Remembrance: 7th and 8th November

              CB Remembrance

At the close of the script, we append a 7 poem-sequence written by Mike Burrows for Remembrance Weekend.

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 attempt 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 hostilities.  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

 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 unsplintered
            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. 

              2      Ivor Beegy

             A small Celtic cross of stone, with sundown

            Behind it and, on the stepped plinth, details
            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. 

  

            3          (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.   

                         4        (On A Cartoon)

             His dreams now down to a Sunday morning,

            He has no real complaint.  Planes and beeches
            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.

             5  (For The Fallen 1)

           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.

             6        (For The Fallen, 2)

            Freedom can seem worse than even defeat.

            Sorrow or sense of futility crown
            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.

            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

For The Fallen 30 October & 1 November

This week's Classical Break is a recording of a lunchtime concert given at the Holburne Museum, Bath on November 11th, 2014. 

Below are the programme notes by the concert's co-organiser, Edna Blackwell, from which the radio script has been shamelessly drawn. Thanks to the Holburne Museum for allowing us to record the concert for your listening delight!

The Holburne Museum

Lunchtime Concert Tuesday, 11^th November at 1.10pm

 For the Fallen

Ludlow and Teme by Ivor Gurney

Bruce Evans (tenor)

Edna Blackwell (piano)

and The Remembrance Quartet

A Shropshire Lad by George Butterworth

and songs by Rudi Stephan and W. Denis Browne

Niall Hoskin (baritone)

Steven Hollas (piano)

All today’s composers were born within 5 years of each other. By the end of the First World War three – the Englishmen Butterworth and Browne and the German Stephan – were dead, the other (Ivor Gurney) psychologically damaged.

Ivor Gurney was born in 1890 in Gloucester. A scholarship took him to the Royal College of Music to study composition with Stanford.
He was equally talented as poet and musician writing nearly 900 poems between 1913 and 1926 and continuing to write poems long after his ability to compose coherent music ceased.
At first rejected for military service he joined the Army in 1915 and served in France where he was wounded, gassed and shellshocked. After treatment in military and mental hospitals he resumed his studies at the R.C.M, this time with Vaughan Williams.
Leaving college in 1921 he returned to Gloucester where he failed to find permanent employment and felt he was being rejected both as a composer and a poet.
He threatened suicide and the instability which seemed like eccentricity before the war was aggravated by his feverish activity in producing poems and songs and, of course, his war experiences eventually leading to his admission to Gloucester Mental Hospital.
Gurney rarely set his own poems and was drawn to A.E. Housman for his two song cycles ‘Ludlow and Teme’ and ‘Western Playland’ which were eventually published in 1923 and 1926 after much revision, a process which he continued throughout his composing life.
The seven songs of ‘Ludlow and Teme’ were all probably written in 1919. There is no attempt at musical narrative or cross reference between the songs. He rarely uses word painting, instead he captures changing moods in his accompaniments. The tonality is fluid, the music hovers around rather than settles into a key.
Gurney very much admired Vaughan Williams’ song cycle ‘On Wenlock Edge’ which uses an accompaniment of piano and string quartet, he follows this idea for both his song cycles.
With his deteriorating mental health, musical friends, particularly Marion Scott, had to take over preserving and preparing his manuscripts for publication.
In a letter to a friend, Gurney wrote ‘My Housman cycle is to be done at a party at the Scotts in March (1920), Stewart Wilson as the singer and the Philharmonic Quartet and myself as back ground’. This is a very apt description of the role of the accompanying instruments.
Now permanently resident in a London mental hospital, Gurney was allowed to listen to a first broadcast performance of ‘Ludlow and Teme’ in August 1925. He commented ‘I wish the singer had used the revisions I made – to avoid squareness’. His many revisions are noted in Philip Lancaster’s edition of 2011 which is being used today. All creative activity ceased in 1927, Ivor Gurney eventually died in 1937.

Ludlow and Teme  [words by A.E. Housman]When smoke stood up from Ludlow
Far in a Western Brookland
‘Tis time, I think by Wenlock Town
*Ludlow Fair
On the Idle Hill of Summer
*When I was One and Twenty
The Lent Lily
*These two poems are also set by Butterworth in the second part of this programme.

Bruce Evans studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He has sung both opera and oratorio widely, working for English Touring Opera, Opera della Luna and Glyndebourne Festival and Touring Opera. He also toured in Europe, the Far East and United States with Pavillion Opera. Next year he will be singing the title role in Stravinsky’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ for Bristol Opera. Bruce has enjoyed greatly the opportunity of studying this beautiful and challenging work. He is currently a Technical Project Leader at Heathrow Airport Ltd.

Edna Blackwell is a pianist, conductor and teacher. Apart from conducting many choral and instrumental works, mainly for the Bath Cantata Group, she has enjoyed acting as repétiteur for many operas and has conducted quite a few including ‘La Bohéme’ and ‘Albert Herring’. She enjoys playing chamber music and accompanying in particular. She founded ‘Operaletta’ whose one act comic operas at the Rondo Theatre and latterly Shakespeare’s Birthday Concerts at the Holburne have been particularly successful.

The Remembrance Quartet was especially formed for the concert.

Its members are: Matthew Taylor, Anna Salamonsen, Tim Robb and Shena Power.

Note from producer, Rupert Kirkham. Live concerts don't always fit the slot available for a radio programme - in the case of Classical Break, it's 58 minutes. We are running a little early, so I have added in an item which went out on Somer Valley FM earlier this year, researched and written by Mike Burrows. It's another song by Ivor Gurney, called, In Flanders. But as you will hear, although written at the Front, it's about Gurney's love of the Gloucestershire countryside. The singer is the baritone, Stephen Varcoe, the pianist, Clifford Benson. The introduction is me. 

George Butterworth was born in 1885, was educated at Eton and Oxford and studied at the Royal College of Music. He was part of the Folksong Revival movement, as a song collector and an enthusiastic dancer (there survives a very short film of him Morris dancing). When war broke out in 1914, as Peter Pirie says ‘it gave him something to do. No-one near him in the army suspected he was interested in music, and he was killed in the Battle of the Somme on 5th August 1916.’
A.E. Housman’s collection of poems ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was published in 1896; Butterworth’s setting dates from 1911.

Loveliest of trees
When I was one-and-twenty
Look not in my eyes
Think no more,lad
The lads in their hundreds
Is my team ploughing?  
    

Rudi Stephan grew up in the Rhineland city of Worms: he was born there in 1887. He studied in Frankfurt, and following performances of orchestral works at the Festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Muskiverein he was hailed as a leading light among the younger generation of German composers. His only opera had just been accepted for performance in 1915 when he volunteered for action. He was killed by a Russian sniper’s bullet in September of that year.

Waldnachmittag   (Woodland Afternoon) (composed 1906)

The peace of Sunday lies over the land: you and I rest beneath a leafy roof. Birds sing sleepily; a sweet breathing silence goes its evening way. The sun dapples the ground, deer graze. Distant hymns tell of love and pain, and the darkling soul quivers at its transience. – words by Maurice Reinhold von Stern.

Memento vivere  (Remember to live) (first draft 1908, final version 1913)

I rode through the dark, silent as sad as night, thinking of the few friends I had on earth, and of those already under the earth. Then a ghostly voice called from the dark mountain: ‘Man, enjoy life today, for tomorrow you go to your grave!’ Was it a shepherd boy singing? I do not know, but it filled my soul with fear. Once I heard those words from a brother’s lips: now he lies in the cold ground. – words by Friedrich Hebbel.
 

William Denis Browne, born 1888, was educated at Rugby and Clare College Cambridge,
where he was later organ scholar. He was a close friend of Rupert Brooke, who was next door at King’s. Browne studied under Charles Wood and Busoni; he taught for a while before he and Brooke were commissioned together. Brooke died en route to the Dardanelles, where Browne died in action on 4th June 1915

To Gratiana Dancing and Singing – to words of Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

See! with what constant motion

Even, and glorious, as the sun,

Gratiana steers that noble frame,

Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice

That gave each winding law and poise,

And swifter than the wings of Fame.

Each step trod out a lover's thought

And the ambitious hopes he brought,

Chain'd to her brave feet with such arts;

Such sweet command, and gentle awe,

As when she ceas'd, we sighing saw

The floor lay pav'd with broken hearts.

So did she move; so did she sing

Like the harmonious spheres that bring

Unto their rounds their music's aid;

Which she performed such a way,

As all th' enamoured world will say:

The Graces danced, and Apollo play'd.

Note by the composer: ‘the melody on which the accompaniment is founded is that of an anonymous Allmayne in Elizabeth Rogers’ Virginal Book (17th century)’

Niall Hoskin (Tenor) was in Clare College Choir, Cambridge. He sings in oratorio and recitals, and has now reached the stage where his operatic roles are daddies and baddies. He has done title roles from Orfeo to Don Giovanni, Falstaff to the Mikado. Future oratorio includes Handel’s Judas Maccabeus, Brahms’ German Requiem and Vaughan Williams’Dona nobis pacem. Next year he will be singing in Bath Opera’s Peter Grimes and Bristol Opera’s The Rake’s Progress

Steven Hollas (piano) read music and history of art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He teaches piano, mainly at St. Lawrence School, accompanies Bath Minerva Choir and Cantamus Choir, plays harpsichord and organ for the Paragon Singers and Bradford Baroque Band. He very much enjoys accompanying singers, especially on historic pianos of various periods.

Edna Blackwell

Halloween 24 & 25 October

CB Halloween

(this programme is a repeat from 2014)

 

Track 1:  Nightmare, Artie Shaw  

Nightmare, by Artie Shaw.  This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme comes by kind permission of the Nabbital-Crashe family, from  the famous Tudor manorhouse of Numbleigh-On-The- -Hill, one of the most haunted houses in England.  The script, written by Mike Burrows, is a celebration of Halloween. 

Untouched by contemporary attitudes to property and squatters, Halloween, a night for ghosts and spirits, exists largely in  corner-of-an-eye paleness amid fierce red and yellow tints of trees, mists and bittersweet drifts or upward spirals of blue smoke and memory from bonfires and chimneys:  in the shadows, uncertain sunshine and early lamplight experienced in old limestone houses and buildings, and the vast darkness and distant, flame-like lights of an Autumn night out-of-doors, which might as well be as far-off as the stars or moon between clouds.  Is it merely the chill of approaching winter that one suddenly feels – or a presence of the long, unhappy past?  The stories of the past are acted out still, as our stories move on.  Some griefs – and happinesses – are not to be effaced, whatever the living may think.

A ghost for every room or alcove and every passageway.  And one could go further in a country home, as the Otherworld’s fairies and witches of old belief are held back by articles of iron, moving water and prayer, and are known for their tricks.

Here, as one dunks one’s Sainsbury fig-roll in Kenco Really Rich in the front room of Numbleigh, and Mike takes a gingerly look at the antique Green Man andirons beside the Winchester stone fireplace, it may be Autumn, and it may be superstition, but where generations of landowning families and their servants have lived, light and shade shift or are meaningfully still; where cold sinks into the bones and there is the sense of centuries co-existent with our own, we may be feeling a closeness to the ghost-world .  Now that Mrs Nabbital-Crashe has returned to the stone kitchen and Amazon.uk , we must express our gratitude to the Nabbital-Crashe family for their hospitality, not that there is a blazing log-fire of welcome, or any kind of fire, for that matter, in the grate.

Here’s a Lyric Piece by Grieg, one of his popular character-pieces for piano.  This one, the 5^th number of the Seventh Book, Opus 62, is entitled simply, Phantom.  Is this ghost a haunting memory of an event or person, or the ghost of a lost feeling or opportunity?  A melody generated by rhythm and phrase-structure and embroidered by trills, repeated notes  and harmonies that look forward to Debussy, the entity passes before one’s view, the inspiration of an Autumnal-seeming moment.  There is no contrasting material.

Track 2:  Phantom, Grieg  

Thomas Hardy and Gerald Finzi – two  atheistic masters of the uncanny.  Finzi devoted many years to reading and setting the poetry of the sage of Max Gate.  His Hardy songs are arguably among the finest English vocal works produced in the 20^th Century.  Here is the evocative song, Voices From Things Growing In The Churchyard, the penultimate number of his cycle, By Footpath and Stile for baritone and string quartet.of 1921-22.  The composer withdrew the cycle after publication, as immature, and it was edited and republished  in an edition by his friend and fellow-composer, Howard Ferguson, in 1981. 

The poet imagines the inhabitants of the churchyard rising, in that they speak through flowers, grass, trees, leaves and berries in the wind.  From rapt opening through a lutenist-like strain, and characterizations of the voices, the scrupulous compassion of both poet and composer finds some sunshine between occurrences of the refrain, “All day cheerily,/All night eerily”.

Track 3:  Voices From Things Growing In The Churchyard, Finzi

One of the ghosts of Numbleigh is, of course, that of the Henrican Sir Amyas de Hoote, the founder of a dynasty and doomed to haunt the stables and the neighbouring rough country for hunting on the Sabbath:  he has become a Flying Dutchman of county circles, an awful warning to the hunter.  The de Hootes owned the house and estate from the dissolution of the monasteries until the late 18^th Century, when all was gamed away on Mr Bunn by the latest head of the family.  The gamester, Sir Edward, knew people who attended Hellfire Club parties, and, being a gambling-enthusiast with a system, built a Temple of Fortuna on the South side of the park.  It was converted into the ruined folly it is a year later.  

Cesar Auguste Franck, pianist, organist and teacher, enjoyed two periods of inspiration – beginning as a piano-virtuoso and composer of trios and glittering pieces for solo piano, when he was mocked for his full name – more recognizable as Caesar Augustus – and ending as a well-regarded church musician and important and much-loved figure at the Paris Conservatoire, when he took to writing orchestral tone-poems and a symphony, besides advancing his reputation as a composer of chamber-music and instrumental pieces of great maturity.

His highly schematic  tone-poem, Le Chasseur Maudit, The Accursed Horseman, was inspired by a German Ballad written in the 18^th Century by G.A.  Burger.  The introduction evokes the  auditory and spiritual tussle between the huntsman’s call on horns and tolled-over peace of the Sabbath countryside:  the huntsman’s call comes out uppermost; in blustery air, with asides for the bystander’s reflections, the reckless lord’s horse begins its wild, staggering career over all physical obstacles, urged on ever more madly...

A sudden whispering hush mutes even the huntsman’s horn...  Note the tritone derived from his music – now overt and chilling...  Diabolus in musica!  Doom is sounding in strings and trombones...  The swing of unearthly bells is in the eddying air of strings and woodwind...  Final-sounding chords bring something else on the wind – agitated rhythms pass on to the Sentence.  The Accursed Huntsman will hunt on to eternity, day and night, never to rest, driven on by the Wild Hunt of legend.  And so, in the midst of horror, already whipping up on his way and moving into the far distance, he leaves us.From the standpoint of thematic transformation, scoring, sensitivity to the elements and instinct for theatre, it’s an extraordinary feat of imagination to have come from a dutiful church-organist and professor in his sixties.

Track 4:  Le Chasseur Maudit, Franck

Spare a thought for those who have gone far beyond basking, sun-drenched naturism.  Then again, although Summer’s over, think of how hot and weary of heat overdressed mortals can become.  Surely, there is something to be said for supernaturism?  As Dan Russo and his Oriole Orchestra opined in the 1920s, Tain’t No Sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones!

Track 5:  Tain’t No Sin, Russo

The Ghost’s High Noon, as everyone knows, is midnight.  On October the 31^st, the Eve of All Hallows, how much more evidently is that the case?  We shan’t be at Numbleigh-on-The-Hill on the 31^st.  By all accounts, normal laws of physics are held at nought on the estate.  If there’s Sir George, the dandy of Mayfair, taking off his skin and dancing in his bones in the library, here’s Lady Joan, the grey lady, dressed in monochrome Elizabethan fashion, who haunts the passageway to the master bedroom, her back to the viewer and alternately wringing her hands and weeping into a handkerchief.  Her face ought to be a picture.  More of her anon.  Then, there are the portraits in the gallery at the top of the sub-neo-classical main stairs; a succession of wicked lords and ladies, all subject to the curse of the dying witch or abbot, and, come the night of the 31^st, doing very well on it; stepping down from their gilt frames to be much as ever they were – or – as in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Ruddigore - to encourage the latest baronet to maintain their family tradition of at least  one-crime-a-day wickedness.

Here, the ancestors sing of their delight in being ghosts.  

Track 6:  When The Night Wind Howls, Sullivan

From spirits who discover that, as they are ‘practically alive’ they need not be dead at all, to the world outside light opera.  Every old ghost was a new ghost, once, stepping out of the sheath of flesh and blood much as imagined by the poetess, Fredegond Shove.  The change here is made a still more solemn and mystical event, shimmering with wonder and compassion, by the magical realism of Vaughan Williams.  Here is his setting of The New Ghost.

Track 7:  The New Ghost, Vaughan Williams

Engelbert Humperdinck was a Wagnerist whose music turned principles of The Music of The Future and the Assembled Artwork of Music-drama as exemplified in the operas of The Master to as wonderful ends in such fairy-tale, childhood-centred theatre-pieces as Hansel und Gretel and Die Konigskinder.  Here is the orchestral description of the Witches Ride, Prelude to Act Two of Hansel and Gretel.

The de Hoote family of Numbleigh boasted no known witches or warlocks, perhaps mainly as they kept themselves to themselves when not burning witches.  The eccentric Sir Isaac, who flourished in the late 17^th Century, manifests himself as a sulphurous stench in an outhouse now let to holiday-makers, but, however insistently the old ash-tree taps at the window on lonely nights, he was, in fact, a serious amateur chemist.  The mysterious disappearances among villagers of his day, and odd goings-on both in the churchyard and on the bare turf summit of Numbleigh Hill were mere stories put about by the neighbouring gentry whose fortunes were ruined and whom, thanks to his own great good luck, he could kindly buy out.

Track 8:  Witch’s Ride, Humperdinck 

Lady Joan de Hoote, the Grey Lady mentioned earlier, endures unlifelike stature from the end opposite to that endured by some other celebrated ghosts.  Some walk with their head tucked underneath their arm, while she walks the passageway to the master-bedroom complete at the top, but with miserable figure abridged at the knees owing to the vanity of her great-great-grandson:  he it was who had the floor of the manor-house’s first storey raised by just over a  foot in order to feel tall at least somewhere in his house.  When she has her feet up and chews the spirit-fat with fellow-spectres, she most likely admits that the effect of keeping to the floor as it was in her day adds gratifyingly to her strange power. 

Classical Break came from freezing Numbleigh Hall,  courtesy of the present owners, the Nabbital-Crashes, to whom we extend a lighted swede-lantern and prayer for benighted souls.  Do we accept their invitation to attend the Numbleigh Halloween-party?  In lieu of that desperate act, we play out with the Grey Lady Joan’s favourite number, these days,  according to Mrs Nabbital-Crashe.  With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, performed by Cyril Smith and Rudy Vallee’s Connecticut Yankees! This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was phoned in by Mike Burrows.  Goodbye!

Track 9:  With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, perf. by Cyril Smith and Rudy Vallee’s Connecticut Yankees.

-“My swede has no nose.”

-“Your swede has no nose?  How does he smell?”

-“Terrible.”