wife supervened.  A few fragments survive of the third oratorio, some worked into the 3rd Symphony, lately completed by Anthony Payne.  The first two are thus, a torso, but in themselves are glories of literary syncretism bringing together texts from both the new testament and apochrypha, Wagnerian leading-motives, diatonic and chromatic harmony that melds Franck and Strauss and a peculiar English quality perhaps owed to the much put-upon cathedral composer SS Wesley.  There are crowd-scenes, arias, recitatives.  Solo voices, large choirs and huge, Late Romantic orchestra - including a Hebrew shofar or ramshorn provide colours unique to Elgar and perhaps a little owing to a holiday-cruise in the Aegean.  The Apostles and the Kingdom rank with his symphonies and concerti in imagination, resource and inspiration.  Were they the work of a German other continental composer, It’s hard not to believe that they would be known to many abroad.  As a tour de force, they are irresistible, but they contain some of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring and touching music penned by even Elgar.

In the  Scene of the Oratorio, Christ has been arrested and tried and the zealot who betrayed him, Judas Iscariot, has returned his payment for Christ’s betrayal, and been ejected from the Temple.  Let’s hear his powerful bass-register soliloquy ending in suicide.  Judas is a basso profundo part unusual in British oratorio.  This is dark music, lost deep in night.  It was a passage that terrified Elgar as he was writing it, and with good cause.  His faith was uncertain and he had had to play down his Catholicism to gain national acceptance; there’s evidence that he identified greatly with Judas, and subscribed to the theological view, daring at the time, that Judas had betrayed Christ in order to compel his Master to make a show of His Divine Power.  Certainly, Lady Alice had to ban the subject of suicide from the Elgar dining-table at this time; visitors were tactfully warned, conversation as tactfully steered away from it...

Track Five:  The Apostles, Without the Temple,  Elgar

We should not forget the proliferation of another Easter symbol - of the cross, woven from thatch-reeds or osier-twigs.  The cross of four arms is almost latterday to two thousand years ago, when the Romans didn’t waste wood, but simply crossed the Tee.  Then again, the cross is ‘The Tree’,and trees have always been objects of worship - many springing to green life and blossom at Eastertime, as crops were sown, troths plighted and babies made.

Now the movement, Golgotha, Scene 5 from Elgar’s The Apostles.  One draws near the cross to muted strings:  the image of the crucified Lord strikes the onlooker - Christ cries out in the heavy and sombre brass, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthami’, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’  The chorus sings, Truly, He was the Son of God; Mary and St John - contralto and tenor, sing brokenly of their pain and despair at Christ’s suffering at the hands of His people.  As in the Judas soliloquy, there is a Moussorgskian pungency to this music, in this case admitting some warmth in the love of Jesus’ Mother and favourite disciple, traditionally placed beside the cross in many examples of church-statuary - in Wells Cathedral for one prominent example - and paintings.    

Track Six:  Golgotha, from The Apostles, Elgar

The Ave Verum Corpus is a hymn dating back to Pope Innocent Vl, and has been set by thousands of composers, many of them unknown.  It apostrophizes the body of Christ after the ordeal of the cross, and begs that the sight of it can console us in our last hour.  We hear it in a setting for male voice choir by Gerald Hendrie (1936- ), for 21 years Professor of Music at the Open University.  This was written for the Gentlemen of Ely Cathedral and employs bare fifths and fourths harmony and appoggiatura in an unaccompanied chant; its slow-moving or stilly uncanniness heightened by the tritone - diminished fifth or augmented fourth, a divisive interval known to the Mediaeval church as Diabolus in Musica, the Devil in Music, and later much-employed in all forms of Western music as a harmonic or tonal intensifier; its use here is perhaps the more disturbing for being quiet.  Instead of expressing terror and pity in high-coloured tragedy, this piece might perhaps be compared with Shakespeare’s use in his later tragedies of a blank verse freed by monosyllables and enjambment at moments of great intensity: apparent simplicity conceals art and enshrines humankind’s truest, loneliest responses to life and death.    

Track Seven:  Ave Verum Corpus, Gerald Hendrie

We come to the end of our programme with...what?  The Ascension is a month away.  Christ rose again after three days to share life again with those who followed Him.  SS Wesley’s grandfather Charles, brother of John, wrote some of the greatest hymns bequeathed us, often adapted from the works of first rate composers; Rejoice, The Lord Is King was sung every Easter at School assemblies as in church and never failed to move, thanks to its fine words, strong melody, striking fourth line to every quatrain, and earnest refrain.  The tune, known now as Gopsal, was adapted from Handel.  It was first published in Hymns for Our Lord’s Resurection in 1746.  This is a hymn of joy and renewal and so ends this programme.  Here it is performed in an arrangement complete with baroque descant and trumpet obbligato, by Paul Leddington Wright.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  We hope you enjoyed our programme and will join us for further journeys in music.  A happy Easter to you from all of us here!

Track Eight:  Rejoice, The Lord Is King, Handel/Charles Wesley

©  Mike Burrows 3/4/12

23 & 24 March

CB United States

Intro:  Fanfare For The Common Man: Copland   

Hullo.  This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is a tribute to the music that established the United States as a pioneer-nation in the mainstream of cosmopolitan art-music.

We have just heard the Fanfare For The Common Man by Aaron Copland.  Written after the United States had entered the Second World War, to a commission awarded by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, this is a crucial work in the history of North American music, and must have seemed so from its first play-through.  At a time when the world seemed nightmarishly split along racial lines, a New York Jew had written music for a great nation of races, seeming to express the idealism and determination of this nation’s response to Pearl Harbour.  In gong- and timpani-strokes, massed trumpets, more throaty horns and trombones, fourths, fifths and triads of purity and brazen clashes, the stride and power of the titan is evoked with permutations of a phrase and answer:  but in deliberate white-note music, this is American humanity on the march. Copland said that he had written as he imagined others were feeling.  The Sleeping Giant has been awoken.  The brash circus-world of Sousa marches or music-theatre jazz is a world away.

We think of this music as ‘American’.  Actually, its jagged aesthetic owes greatly to Stravinsky, Janacek and Les Six as well as to what might be characterized as a settler-rhetoric.  Copland, like most of his American contemporaries, studied in Paris.  

Our next piece was written in a similar style: some fifty years on.  Saving Private Ryan, a Spielberg portrayal of the Omaha landing on D-Day and a small force’s attempt to return a Mother’s last surviving son home, suffers from histrionics and cynically manipulative scenes of mayhem, but no such faults mar John Williams’ music, the piece Hymn For The Fallen, in particular.  True, Bach’s Air On A G-string turns up, along with a less noticeable echo of Delius’ Song Of Summer, but for the rest, the side-drum, stoical, close-harmony theme, Coplandesque brass, not to mention the triangle or glockenspiel and busy string-figuration at the climax, are both emotionally true-sounding and affecting.  There is a power in the deliberately limited melody grouped about a modal clash between major and minor, between home-spun harmonies and the tritone.  This is like a marching song for ghosts or for those who knew them.  It is a fine piece and may cause one to forget how the Copland ‘Common Man’ style has been hijacked for just about any feature-film that aimed for pathos, patriotic or spiritual uplift, in the past thirty years.

 

Track 2:  Saving Private Ryan, Hymn To The Fallen, John Williams.

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme looks at American music. 

A Hymn To The Fallen from the 1990s reminds us that America has always had a strong tradition of non-conformist psalm-singing, from the early years of European settlement until the period of 19th Century religious revivals, the days of the ‘camp-meetings’.  Our concept of hymn-singing dates back to the days of Methodism and the Wesley brothers - and the Church of England had no official hymnal until the 1860s or so.             

In the main, at first the music was rudimentary and in unison, and trained singers led a congregation with greater or lesser accuracy.

By the 18th Century, Tune-books were in use.  Here is a hymn by John Antes, a Pennsylvanian of this period, How Beautiful Upon The Mountains, in a comparatively ‘classical’ contemporary arrangement for singers, chorus and orchestra.

Track 3:  How Beautiful Upon The Mountains, John Antes

A hymn like Simple Gifts, we owe to the American Shaker sect, of course.  The much later Episcopalian setting of Nearer My God to Thee by Lowell Mason resounds from its use in films on the Titanic disaster.  From numerous westerns and small-town films, besides the dances at hoe-downs or balls, hymns such as The Shining River have been a valuable scene-setter.

One of the stranger and stronger figures in United States music was the recluse Charles Ives, born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874.  The son of a Civil War bandsman, town bandsman and banker, he was taught music by his father, who, fascinated by resonance, free tonality and chance musical happenings, encouraged his children to sing in one key whilst accompanying themselves on the piano in another.  Ives grew up to be a fine organist and pianist, playing in his local church, encountered academic music at Yale and, after a spell as organist and choirmaster at a New York church, went into insurance and continued to compose in his own manner.  A fervent transcendentalist to whom everything sang, between boyhood and his late thirties, he created a huge quantity of music that anticipated every development in modernism by twenty years.  At the same time, hymns or popular tunes such as Hail Columbia, Dixie and Turkey In The Straw – or, indeed, ragtime - provided this intensely patriotic liberal Democrat with raw material, sentimental value, for reworking in context.  Here is one of his eerier works, Hanover Street North, the third and final piece from his Orchestral Set No 2.  It is a description of coming into New York as a commuter the morning the news broke of the sinking of the Lusitania:  he remembered that an organ-grinder began to play the gospel hymn In The Sweet Bye and Bye - and one by one, the passengers joined in - their efforts uninterrupted even though a train came into the station.  By its dying fall, this work has liberated the ear from fixed notions of rhythm or harmony in a piano-concertante texture (Ives was a formidable pianist) that shows all things in an almost filmic equality of significance, with broken and ultimately baleful brass - listen for the crowd’s voice raised full-throatedly in its hymn – hymns were another of Ives’ New England inheritance - and treble register ‘atmosphere’.  The close is as quiet as the opening, but one has experienced an event in human experience, an epiphany of New York America.

Track 4:  Hanover St North, Ives

 

Before pioneers such as Ives, popular music, with its intermixed roots in the world of slave-trade, settlers, labourers, the Civil War, Indian Wars and industrialization might have seemed to be staring the hi-falutin in the face as a potential source of inspiration in the 19th Century.  The folksongs of many European nations, negro spirituals and work-songs, revivalist and episcopal hymns, Indian chants, military marches, parlour- and theatre-songs and dance-sets, South American ‘latino’ rhythms and jazz were not only mixed from the roots but cross-fertilizing apace in the incredibly varied climate, topography and demography of he fifty States.  With the growth of the railways from Atlantic to Pacific and North to South, mass-ducation and mass publication-methods, the musical establishment remained an establishment by the skin of its teeth.

The open fourths-fifths and pentatonic style that most think of as American is present in most countries’ folk-music, owing to systems of tuning:  the chromatic accompaniment of such music is artistic licence or literally accidental.  Like rubato, it permits variety of emotional nuance, usually on a descending scale - a flatward tendency in harmony.  Certainly, it is a demonstration of skill to find the unovbvious right wrong note.  Jazz - the word originally denoted sexual excitement - is founded on such tricks; spontaneous improvization was the origin of all folk-music.  The Land of The Free was built on conquest and oppression:  folk-music, to an extent - was a reaction to rural and urban oppression of ‘labor’ and crash social and economic change.

Let’s hear the famous folk-tune, Ashoken Farewell.  Justly famous, easily as fine a tune as Shenandoah, it has come down to us in many variations and arrangements.  This one is played on instruments that would have been available to country people and ordinary urban folk alike.  It leaves the darkie-songs and parlour muse of composers of the Mid- 19th Century, such as Stephen Foster, for dead.

Track 5:  Ashoken Farewell, Trad.

The transformation from a land whose academies had grown modern by recognizing the genius of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak rather than Liszt and Wagner, took the better part of a quarter of a century everywhere but in the minds of Charles Ives and Charles T Griffes, a man whose world was of dreams and such visions as Xanadu, and whose music was influenced by the whole-tone experiments of Debussy and Scriabin.  He did not represent a nationalist’s dream of American music, but his success was possibly to build on the aesthetic change discernible in the Grieg--influenced music of another, earlier ‘modernist’, Edward Macdowell, and cause comparisons between the music of an American and that of the impressionist musicians of France and Spain, and the mystical tendency, such as it was, in Russia.  Here is the second of his Two Sketches Based on Indian Themes for String Quartet, Allegro Giocoso.

Track 6:  No 2 of Two Sketches Based on Indian Themes, Charles T Griffes

Next, let’s hear a piece by another maverick, Henry Cowell (1897-1965).  This was a man who wrote several symphonies and other large-scale works in an idiom not far removed from that of Ives.  He could be inspired by a good old Fuguing Tune, but in many of his pieces, instruments were played in novel ways; he specialized in tone-clusters, microtones and many other innovations, directing a pianist, for example, to play with his fist, or pluck and play glissandi on the strings as if on a zither.  Here is his magical miniature, the third piece of his three movement Irish Suite for String Piano and Small Orchestra:  Fairy Bells.

Track 7:  Fairy Bells Henry Cowell

The works of the urban negro composer, Scott Joplin, born three years after the end of the Civil War and famous for his rag-time, less so for an opera about plantation-life, Tremonisha, took up an uneasy position between Art-music and popular songs and dances and the world of the bar-room, bordello and musical theatre.  He made a name for himself in spite of his colour, his uncertain education and poor health, working himself hard as a performer and arranger as well as composer, but died before he could realize his ambitions as a serious artist - Tremonisha’s trials proved fatal to him.  George Gershwin and others were to fare better in this direction later on, with hits like Porgy and Bess and Show-boat.  Of course, working within the idiom of cakewalks and other such black institutions, an idiom whose holiday strut or weary worksong bluesiness captivated whites, he was a useful composer, a money-spinner for others.  The pathos and efficient melodic and rhythmical resource of his rags have conquered the world since his death, the film Sting - which plugged The Entertainer - provoking a new wave of sympathetic attentions from musicians, musicologists and Civil Rights supporters.  As a kid, I recall, there were two pieces the unmusical pianist was certain to know how to murder, The Moonlight Sonata - the opening few bars, that is - and The Entertainer.  Let’s hear the Maple Leaf Rag.

Track 8:  Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin 

Another black musician:  the violinist, composer and arranger of Negro music, HT Burleigh, was taught composition by Dvorak at the New York Conservatory, during the great composer’s brief reign of terror as a professor.  Much-respected - and liked - by his students, Dvorak was known behind his back as Borax, owing to his blunt but abrasive reactions to their exercises.  Dvorak’s views on black music were remarked on; he believed that an American music of the future might well be built on the traits of negro themes and harmonies.  In his American music -  the Cello Concerto, the Nigger Quartet - as it was once known - an American Suite, The American Flag and the New World Symphony, he does seem to have taken his own advice!  Harry Burleigh admired the dour Czech greatly; and Dvorak’s respect for folk-song certainly left its mark on his pupils.  Of peasant-stock himself, Dvorak had not impressed the great musical and other thinkers at Cambridge when there to receive an honorary doctorate:  “Did you try him on pigs?” one of these characters had asked a colleague who had tried to get a word out of the man.  But Dvorak was an inspired composer, if not the world’s greatest theoretician, and his good-hearted belief in and practising of true art electrified his students.  It may not be too much to say that Dvorak was a founding father of the new American music - Nadia Boulanger of 1920s Paris later to become a founding mother.  Let’s hear a spiritual arranged by Burleigh, who himself became an academic,  My Lord, What A Morning.

Track 9:            My Lord, what a Morning, Arranged HT Burleigh

And that’s it for our programme of American music - except...  Bernard Herrmann (1911-75) wrote music for a film, The Devil And Daniel Webster, a fable set in New England, in which a farmer is led to a hoard of War of Independence gold by Scratch, the devil, and proceeds to sell his soul for wealth and an easy life as the rest of the local tenant farmers live and suffer hard times, and he grows rich at their expense.

Here is an evocative cue from the film:  Swing Your Partners.  In this barn-dance sequence, Scratch strikes up with a fiddle in Mephisto-New England-style!

(Ed:  actually, the pen ran away with me, here; these are the end-credits!)

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  We hope you have enjoyed our survey of American music and will join us again, soon.  Swing Your Partners!

Track 12:  Swing Your Partners, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Herrmann

16 & 17 March

Classical Break - Children and Childhood

Today's programme is an enjoyable anthology of mainly 20th Century music celebrating childhood.  Flashman, School bully, is absent with our blessing, and this savourable hour is guaranteed 0% proof, that is, Austerity- free.

 Intro:  Children laughing, singing Girls and Boys Come Out to Play. 

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!                   

 

We hope you enjoyed your Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.

This is Mike Burrows saying, see you again soon!

Track Ten, Alfred Reynolds:  Alice Through The Looking-glass, Jabberwocky. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9 & 10 March

CB97  Railways and Locomotives

Intro:  The Little Train of Calpeira - Villa-Lobos  

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. We have just heard Bachianas Brasileiras Number 2, The Little Train of The Calpeira, a postcard-like vignette by the prolific Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa--Lobos. Legend has it, that it was written in the space of a trip on this very train.

Today’s music has to do with a great symbol of logistic power and the power to bring a little freedom into people’s lives, a once-great resource of the state and business in real partnership, heavily subsidized and thus kept within the means of a population’s pockets, whilst also employing hundreds of thousands of people throughout the length and breadth of the country, to maintain a network that drew almost every district, every village, close together, enabled a prompt mail and trade-service and expedite travel to one’s place of work, close links between family members; created a pre-holiday adventure of convenience and speed, and was latterly never appreciated by those who had no need of national systems: the railways.

We all know the people who cause the erection of buffers everywhere and who leave ghosts to stand or wander nowhere: the people who cut and cut at life in a bid for what they call efficiency - that is, low cost to themselves and their few friends, and the chance to make funny or rapine money; the people who create efficiency by destroying effectiveness, or by causing system and equal outcome to vanish into thin air. How clever it is to solve unreal problems by closing things down. By making tough - ie, impossibly stupid - decisions, choosing between unalike things, one creates endless new illogical provisions made logical by continued erosion of what holds us all together, safeguards personal freedoms and prevents dictatorship.

 

Take a moment to remember what railways are: the excitement of purpose as burdens of material goods and wishes are most durably, powerfully and speedily borne where perhaps the car or coach - or forty-ton juggernaut - isn’t master. Remember how Victorian adults and children could at last break out of the parish-bound existence that destroyed the initiative and individualism of most of our forebears for centuries, and latterly created hellish urban living conditions and inescapable sickness. For once, the needs of trade and the well-being and liberty of our people coincided. Remember how better-paid engineering and administrative skills became a wide-spread opportunity, jobs offering a graduating, steadily incremented salary were created for a multitude, and there need be less sense of toil and aimlessness at any level, given the mission that every person in the system shared, that of keeping a socially developing nation on the move. Let’s hear music that celebrates this spirit: Coronation Scot, by Vivian Ellis, a composer of light music and musicals. This fine piece has not only a good, easily modulatable tune of smooth length and considerable idealism, but also instantly recognizable moments of onomatapoeia. The changes of key and repeated climaxes follow a cycle that conveys sense of ever-changing landscape and of a destination - the excitement of a predestined journey over unfamiliar but easily-crossed terrain by virtue of well-resourced, co-operative system, in fact. The power in hand of a fired-up locomotive is conveyed by brass and percussion in harsh discord, the super-athletic ease of movement humming with constant figuration and a fine melody led by the strings, violins singing like one’s happiness-stimulated nerves, warmth coming from horns and woodwind. The orchestra stands for common purpose - railway-staff and passengers in union, the miles speeding by, our machine a tended servant, our track cleared ahead and points changing smoothly, all happening by numbers.

Sadly, we seem not to have a composer who can do equal justice to modern rail-travel.

Track One:  Vivian Ellis:  Coronation Scot

 

British Rail existed long before nationalization, a reliable, integrated strategic service that covered most parts of the country, not a patchwork of fiefdoms embroidered by competing financial sollipsists who owned no track but only rolling-stock, or who didn’t own rolling-stock, but found maintaining track beyond their pockets while charging rolling-stock companies what they felt like charging for the use of it.  That the Victorians could build the world’s first national railway with private capital; enable the nation to avail themselves of the service with stable and fair pricing and constant technological innovation, and create and protect jobs in spite of ever-more ergonomic work-practices, companies’ different natures and policies converging in co-operation - once a free-booting period of unwise, even fraudulent speculation was got over - is a reproach to those who know only how to hand subsidized, profiteering or non-existent costs onto the customer and give him an ever-more restricted service in return, year on year.    

A film that dealt with the problems of coexistence of public and private on our railways was The Titfield Thunderbolt, one of the most popular Ealing comedies, and made in 1952. Film-attitudes to trade unions apart it is a sensible if quaint take on the contrast between two forms of organization and vested interests. The road-lobby in the form of a coach-company wishes to see the back of a Ministry-doomed branch-line, railway enthusiasts who volunteer to fund and run it don’t, the road lobby stoops to sabotage, destroying the only engine and carriage before the all-important inspection by a man from the Ministry. The Titfield Thunderbolt, an early locomotive is taken from a museum, a retired carriage, the home of a retired engine-driver, is spruced up, and with several mishaps and much public co-operation, the inspection goes well, though gravity and brute muscular strength are both required to assist progress: the payoff being that they travelled almost swiftly enough not to qualify as a light railway; they will have to be more careful in future... Georges Auric, the French composer, one of the famous group, Les Six, wrote often for Ealing Studios, and here, composed a memorable, neo-classical score, though possibly one that owes a shade too much to French folk-music to be entirely idiomatic. Its brusque but quirky style is fittingly motoric, the engine’s every puff and sneeze portrayed, the exhilaration of running at full speed, the excitement of joint-endeavour lending rudimentary machinery wings, a certain blague adding to its smile-worthiness, and somehow, in spite of the French demotic, he caught the spirit of this very English, conflictingly cynical, but soft--headed film.

 Let’s hear Titles, The Triumph of The Titfield Thunderbolt and End-titles.

 Track Two:  The Titfield Thunderbolt Suite - Georges Auric.   

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley Radio, and I’m Mike Burrows.  Today’s topic is music about railways.

 

For our next piece, we turn to the great symphonist among The Six, Arthur Honegger. He takes his inspiration from a far grander locomotive than Vivian Ellis’ Coronation Scot - in fact, from an American express, Pacific 231 - for his eponymous symphonic poem of 1923. It is arguable that symphonic form as early as Mozart headed towards prophetic portrayal of mechanical high velocity in its allegro movements, the growth in slow introductions and contrast between quick or aggressive first and slower, more lyrical second subjects during the romantic period giving one the sense of energy pent-up and released, steaming-up and setting out, and of more sentimental thoughts arising during ease of travel, and thus irresistibly giving a full depiction of journey by steam, the development of subjects that had been adumbrated in the introduction a partly fugal working-out at full head of steam having the inherent impatience of that ease and leading to one’s destination. Pacific 231 has the expectancy, almost ghostly in its hollow impersonality, and the beginning slow instability of rhythm settles on a growing pattern punctuated by brass fanfaring and drum, subtlely gathering speed, the woodwind and violins soon beginning to add some air and space, the brass working against that, the music dropping to string ostinato before brass builds up again on its own terms over the teeming notes of speed; the inhumanity is in dissonance and a searching rather than grand theme - the whole ends in a final chord, brass-dominated that is the last word. Do we remember what we saw out of the carriage-windows? Is there the sense of a journey, is the last word a destination? Honegger himself felt that “musically speaking,” he had “composed a grand and varied chorale, interwoven with counterpoint in the manner of JS Bach.” This is music with intellectual muscle, of a mechanistic age, as such, absolute in its own terms. Remember the Fascist boast that Mussolini caused the trains to run on time. The dehumanizing influence of technology was supposed to have superceded sentimentality and the softer emotions for the unsparing, but scientifically rational and therefore preferable, better.



Track Three: Pacific 231 - Arthur Honegger

 

When Naples gained its funicular railway, one on which cars run drawn by a cable, it gained possibly its most famous song, taken up the world over as characteristic. The Vesuvius funicular railway opened in 1880, and this occasional piece gained a life of its own; to this day, many have no idea what it is about, but relish its apparent zest. It was quoted in the young Richard Strauss’ tone poem, Aus Italien, as a folksong. Funicula Funiculi, in which a young man invites his girl to accompany him in a trip on the latest public service, was in fact written by an otherwise forgotten composer, Luigi Denza. From the summit, not only can the couple see the fiery crater, they can look outward to see the island of Procida, France and even Spain: or they can look into eachother’s eyes and see love. So hurry!

Track Four:  Funiculi Funicula - Luigi Denza

William Blezard’s Battersea Park Suite ends with a short piece Miniature Railway. It could be almost a movement from the orchestral version of the Children’s Corner Suite of Debussy, characterized as it is by an open-air, melodious quality, aided by the composer’s neat orchestral scoring. The clarinet at opening starts us off into a lazy tune; and so things continue, with a stop to pick up further young passengers. The oboe has its moment of sad uncertainty before the ride ends all too soon.

 

Track Five: Battersea Park Suite - Miniature Railway - William Blezard

 

To the Denmark of the mid-19th Century now. Hans Christian Lumbye is often seen as a Danish Strauss. Inspired by Strauss, from the age of twenty-nine, he composed waltzes, polkas, galops and mood-pictures calculated to appeal to fashionable society. From the age of thirty-three, for thirty years, he directed music at the Tivoli Gardens, his orchestra establishing a fine tradition of light music there. The Kobenhavn Steam Railway Galop was written to celebrate the opening of Cobenhavn’s first railway station and Denmark’s first railway.

The Galop describes a short train journey of the pioneer-days from beginning to end, with an array of whistles and percussion, besides the usual orchestral ensemble. The tune is a good one, when travelling, swift, vivacious and light-hearted, giving the lie that in the early days of rail-gloom as to how the human body could stand up to speed was taken seriously. The sound-effects must have seemed riotous when heard first, but are vividly apt and well--matched by the pace of the score from slow start to slow end, with subtle gradations along the way. It is as if the last foot leaves the ground just in time, but no-one wants to set foot on the platform at the end, as the guard shouts that they have arrived!

Track Six: Kobenhavn Steam Railway Galop - HC Lumbye

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was possibly the only American composer to begin in modernism inculcated by Nadia Boulanger in the Paris of the 1920s and regarded as an enfant terrible - his Organ Symphony caused a colleague to say that it was the work of a young man who could now go on to commit murder - to become thoroughly popular for his national music, often based on folksong in a style that is de rigeur in films of the last quarter of a century precisely because its Rooseveltian context is dead - and then track off into serialism, some of which out-barbs Schoenberg, but all of which is fascinating; he was a composer of real integrity, authority and conviction. Through a career of nearly seventy years, his talent as a composer and conductor developed, and he remained what he had always been, a man who concentrated on bettering himself and encouraging others, seen as a liberal, left-wing figure who interested himself in many enlightened causes. He was the man who stated that when non-musicians wrote two words on music, one of them would be wrong, but for the most part, he spared the world his asperity, save when musical expression called for it.Let’s hear his ‘song’ based on the negro ballad about a track-layer and rock-crusher, John Henry, killed in competing against a steam-hammer. A Railroad Ballad For Small Orchestra was revized in 1952. It is conducted by the composer.

Track Seven:  John Henry, A Railroad Ballad - Copland

Charles Valentin Alkan (1813-88), was possibly the greatest musical recluse of his generation or even century. His professional name was a pseudonym. A noted piano-virtuoso in an age of virtuosi, he numbered Liszt amongst his admirers but back-pedalled from the limelight to compose some of the most accomplished and complex piano works of his era. Born the son of a piano teacher, Charles Valentin Morhange was brought up in the Marais, the Jewish quarter of a strongly anti-semitic Paris. He became a child-prodigy, attended the Conservatoire, taught by the teachers of Georges Bizet and Cesar Franck, attracted aristocratic Russian patrons, became a private teacher and soloist and lived comfortably on his earnings. Chopin, an equally shy man and not a willing sharer of fame, performed in at least one concert with him, and Alkan's progress towards settled eminence seemed assured. But it was at this time of his greatest fame that his appearances in public became fleeting; he was passed over for a professorship and possibly fathered a love-child on a married lady-admirer; worse than professional disappointment or scandal, he begun to suffer from nervous illness - dread of ill-health. He withdrew into himself, musical composition and the study and translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Towards the end of his life, he reappeared for a series of concerts on behalf of Érard, makers of pianos favoured by many composers; these continued on Mondays and Thursdays until he died.

Reputedly, his death came when reaching down a volume in his cluttered study. As he pulled on it, the high, haphazardly-weighted bookcase in which it stood toppled onto him.

Le Chemin de Fer, of 1844, is a tone-poem for piano, describing a railway journey.  

Track Eight:  Le Chemin de Fer - Charles Valentin Alkan

Underground railways have their portrayals in music. Most are surprizingly up-beat and cheerful. Our next piece, which dates from 1961, evokes a rather grimmer reality - Subway Jam. Its sinister concrete-jungle rhythms on percussion and brass with interspersed, softer grey tones from woodwind, were intended to accompany a sequence from a film set in New York - Carline’s Something Wild. About this piece there is the inhumanity of scale and an alienation whose ends have been lost in all-powerful mechanical means; it exhibits a harsher, harder-hitting development of Honegger’s impersonal vision and style, perhaps, the sentimental ‘machinism’ left a nightmare. The ‘Sixties were very distant from the ‘Twenties, thanks to the Second World War, the growth in technology, intense urban development and, side by side with wealth, grinding poverty untouched by any social programme to build on gains of the pre-war New Deal. The piece was revized by its composer for concert as the third number of the Suite Music For A Great City (1963-4). The composer? Aaron Copland. It is an example of his gritty, later work. Here it is conducted by Copland himself.

Track Nine:  Subway Jam - Music For A Great City - Copland 

For our last piece, Charles Williams’ Rhythm on Rails, from 1943, a typical example of orchestral and lyrical finesse from him, and some onomatapeia. Its optimism brings our short journey to a close. This was Classical Break, I’m Mike Burrows, hoping that you have enjoyed the trip and that I’ll have your company again, soon. Mind the doors!

Track Ten:  Rhythm on Rails - Charles Williams