CB Gloucestershire May 21-22 2016

CB Gloucestershire 21 - 22 May

CB Gloucestershire

Now the Summer is almost upon us - take a trip to the Cotswolds and the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside!

 A Bit From My Gloucestershire Rhapsody

The trees talked it, and horses, went trampling by.

There is no end to glory when blood is high,

And we that are Gloucester’s own, since She has gracious grown

Will take a day of April as it is meant in mind.

Cotswold called an infinite love from the deeps

Of Her – Severn remembered the galley sweeps;

Thought Dane – as Cotswold Roman – and lifted Her whole

Soul to the day; all the history and gossip keeps

She heard in twenty centuries of change, and strange people.

March with Her wind, which might be great, is kept friend;

For one day man is allowed equality, and/of/godlike mind

Comrade with March and Cotswold – Severn broadening

                                                                           all-grand.

All love from all memory called out – Beethoven, Belloc,

The Lament Song – and watching the scarred hills, “Puck

Of Pooks Hill” – and my own music surging up and up.

                 Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), from Best Poems

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  Today’s programme presents two orchestral works by two composers from Gloucestershire:  Gustav Holst’s early work, the Cotswolds Symphony – later disowned by him – and The Gloucestershire Rhapsody.   Neither of these works represented a landmark in British music at the time of their reception, and only one of them was publicly performed. 

 The Symphony in F Major, ‘The Cotswolds’,  dates from the end of the 19^th Century, the years 1899-1900; the then Gustav von Holst began it the year after leaving the Royal College of Music, at about

the time that he was writing the Wagnerish Walt Whitman Overture and Winter Idyll, filled with plans, though mainly vocal and operatic, and ruefully aware of the three influences on him, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Wagner.  He was also studying Sanskrit and Indian mythology; his theosophist step-mother being influential.  The transformation from Holst the student into Holst the artist was under way. He was born and brought-up  in Cheltenham, educated at Pate’s Grammar School for Boys, and loved the Gloucestershire Cotswolds-area, with its complex-curved hills and oddly secretive valleys; the bluffs of the hills rise above Cheltenham, sheep and agrarian country with added woods, rocky limestone outcrops, such as the Devil’s Chimney at Leckhampton, tiny local stone-built villages and hamlets, and wildness.  Country fairs take place in larger towns, and yet are a part of the lonely lives and comraderie on one farm – and wider friendships in pubs – of the local people.  In his late teens, he had served as church organist and choir-master at Wyck Rissington and Bourton-on-the-Water, respectively.

The first movement of the Symphony is all too brief, Allegro Con Brio, more like a voluntary for orchestra than a first movement as taught by Professors Stanford or Parry (Holst was one of Stanford’s boys).  F Major is a bright key, held to be evocative of nature:  Holst proves that other keys are bright and evocative by unusual tonal vagrancy, though the harmonies are quite clear and pleasant.  Beginning with a brazen fanfare, this piece is fresh and highly attractive in its mixed scoring, which is effective in all sections, favouring trumpets, higher woodwind and violins; its brief, Parryesque, therefore mildly 18^th Century first subject is robust and a little (attractively), crabbed and stubborn, but active and purposeful; the second is melting, sweet in the style of Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov, airy and with nagging pendants that heighten its happy pathos.  The development is brief-to-unnoticeable, but neat, and refuses to become bogged-down in the hectoring scrabble that often passed for symphonic argument at the time. 

One guesses that Stanford, a hard task-master as Professor of Composition, had left, and had not left, his mark on the frail but innovative and determined Holst, just as he was to do on Ivor Gurney (who referred to his teacher as “that python!”).  Contemporary critical opinion was that the First Movement was the work’s weakest.

 Track 1:  Symphony in F Major, “The Cotswolds”: Allegro con brio, Holst

The mournful slow movement, Elegy (InMemoriam William Morris): Molto Adagio, may explain the Classical brevity and liveliness of the first.  In B Minor, it is in Stanford’s commemorative or symphonic vein, a slow march with pauses and asides that allow for llittle relief.  The brass and lower woodwind are heroic, the violins sighing and sliding in ornamentation.  All is as tightly packed and shaped as in a Brahms symphony, not over-repetitive, but its 8.35 minutes do impose; possibly the movement is too grave and powerful in its place in the scheme of this Symphony.  Holst, a lifelong Socialist, had had deep feelings for the head of the Arts and Crafts movement. He had heard Morris speak.  The Molto Adagio has led an independent life in the concert-hall.   With a different title, it might do duty as a superb War Elegy.  Cheltenham is a military town – officers of the Indian Army and civil servants of the Raj-administration settled there for the waters of the spa, and the Gloucestershire Regiment had had a long and fine career in the service of the Empire, losing many good men in the course of its expansion.  The War in South Africa was a nightmare to Imperialist and Socialist alike, the loss of volunteer soldiers to death, serious injury and, overwhelmingly, disease, sharpened people’s concern at the international disgust with which this cruel and foolish war caused the world’s other powers to regard Great Britain.  The movement ends smoulderingly, as it began. 

Track 2:  ll, Molto Adagio

The Scherzo  in D and B-flat, returns us to the bluff bucolic style of the first movement.  As at least one commentator has written, it is like a fairground-scene.  Actually, for once, one can accept this kind of idea.   It teems with detail, syncopations, changes of emphasis; the trio adds a tone of intimacy or transcendence to the presence almost everywhere of barkers and murmurous or clamorous  crowds dawdling, riding or playing, and music courtesy of musicians or steam  - the eye is on a pair of eyes, or the cloudy-blue sky above bunting, tents and gaudy roundabouts.  Holst met his wife at meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, but it’s tempting to read the couple into any picture of fairs and easy enjoyment of life, particularly after a tortured Adagio Molto.   The movement nips back to D by the close.

Track 3: lll Scherzo

The finale, in the Symphony’s home-key, is marked Allegro Moderato.  It is happy-go-lucky, Holst’s manner brassy,  suggesting assurance and rightful expectancy of the future – of an infinity of hope and joy in life.  His counterpoint and scoring are British Symphonism of the 1880s and 90s, striding out a little coloured by Wagner, but new in practical terseness and spare contrasts.  There is strenuousness, the rhythms are a little square, the brass insistent, but optimism prevails without too much forcing of the issue.  Rationed cymbals add a requisite touch of high-spiritedness.  The music is strong but has its feet firmly on the ground. 

 Track 4: lV Allegro Moderato

During Holst’s lifetime, the Cotswolds Symphony was performed once in full, by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, conducted by the redoubtable Dan Godfrey, in 1902. 

The period from 1918-1922 was, in the life of the composer-poet, Ivor Gurney – who, pace his latest champions, did not love the War - one of the most exciting to be read about for its record of artistic achievements  against the odds and in the face of fairly arrogant and obtuse middle-class appreciation of our own “Schubert” – as Parry – squire of Highnam, just outside Gloucester - called him...  In March, 1919, he wrote to a friend that what with sketches of a Gloucestershire Rhapsody and other musical tasks (including the writing of a symphony), his  life wasn’t worth living!  There was nothing else on hand, save songs, a mass and string quartet, and a piece for violin and piano...

Ivor Gurney's colourful Gloucestershire Rhapsody was  a work of love, following on from his despairing last days as a number in Kitchener’s army.  In it surges the tidal  Severn, as the superfine nervous (and chromatic) system of Scriabin's strings and woodwind and Straussian harmony, soaring violins and burnished brass – a three-note trumpet call seems to have come straight straight from Also Sprach Zarathustra  - mesh with a further weave of British influences.  A recurring grand passage in full orchestra begins in the world of Parry’s Jerusalem, joins with an evocation of Elgar’s

Coronation March, to meet an upward leap that seems to suggest that Gurney may have known Herbert Hamilton Harty’s fine vocal and orchestral setting of Ode To A Nightingale, the climactic spirit of Holst's early Cotswold Symphony (and oompah-bass processionals of later), and Stanford's Brahms-influenced rhapsodic manner... 

The result is yet 100% Gurney, the Gurney of withdrawal from the world into contemplation perhaps of a clay shard or coin found amid the red-brown clods of a ploughed field, or of Sirius during a nightwalk in the hills, but also the Gurney of county fairs, football matches, the Gloucester Regiment in which, even as the convinced Socialist that he became, he was proud to serve, and the society of farm-  and dock-labourers, river- and fisher-folk - a Gloucestershire of the British Empire.  The sudden, mysterious hushes of the Severn plain or Cotswolds are there - moments when one stands on the hills above Cheltenham or by the Severn at Framilode, Saul or Frampton - where willows waft grey-green locks of glaring-backed leaves,and the weighty river feels its own length surprisingly little:  Gurney’s ghost may be with one.  Alto woodwind have a magical descending snatch that seems wood-magic in itself – the sighing response has what may be Straussian sixths and doubling of violins.  Possibly the ‘Moglio’ episode in Elgar’s Concert Overture: In The South – Alassio influenced Gurney.  Later on, there's a little, plodding tune on alto woodwind, to strummed accompaniment that may remind one (very slightly) of an old French Carol or song!  It seems mediaeval, and of course Gurney’s sense of history was profound.  As a Gloucester chorister and apprentice organist, he must have performed much church-music of long tradition.  The development of the tune is predictably lovely in all aspects.  

On the other hand, the Rhapsody has a more extroverted side that seems almost to invoke Georgian bandstand-music.  One trumpets-and-drums passage may seem like a march of adolescence in Summer or Autumn:  Gurney and his friend, the poet,  Will Harvey, arm-in-arm and singing preposterously on a country lane.  The finale of the Cotswolds Symphony seems evoked at the grand close, but the Cotswolds Symphony isn't in it!  The Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare is almost like a glorified  bugle-call - Lights Out – here (significant, that).  The final chords are quite definite, yet peculiarly unbrassy and austere, almost classical in weight of tone. 

Track 5:  The Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Gurney

That was the Gloucestershire Rhapsody by Ivor Gurney:  a lovely, consequential, yet fantastic piece,  beautifully-scored, with all the light and shade and sense of history that one finds in the embowering Cotswolds and on the lonelier, bleaker Severn Plain... Not Elgar, not Delius, not Vaughan Williams, nor Howells. The Elgarian phrase nags at one - Coronation March? The Young Olaf motif from Scenes From The Life of King Olaf seems closer...  Or possibly a moment from the partly Gloucestershire-based Falstaff .   One hardly expected to hear a rhapsody on the scale of, and written with as much skill as, a Bax tone-poem, from the pen of a composer once thought to be only a miniaturist of the piano and a songwriter. ... And no, it's not remotely like Bax, either.  But Gurney knew from where the word rhapsody was derived: in the ancient Greek, a rhapsode is an epic poet or bard.  A speaker for a nation – or county!  In his vocabulary, a rhapsody was not a japed-up orchestral medley of popular songs!  Gurney hoped for far more than fame; he wanted to live to see Socialism flourish in Britain.  He died in an asylum.

As he lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1937, a parcel of recognitions – including a number of the magazine, Music and Letters, that contained an appreciative article on his work – arrived for him.  It was handed over, he struggled to open it; in moments, let it slip, and relapsed on the pillow:  “It’s too late,” he said. 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope you enjoyed our programme of music by Gloucestershire composers, scripted by Mike Burrows.  We leave you with the War Elegy by Ivor Gurney.  Goodbye.

Track 6:  War Elegy, Gurney

CB Gloucestershire 19 & 20 September

CB Gloucestershire

Now the Summer is almost upon us - take a trip to the Cotswolds and the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside!

 A Bit From My Gloucestershire Rhapsody

The trees talked it, and horses, went trampling by.

There is no end to glory when blood is high,

And we that are Gloucester’s own, since She has gracious grown

Will take a day of April as it is meant in mind.

Cotswold called an infinite love from the deeps

Of Her – Severn remembered the galley sweeps;

Thought Dane – as Cotswold Roman – and lifted Her whole

Soul to the day; all the history and gossip keeps

She heard in twenty centuries of change, and strange people.

March with Her wind, which might be great, is kept friend;

For one day man is allowed equality, and/of/godlike mind

Comrade with March and Cotswold – Severn broadening

                                                                           all-grand.

All love from all memory called out – Beethoven, Belloc,

The Lament Song – and watching the scarred hills, “Puck

Of Pooks Hill” – and my own music surging up and up.

                 Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), from Best Poems

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  Today’s programme presents two orchestral works by two composers from Gloucestershire:  Gustav Holst’s early work, the Cotswolds Symphony – later disowned by him – and The Gloucestershire Rhapsody.   Neither of these works represented a landmark in British music at the time of their reception, and only one of them was publicly performed. 

 The Symphony in F Major, ‘The Cotswolds’,  dates from the end of the 19^th Century, the years 1899-1900; the then Gustav von Holst began it the year after leaving the Royal College of Music, at about

the time that he was writing the Wagnerish Walt Whitman Overture and Winter Idyll, filled with plans, though mainly vocal and operatic, and ruefully aware of the three influences on him, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Wagner.  He was also studying Sanskrit and Indian mythology; his theosophist step-mother being influential.  The transformation from Holst the student into Holst the artist was under way. He was born and brought-up  in Cheltenham, educated at Pate’s Grammar School for Boys, and loved the Gloucestershire Cotswolds-area, with its complex-curved hills and oddly secretive valleys; the bluffs of the hills rise above Cheltenham, sheep and agrarian country with added woods, rocky limestone outcrops, such as the Devil’s Chimney at Leckhampton, tiny local stone-built villages and hamlets, and wildness.  Country fairs take place in larger towns, and yet are a part of the lonely lives and comraderie on one farm – and wider friendships in pubs – of the local people.  In his late teens, he had served as church organist and choir-master at Wyck Rissington and Bourton-on-the-Water, respectively.

The first movement of the Symphony is all too brief, Allegro Con Brio, more like a voluntary for orchestra than a first movement as taught by Professors Stanford or Parry (Holst was one of Stanford’s boys).  F Major is a bright key, held to be evocative of nature:  Holst proves that other keys are bright and evocative by unusual tonal vagrancy, though the harmonies are quite clear and pleasant.  Beginning with a brazen fanfare, this piece is fresh and highly attractive in its mixed scoring, which is effective in all sections, favouring trumpets, higher woodwind and violins; its brief, Parryesque, therefore mildly 18^th Century first subject is robust and a little (attractively), crabbed and stubborn, but active and purposeful; the second is melting, sweet in the style of Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov, airy and with nagging pendants that heighten its happy pathos.  The development is brief-to-unnoticeable, but neat, and refuses to become bogged-down in the hectoring scrabble that often passed for symphonic argument at the time. 

One guesses that Stanford, a hard task-master as Professor of Composition, had left, and had not left, his mark on the frail but innovative and determined Holst, just as he was to do on Ivor Gurney (who referred to his teacher as “that python!”).  Contemporary critical opinion was that the First Movement was the work’s weakest.

 Track 1:  Symphony in F Major, “The Cotswolds”: Allegro con brio, Holst

The mournful slow movement, Elegy (InMemoriam William Morris): Molto Adagio, may explain the Classical brevity and liveliness of the first.  In B Minor, it is in Stanford’s commemorative or symphonic vein, a slow march with pauses and asides that allow for llittle relief.  The brass and lower woodwind are heroic, the violins sighing and sliding in ornamentation.  All is as tightly packed and shaped as in a Brahms symphony, not over-repetitive, but its 8.35 minutes do impose; possibly the movement is too grave and powerful in its place in the scheme of this Symphony.  Holst, a lifelong Socialist, had had deep feelings for the head of the Arts and Crafts movement. He had heard Morris speak.  The Molto Adagio has led an independent life in the concert-hall.   With a different title, it might do duty as a superb War Elegy.  Cheltenham is a military town – officers of the Indian Army and civil servants of the Raj-administration settled there for the waters of the spa, and the Gloucestershire Regiment had had a long and fine career in the service of the Empire, losing many good men in the course of its expansion.  The War in South Africa was a nightmare to Imperialist and Socialist alike, the loss of volunteer soldiers to death, serious injury and, overwhelmingly, disease, sharpened people’s concern at the international disgust with which this cruel and foolish war caused the world’s other powers to regard Great Britain.  The movement ends smoulderingly, as it began. 

Track 2:  ll, Molto Adagio

The Scherzo  in D and B-flat, returns us to the bluff bucolic style of the first movement.  As at least one commentator has written, it is like a fairground-scene.  Actually, for once, one can accept this kind of idea.   It teems with detail, syncopations, changes of emphasis; the trio adds a tone of intimacy or transcendence to the presence almost everywhere of barkers and murmurous or clamorous  crowds dawdling, riding or playing, and music courtesy of musicians or steam  - the eye is on a pair of eyes, or the cloudy-blue sky above bunting, tents and gaudy roundabouts.  Holst met his wife at meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, but it’s tempting to read the couple into any picture of fairs and easy enjoyment of life, particularly after a tortured Adagio Molto.   The movement nips back to D by the close.

Track 3: lll Scherzo

The finale, in the Symphony’s home-key, is marked Allegro Moderato.  It is happy-go-lucky, Holst’s manner brassy,  suggesting assurance and rightful expectancy of the future – of an infinity of hope and joy in life.  His counterpoint and scoring are British Symphonism of the 1880s and 90s, striding out a little coloured by Wagner, but new in practical terseness and spare contrasts.  There is strenuousness, the rhythms are a little square, the brass insistent, but optimism prevails without too much forcing of the issue.  Rationed cymbals add a requisite touch of high-spiritedness.  The music is strong but has its feet firmly on the ground. 

 Track 4: lV Allegro Moderato

During Holst’s lifetime, the Cotswolds Symphony was performed once in full, by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, conducted by the redoubtable Dan Godfrey, in 1902. 

The period from 1918-1922 was, in the life of the composer-poet, Ivor Gurney – who, pace his latest champions, did not love the War - one of the most exciting to be read about for its record of artistic achievements  against the odds and in the face of fairly arrogant and obtuse middle-class appreciation of our own “Schubert” – as Parry – squire of Highnam, just outside Gloucester - called him...  In March, 1919, he wrote to a friend that what with sketches of a Gloucestershire Rhapsody and other musical tasks (including the writing of a symphony), his  life wasn’t worth living!  There was nothing else on hand, save songs, a mass and string quartet, and a piece for violin and piano...

Ivor Gurney's colourful Gloucestershire Rhapsody was  a work of love, following on from his despairing last days as a number in Kitchener’s army.  In it surges the tidal  Severn, as the superfine nervous (and chromatic) system of Scriabin's strings and woodwind and Straussian harmony, soaring violins and burnished brass – a three-note trumpet call seems to have come straight straight from Also Sprach Zarathustra  - mesh with a further weave of British influences.  A recurring grand passage in full orchestra begins in the world of Parry’s Jerusalem, joins with an evocation of Elgar’s

Coronation March, to meet an upward leap that seems to suggest that Gurney may have known Herbert Hamilton Harty’s fine vocal and orchestral setting of Ode To A Nightingale, the climactic spirit of Holst's early Cotswold Symphony (and oompah-bass processionals of later), and Stanford's Brahms-influenced rhapsodic manner... 

The result is yet 100% Gurney, the Gurney of withdrawal from the world into contemplation perhaps of a clay shard or coin found amid the red-brown clods of a ploughed field, or of Sirius during a nightwalk in the hills, but also the Gurney of county fairs, football matches, the Gloucester Regiment in which, even as the convinced Socialist that he became, he was proud to serve, and the society of farm-  and dock-labourers, river- and fisher-folk - a Gloucestershire of the British Empire.  The sudden, mysterious hushes of the Severn plain or Cotswolds are there - moments when one stands on the hills above Cheltenham or by the Severn at Framilode, Saul or Frampton - where willows waft grey-green locks of glaring-backed leaves,and the weighty river feels its own length surprisingly little:  Gurney’s ghost may be with one.  Alto woodwind have a magical descending snatch that seems wood-magic in itself – the sighing response has what may be Straussian sixths and doubling of violins.  Possibly the ‘Moglio’ episode in Elgar’s Concert Overture: In The South – Alassio influenced Gurney.  Later on, there's a little, plodding tune on alto woodwind, to strummed accompaniment that may remind one (very slightly) of an old French Carol or song!  It seems mediaeval, and of course Gurney’s sense of history was profound.  As a Gloucester chorister and apprentice organist, he must have performed much church-music of long tradition.  The development of the tune is predictably lovely in all aspects.  

On the other hand, the Rhapsody has a more extroverted side that seems almost to invoke Georgian bandstand-music.  One trumpets-and-drums passage may seem like a march of adolescence in Summer or Autumn:  Gurney and his friend, the poet,  Will Harvey, arm-in-arm and singing preposterously on a country lane.  The finale of the Cotswolds Symphony seems evoked at the grand close, but the Cotswolds Symphony isn't in it!  The Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare is almost like a glorified  bugle-call - Lights Out – here (significant, that).  The final chords are quite definite, yet peculiarly unbrassy and austere, almost classical in weight of tone. 

Track 5:  The Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Gurney

That was the Gloucestershire Rhapsody by Ivor Gurney:  a lovely, consequential, yet fantastic piece,  beautifully-scored, with all the light and shade and sense of history that one finds in the embowering Cotswolds and on the lonelier, bleaker Severn Plain... Not Elgar, not Delius, not Vaughan Williams, nor Howells. The Elgarian phrase nags at one - Coronation March? The Young Olaf motif from Scenes From The Life of King Olaf seems closer...  Or possibly a moment from the partly Gloucestershire-based Falstaff .   One hardly expected to hear a rhapsody on the scale of, and written with as much skill as, a Bax tone-poem, from the pen of a composer once thought to be only a miniaturist of the piano and a songwriter. ... And no, it's not remotely like Bax, either.  But Gurney knew from where the word rhapsody was derived: in the ancient Greek, a rhapsode is an epic poet or bard.  A speaker for a nation – or county!  In his vocabulary, a rhapsody was not a japed-up orchestral medley of popular songs!  Gurney hoped for far more than fame; he wanted to live to see Socialism flourish in Britain.  He died in an asylum.

As he lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1937, a parcel of recognitions – including a number of the magazine, Music and Letters, that contained an appreciative article on his work – arrived for him.  It was handed over, he struggled to open it; in moments, let it slip, and relapsed on the pillow:  “It’s too late,” he said. 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope you enjoyed our programme of music by Gloucestershire composers, scripted by Mike Burrows.  We leave you with the War Elegy by Ivor Gurney.  Goodbye.

Track 6:  War Elegy, Gurney

George Butterworth 14 & 15 May

George Butterworth.

(Script has been slightly edited to fit the timeslot)

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme, written and researched by Mike Burrows, is a tribute to the composer, George Butterworth.

George Sainton Kaye Butterworth was born in 1885, the son of a lawyer and managing-director on the railways, and died as a Captain in the Durham Light Infantry during the Battle of the Somme. At about dawn, in August 1916, leading his company in action near Pozieres he was killed instantly by a sniper in a moment of sleep-deprived unconcern for his own safety. As a soldier, he had liked to lead from
the front; here, he had made an elementary slip and raised his head too high. Posthumously awarded the Military Cross, he lived up fully to what had been expected of him and thus to the example of his grandfather, an army General. Like many of his contemporaries of the privileged middle-classes, he died as a junior officer fighting the Hun, his last moments spent caught up in the crossfire of an attack in the blasted landscape of a sector of the Western Front, his body never recovered, his name added to the famous Thiepval Monument to many of those Allied troops who were killed in France or Belgium between 1914-18 and who have no known grave. The monument stands not far from where he was killed. At the time, the earthwork in which he fell became known as The Butterworth Trench.

Let’s hear an arrangement of a folksong arranged by him, one of his 11 Sussex Folksongs, Roving In
The Dew. He collected 3 versions of this song himself, under the title, Dabbling In The Dew, but
for this arrangement used a version taken down by another researcher.

Track 1 Roving In The Dew, Arr Butterworth 

It is doubtful that George Butterworth ever had thoughts of living up to his Grandfather’s example. Though an Old Etonian and graduate of Trinity College, Oxford and one who would have regarded himself as the social equal of most of the more famous victims of the meatgrinder in the teens of the last Century –the first-rate Tennants, Grenfells Asquiths and Horners of this life - was no conventional patriot, no Tory, no euphuist in any aspect of existence.  Whether learning or teaching music – he 

taught at Radley – he was an artist of close mouth and practical activity. He was a physically strong,
man who smoked a straight Lovatt briar, grew the expected flourishing moustache and tended to look as though smiling at the eyes – lucent eyes crinkled at the corners, the lower lids subject to upward pressure from his cheeks, humorous eyes, their humour with a touch of irony or scepticism, perhaps.

They were also watchful eyes. A graduate in Classics, he attended the Royal College of Music from 1910, a late starter in the College’s eyes – though a composer from the age of 9 - who knew where
he was going. The courses disappointed him, leading nowhere; he left after a year. He had the clearest ideas of form and modern harmony and had made a study of folk-music, becoming a staunch member of Cecil Sharp’s Folksong Society. He had worked through the expected influences of the day that wrecked the work of lesser talents; Wagner left his mark, possibly Grieg or Debussy and possibly, at the outside, the colourful and ingenious style of Slavic instrumentation. He remained the most analytical and clearminded of critics, and certainly cut through musical problems for that late-developer, Vaughan Williams. At the end of an evening, he took his pipe out of his mouth to suggest in his abrupt way that Vaughan Williams write a 2nd Symphony, The London Symphony, and Vaughan Williams dedicated it to him before its premiere in 1913. When Butterworth died, Vaughan Williams felt as though utterly bereft; there’s the matter of his having volunteering for war-service as an ambulance-driver but, in time, changing his battlefield vocation to become a Royal Artillery officer. Perhaps
the death of Butterworth contributed to this decision.

George would not have been impressed by talk of his bravery in encouraging his men – mostly hardbitten ex-miners - to one more effort, or by admiration of his Military Cross – which only officers could win. His men loved him, but that would have made the error seem all the more stupid. He would have kicked himself for making the mistake made by chivalrous idiots just posted up from home, clever lads who forgot to duck or who had no idea how hard it were to dodge the bullet of an unseen assailant – the speed with which death could be dealt in a modern War in France.  As a composer, George Butterworth’s work has come down to us as a proof of his technical ability as well as pure expression; he seems the most humane but poised of artists, a man who, quite possibly attained the very highest degree of feeling and polish; not one of his works appears blemished by extraneous or awkward details or developments. They appear to have been distilled and perfected by a musical magician. He must have destroyed volumes of early pieces before leaving for France – if not sooner. His complete oeuvre 

consists of four orchestral pieces, a couple of single songs – one setting Requiescat by Oscar Wilde after the death of his own mother, three song cycles – one based on poems from Stevenson’s Songs of Travel, two on the Shropshire Lad poems of AE Housman, one on poems by WE Henley, Love Blows
As The Wind Blows, a book of arrangements of 11 Sussex folksongs and – most famously – the ever-fresh four orchestral pieces, the Two English Idylls of 1911, the Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad, (1912) and An Idyll: The Banks of Green Willow (1913).

The Folksong movement in English music has been decried by modernists and so-called internationalists ever since its co-opted member-composers came to fame. Not one of the brilliant
minds who have pointed out that the world of folksong nostalgically revived was invalid as a form of
artistic expression because dead on its feet even as it was obtruded on the minds of sophisticated Rightwing intellectuals, or just plain substanceless when contrasted with industrial machine-reality, has
managed to extirpate the public’s love of its Art-music. The point has so often been missed that
folksong-and-dance formed the musical means of self-expression and entertainment of ordinary people who did not attend Public School or University or hire a suburban piano. Ordinary people toiled and died without mark save birth, marriage, census and funeral – unless they attained the charge-sheet, or entered the Workhouse.

Let’s hear the two English Idylls. The first is based on three folksongs: Dabbling in The Dew, whose
subject is unsuccessful wooing, Just as The Tide was Flowing, a story of successful wooing and Henry Martin, in which a man turns to piracy on the high seas in order to support his brothers!

Track 2: English Idyll No 1, Butterworth 

Butterworth’s use of alto instruments is a shading feature – voices we made of oboe, clarinet, violas, cellos, horns, trombones. The light and freshness comes from flute, harp, solo trumpet, violins. In rounding out the story how effective his harp runs are. The bass is unobtrusive but mobile or 

provides pedals of depth – a depth of earth like firmness. The interplay of instrumentation is lively. His use of harmonics and mutes is as breathtaking in its elemental scene setting as is his sense of drama
and tragedy. Full throated, his orchestra is a formidable force from which both Holst and Vaughan Williams and many other composers learned, as the deep earth settled on its perhaps one time Wagnerist only begetter. Constantly, the blending of timbres is both subtle and unerringly distinct.

In the English Idyll No 2, the folksong is Phoebe and Her Dark-eyed Sailor: in it, a girl encounters a sailor; he seeks to win her; she refuses the confident well-set up lad until she suddenly realizes that he is her betrothed who went to sea and was thought to have drowned. He tried and made his fortune.

Track 3: English Idyll No 2, Butterworth 

People had flocked from the poverty-stricken land to the cities, where pay was supposed survivable. The cities swelled with increasingly cheap labour with predictable results. Thousands were killed young
by machines, dust or fibre-polluted atmospheres and toxic agents, or by a home-life best imagined from the prints of contemporary artists. The workhouse – the being a charity-case – was merely dreaded more than work or a cholera- or typhoid epidemic. No wonder many folksongs sing bittersweetly or longingly of love, usually lost love, betrayal, death or some other form of separation, dalliances while going or coming from somewhere, or sailors, the season or life-occupation, the
possibility of making one’s fortune – with plenty of fireside beer, warming spice and baccy as well. It has to be remembered that at his most utile (and, coincidentally virtuous), the common man or woman was young, fit, unmarried, politically submissive and an abstainer from drinking, smoking and sexual
relations. When rich enough to feed, clothe and house children on one wage, well, a man and woman
could marry, settle down and breed fit young children of the same make. After all, at a higher
differential, this was how professionals not of independent means ought to live, to the glory of God and
Capital, and everyone knew what the alternative was – to be a pauper and expected to die. Moral force was with wealth and the employer; even the established church, socially enmeshed with the gentry and middleclasses, would not or could not ameliorate the conditions created by tyrannical Mammon, yet one had to conform.

The conflicts in AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad are many; but central to Butterworth’s probable view of them would have been that between living in the countryside or coming to live and work in the
City, in London, as Housman had done, and having to hide one’s own very nature. Facing up to
an inimical, godless universe of chance and ill-fate, and to society’s capacity for damning short-lived man’s non-existent soul to cowering under the threat of social disgrace and even capital punishment as a criminal was a peculiarly Victorian dilemma – particularly after the trial of Oscar Wilde. The covertly homosexual Housman described himself as an Epicurian, and Butterworth likewise was no believer in the Christian God, but both must have felt themselves still to be swimming against the tide of middleclass conventional religion, politics and morality. Both loved the countryside, the seasons, the general goodheartedness of unsophisticated people. The countryside and country folk were still there, still sang and danced in reaction to life. The beauty of Butterworth’s orchestral evocation of Spring in the Rhapsody is superfine from the opening on string harmonics, but also as though of Nature itself. The woodwind, violins, violas and cellos shade the music to perfection, the brass affirmatory of
warmth, youthful happiness or dread fate. To judge from the use of harmony, Butterworth’s study of music must have included the works of Richard Strauss. I’d venture to suggest that no Straussian nor expressionist composer achieved a starker, harsher climax than that of this piece in which vaulting
fanfare builds and is broken by the tritone as in Sibelius. A moment of horror that stays with
one. (The whole tone scale from the harp at close may symbolize death by drowning). The day is
not saved by the Loveliest of Trees motif that has opposed it, all along, but by the phrase of last line of the song. “To see the cherry hung with snow.” Butterworth’s modification, qualification or distortion
of song-themes is a brilliant  and original feature of his orchestral work: he develops them as might
a symphonist. He searches out the harmonic implication or resonance to the last drachm (dram) or scruple. The harp’s rippling wholetone scale near the end has been suggested to symbolize a self-drowning.

The main theme of the Rhapsody, by name, Loveliest of Trees, is a folksong that was in fact
entirely Butterworth’s own. In its original form, it is the first song in his first cycle of Shropshire Lad settings. He ventriloquized Housman’s and Great Britain’s Lad in a song indistinguishable from those that move by every means but the intentional. To adapt Wilfred Owen, the poetry of the art-musician inspired by folksong is in the pity. No wonder the soldiers of his company thought so well of him.
In Butterworth’s music it is never, to use the Masefield couplet, “The smoke of all three farms lifts blue in air/As though man’s passionate mind had never suffered there.”

Track 4: Rhapsody – A Shropshire Lad, Butterworth 

Turn to 1913 and another orchestral Idyll, The Banks of Green Willow, based on two folksongs, the
first eponymous – a woman elopes with a captain, believes that she will die in childbirth and begs him
to throw her over the side – and the second, Green Bushes, in which a fickle maid finds a new lover.

It’s interesting that every Butterworth orchestral piece is in an arch construction:  first, there is the proposition of a beautiful tune and contrast material; then, there is a vehement quasi-development section; lastly, there is a restatement of the opening material – long drawn out, becoming hushed, fading into a dying fall, almost unbearably poignant, nostalgic, regretful but too touching not to be consoling and unforgettable 

Track 5: The Banks of Green Willow, George Butterworth 

Perhaps folk-music survived even the worst of the 19th Century’s murderous advancement of Feudal Capitalism as the basis for a modern society, partly thanks to the Folksong Society and young composers from privileged, even landed, backgrounds who bothered to listen and hear; folk-music was popular self-expression more real than music-hall popular songs or polite villa-ballads provided by paid hacks who might have wished to write symphonies. It was national self-expression; it came of the people, the nation rather than its rulers – as glorified by the latest in Art music-technique, those, for one thing, who bothered to note it down as played or sung, not as taught by the Brahmsian, Dvorakesque Professor Stanford. Modal, not diatonic, pentatonic folk-music could be embellished by being played over chromatic harmonies, subjected to direct strokes of development, manipulation, transformation, even counterpoint – and gain. There was never the intention to seem sophisticated. Sophistication is
not a positive value – it means capable of glib persuasiveness. Not exactly a desideratum in one who pays tribute to the victims of the 19th Century British holocaust who, trapped and left with little or no real comfort, leisure or notice created the only natural, meaningful form of music we had to distinguish
our artworks from superior European models. Everyone, not the educated connoisseur, critic or composer, owned folk-music – felt its pathos or humour – often, its defiant humour and unintentional pathos. Socialists might just look back to the 17th Century and think of Commonwealth – wealth held in common. Holst, Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Grainger, Moeran and many others will not appeal to those who think their music easy or unpolitical. Anyone with half an ear for music will hear what their
music may mean – and find its influence compelling, magical and inexhaustible, the musical equivalent of a powerful poetic tradition stretching back to Shakespeare or even Chaucer – a bringing together of
the classes, a levelling process, a voice for us all, harmonies for our comedies and tragedies, our own
too-often oppressed and distracted lives. Even if in the Nineteenth Century the devil preached from holy scripture, still, pace the hymn or parlour song writers, he had almost none of the best tunes. True feeling was in the distinct lyrics, ballads and dances of semi-literate and self-taught musicians. Ribald, raucous, insolent or hail fellow, well-met, wistful, grieving, seeking solace, folk tunes held the truth of a materialistic, deeply false and unspeakably cruel age that had trashed earth and society for resources and productivity, profit and power.  How heartrending that Captain Butterworth failed to duck. Sometimes, it is hard to see what he fought and died for on the Somme. His music though is a glory of 

his generation and our country and, as the Great War was simply one more huge atrocity of ndustrialization, capital and utility, his pieces of lifelong-taken pains are made still more poignantly beautiful – as well as ironically bittersweet - by its being in part his and his lost generation’s
unconscious memorial.  How would his music have developed if he had returned to it after the Great War? That is unknowable; like Ivor Gurney, Butterworth was his own man, his future tendencies 

not to be predicted. He left one unfinished orchestral piece. Fantasia. This was completed a short while ago by Martin Yates. A long movement, it makes for fascinated listening, though always with the caveats that a major composer’s sketches are his own and subject to any change he likes, and his final intentions are not divined by editors or, as in this case, a talented fellow-composer who helps fragments across within composition of his own. Here it is. Memories of the pieces heard earlier are rife but welcome, and there is a very likeable dance-episode that Butterworth as a folk-dancer knew well how to encompass. Also, there are moments somewhat akin to Copland’s Appalachian Spring…

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon. We leave you with Fantasia, sketched by Butterworth and “realized” by Martin Yates. Goodbye!

Track 6: Fantasia, Butterworth/Yates

Cooler - 7 & 8 May 2016

CB  Cooler

(This programme is a repeat)

Track 1: Sicilienne, Paradis 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of music to relax and think to - a near--hour of apparent idleness!  All you, the listener, require is the Summer, a comfortable chair and ice-cool drink.  Let music do the carrying.  

You have just heard a Sicilienne - a kind of dance in 6/8 rhythm by Maria-Therese Paradis, a woman-composer and keyboard-performer, blind from childhood, for whom Mozart wrote pieces.

The Prelude in D Flat, by Ivor Gurney shows no sign of having been written in the difficult times following his experiences as both private soldier and casualty in the Great War.

If anyone knew of the sufferings of people thought idle by materialists and so-called hard workers, it was Ivor Gurney.  Also, he enjoyed the consolations of music and poetry.  Their influence, however, consumed him.  For a time, he tried to hold down casual employment by day and work on his artistic occupations by night; this, along with depression and malnutrition perhaps cost him his reason.  He articulated suffering humanity but also a glorious idealism beyond bitterness in both music and poetry and prose.  His little-known Preludes for Piano are one of his most beautiful inspirations, in a style of refined but deepening harmony, the melodic line as subtle and true as those of an Elgar or Fauré.  Here is the delicate, greatly touching Prelude in D Flat.

Track 2:  Prelude in D-Flat, Ivor Gurney   

Next, a waltz from the days of ‘50s Austerity, by the American virtuoso mouth-organist, Larry Adler.  Genevieve, the story of vintage cars and skulduggery between friends on the London To Brighton Run is a good film, well directed and acted, but Adler provided its heart with his music!  It was not an easy score to write.  Yet the eponymous Darracq, and its Spyker-rival, their occupants and an escalating ordeal by British highways, museum-piece-cars and personal pride, are now inseparable from its delightful qualities...  Harmonica was an inspired choice of soloist; Adler’s melodies, his sly modulations and enharmonic shifts - and clever representation of cranking-up - are indelible  Who can think vintage-car--owners idle, if their labours of love and tussles are this happy--making for spectators ...?  Listen and hear!

Track 3:  Genevieve Waltz, Adler

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of music to relax - and think - to. 

Now, a short piece for voices and viols, in which the Flemish composer, Adrian Willaert arranges the song Lack of Silver:  love has cost a man all his silver, but he doesn’t mind - he has the love of his beloved.  Willaert was a master of counterpoint whose chansons were often built on existing tunes.  The skill in an accompaniment by strict canon (after-echo of the leading-note in an immediate successive part), to take one example, was much the true job of trained composers in the Sixteenth Century.  In six parts, the web spun is fascinating in itself, a reminder that technique is not necessarily meaningless discipline, but the making of music’s expressiveness, and of its liberating hypnotic hold on us.  A banal little verse is shown to be not so banal after all...  If a patron hears and chooses to pay his artist a little more... 

Track 4:  Faulte d’argent, Willaert 

Edvard Grieg had many successors – Norwegian Art-music has proved one of the strongest traditions in all Western music since the mid-Nineteenth Century.  One predecessor was the fiddler, Ole Bull, who became an international celebrity from humble beginnings before Norway was much regarded for more than her scenery. Here is Bull’s most famous piece, an orchestral mood-picture of beauty - The Saeter-girl’s Sunday.  A saeter-girl herded cattle on a saeter or high mountain-meadow.  The life was hard and lonely, with a rough, turf-roofed hut to call one’s home, and frequent fog, rain and rough weather through Spring and  Summer.  Grieg’s later musical vision of Saeter-girls as ignorant, man-eating caricatures of valkyries came via Ibsen and Peer Gynt!  Bull allows his girl latitude for sentiment, and not from sanctimony but from knowledge.  His music is as passionate as any from quiet beginnings, humane and touching.

Track 5:  The Saeter-girl’s Sunday, Bull 

A Royalist servant to the aristocracy, John Jenkins (1592-1678) is now best known for his pieces for consort of viols and other instruments, dances and fantasias, written for the entertainment of wealthy musical amateurs. He was a master of counterpoint in which a piece is generated by statement and successive entries modified by sequence (repetition of intervals at a higher or lower pitch, inversions - a figure played up-side-down - canons and imitations.  Let’s hear his Fantasia in C Minor, a grave little piece for viols supported by organ.  A piece like this invites the listener to look about one at less-than-severe surroundings unless the ear attends and follows.  There is beauty either way, even in the richest of old rooms.

Track 6 :  Fantasia in C Minor, John Jenkins 

Next, a Song of The Seashell from Japan.  This popular song was  written by  Hideaki Yashima  (1915- ) and is played in an arrangement for flute and stringed instruments, including harp, by James Galway and the Tokyo String Orchestra.

Track 7:  Song of The Seashell, Yashima 

What can we make of ourselves if we have no leisure to dream or remember and take stock of events, ourselves and others?  The Portuguese Canadian composer, John Estacio, wrote a three-movement work for orchestra, Variations On A Memory.  In this, the original theme of the variations is not stated in full until the finale.  The movements are named Era Uma Vez (Portuguese for Once Upon A Time), Red Letter Day and A Memory.  Their topics are his childhood home; Canada Day celebrations in Vancouver, and retrospection on such memories later, at a difficult stage in his life.  A description of public rejoicing and its resonances is flanked by personal reflections, a childhood world of folklore and a warm stove, and a gathering-together of what has made us.  There is an important piano--part in the orchestral textures, and Coplandesque use of strings and woodwind, the brass having their main outing during the more extroverted Red Letter Day.  The lyrical poignancy is Coplandesque, too, of diatonic simplicity and clashes created by the intervals of the basic scale, the space between the parts kept open at more expressive moments.  The Red Letter Day is aptly congested and contrapuntal in comparison with the angular but telling lyricism elsewhere.  Its part in nostalgia and finding integration is found at its central section.  One nice touch in scoring, a microtonal glissando on tubular bell, occurs towards the end of the first movement.     

Tracks 8-10:  Variations On A Memory, Eustacio 

Musicians are losers - they work harder than most, so that someone can say that there’s no money in what they’ve done (or so the speaker hopes, given his exertions to ensure that such is the case), or that anyone could do what they have done, if they had the mind.  Sometimes, however, the artist feels that he wouldn’t be anyone else for the world. 

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his own soul?”  What’s affluence, when you can deal in inspiration?

Pub music recorded 50 years ago, now.  Shave The Donkey, performed on two fiddles and a piano.  If the soul revolts, it is a fact that self-taught musicians keep music alive where those who have been trained are not to be found.  Better self-expression and humour than a machine playing sounds.

Track 11:  Shave The Donkey, Trad

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, written when he was attending the Royal College of music. It is called, simply, Sleep, and comes from the famous cycle known by the sobriquet The Elizas - so-named as it consists of settings of Elizabethan poetry:  He was twenty-two when he wrote this masterpiece, his mind weary from overwork but not yet clouded by war and the deadening pattern of life imposed by resettlement in conditions of Post-Great War austerity.  Come, Sleep...   Vocal line and piano accompaniment are reminiscent of Purcell or other masters of the arioso-style; there is an objective transcendence of ordinary suffering that is the source of its infinitely touching pathos, undemonstrative, spare and dignified.  It is a song, a melody, its harmonic implications brought out in simple slow figuration on the piano.  Each verse rises in supplication, and dies away into that figuration.  It seems not only timeless, but a key to escaping sense of time.  Here, Sleep is performed with much feeling and intelligence by local singer, Becky Livesey, and pianist, Gay Pullom.  The performance was recorded at a lunchtime concert at St John’s Church, Midsomer Norton.

Track 12:  Sleep, Gurney 

A pre-war fit of anxiety that had necessitated a short spell of rest in a village on the Severn was adduced by the military authorities as proof that Gurney’s mental state before joining up pre-disposed him to become unhinged. That for years they had entrusted him variously with a rifle, bayonet, grenades and Vickers-gun, and he had made good use of them in others’ eyes, was meaningless  to the entirely objective adjudicators.   The same shift was no doubt used with many sufferers from shell-shock and related physical problems, to reduce costs at the War Office.  He was awarded a half-pension and  left largely to support himself.  He was the son of a tailor and not of independent means.  Such  pieces as the Prelude we heard earlier or Sleep...: are they products of wool-gathering, of inutility to society?  Hardly.  But they earned their author next to nothing, and an artist was driven to madness by the necessity to find and keep employment.  A Socialist, Gurney wrote of the ‘Unemployment Shame’ that destroyed countless post-war lives, yet he found time to create thousands of poems, hundreds of songs, mood--pieces and larger works, some still to be deciphered for publication...  When inspired, his handwriting could be appalling! 

Would he now be working part-time in Tesco’s, to seem hard-working?  People like to think that they now give Gurney his due, but he died in 1937.  His due has to have been more than our being good chaps towards him, eighty or ninety years too late... 

The tremendous efforts of the composer and performer are such that music may prompt great thoughts in good people, people who doubt themselves, perhaps, in what they say and do. A local politician has pronounced that we cannot live our lives in cotton-wool, presumably because he has no idea what cotton-wool costs - and let’s not give the Coalition ideas.  But we can wrap ourselves in music as dreamers of dreams:  to imagine a better future for one-another.  Our artists and we, if we choose, are music-makers - and movers and shakers.  We may develop empathy for our fellow human--beings, sympathies, sincere wishes to share - as say, Gurney shared - for the health and happiness of others: -  how else can we hope for health and happiness ourselves? – and a logical egalitarianism with which truly to build a Big Society.  Insight makes contact with like minds, and like minds reciprocate to bring change!

Now, a dance by the Spanish pianist-composer, Enrique Granados, and orchestrated by the founder of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, De Grignon.  This piece, Andalucia, comes from the collection Danzas Espagnolas. It  displays engaging characteristics fashionable in a certain strain of nationalist music popularized in the late Nineteenth Century by composers as various as Tarrega, Breton, Chapi, a sultry, slightly Arabic-sounding dance with a nostalgic song-like theme as its pendant.  Music for a lazy but thoughtful moment.  And with it, we shall leave you.  This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye! 

Track 14:  Andalucia, Granados 

©  Mike Burrows 06/12

30 April, 1 May - CB Shakespeare 2016

This week's Classical Break was recorded on William Shakespeare's 450th Birthday last week at the Holburne Museum in Bath where the Bath-based ensemble, Operaletta performed a 90-minute concert around music inspired by and set to the writings of the Bard.
For the purposes of the broadcast we have had to cut the programme to 58 minutes but a full version of the concert, along with details of the artists and pieces performed is available on the operaletta website.
Thanks to the Holburne Museum and the members of Operaletta for letting us record this concert and
thanks for listening.

23-24 April Alfred Hill ANZAC

CB Hill Anzac Day

Intro Track:  Waiata Poi (orch version), Hill (3.30m)

100 years ago the ANZAC forces of Australia and New Zealand were smarting from the outcome of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of the Great War. 7,500 New Zealanders and 28,000 Australians died in the campaign. This weekend, the two nations observe ANZAC Day, originally set up to honour members of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps who perished at Gallipoli. As a tribute to those who died in the conflict, we present the music of Alfred Hill, 1869-1960.

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s Programme, researched and written by Mike Burrows, is another in a series based on the works of the Australian composer, doyen of both the Australian and New Zealand musical establishment of his day, Alfred Hill.


Known to many by Waiata Poi, a popular song based on Maori poetry and music,  Born in 1869, Alfred Hill, the son of an English hatter,  failed gold-prospector and amateur musician, was trained as a violinist, orchestral player and composer at the prestigious Leipzig Conservatoire, where he took
a Helbig Prize and played underconductors of the rank of Brahms and Tchaikovsky…

He remained a Leipziger in compositional style, though not a pedantic one.  His music has many influences besides those of Mendelssohn, Bruch or Brahms.  One finds at different moments, Wagnerian harmony, Dvorakian directness, Tchaikovskian sensibility – but also Debussyan whole tones and Griegish freshness and terseness.  As Hill spent a good deal of his life conducting and playing, he had a very practical sense of what worked and what didn’t, and long experience of
writing opera and operetta taught him to aim for both lyricism and the bold gesture, apparent, easily-apprehended shapeliness and colourful orchestration.  What worked for soloists, a chorus and pit-band might be made to work for a full orchestra or chamber group.  The challenge spurred him to extraordinary lengths in self-discipline and aptness.  Another strength was a lifelong refusal
to regard himself as a genius or indulge in the artistic temperament.  There was little in the way
of ego or self-importance in Alfred Hill.

Here’s a short character-piece for orchestra, a song without words in but name, The Moon’s Golden Horn.

Here, the flute – always a magical presence in his music – the woodwind, upper strings (including harp) and horn are in exquisite mood.  The lower strings and brass are added, pedal notes sounded, to add gravitas to melody that is little more than a projection of harmonies that are smooth and yet a touch uncanny.  Brassy and bass-defined astringency makes itself felt at precisely the right moments, as does refulgency or a pathetic longing that reminds one of the film-music of Bernard Herrmann –
feeling for the moon’s serene shining is, after all, unrequitable.  That this work dates from 1937
does not devalue its distinction.  As Brahms might have said, “One cannot imagine it different.”  The Wagnerian close is no less beautiful than what has led up to it.

Track 2:  The Moon’s Golden Horn, Alfred Hill (5.25min)

A very different work, now.  Hill was an indefatigable writer of chamber music.  In two phases, his early and middle-period, he wrote of which he knew as a player.  There are 17 string quartets alone.
In 1912, he wrote a single piano quintet, entitling it simply, “Life”.

Three movements of this work are rooted in Schumann’s masterpiece, springily rhythmical, imaginative in harmony, making the most of motivic themes in ingenious transformations and
counterpoint.  The slow movement is a slow processional with contrasting section, though not a Schumannesque funeral march.  Another composer one may think of as one listens is Sibelius, whose early chamber music is marvellous for the ease shown in classico-romantic expression.

But then comes the finale.  And the finale is an adapted cantata – now setting the composer’s own poem, Life!

It is also related to a song inspired by Maori folksong, Tarakihi, that is, Cicada…

Eight voices are employed in this Paean For The Joy of Life – two each of sopranos, mezzo-sopranos,
tenors and basses – note the canny choice of registers. Every register remains distinct.

Beginning in a Gloria In Excelsis, this movement is a living reproach to shallow thinkers who upbraid Hill for his supposed conservatism.  Rising and falling in waves and asides, it may remind one of Schumann’s superb final chorus in Scenes From Faust, The Ever-womanly Leads Us On, but
tts matter relates logically to what has gone before and the ebb and flow of subjects and counterpoint is a perfect evocation of the words of the poem, a maritime piece.  Its benign and intelligent uproariousness would have gone down well with Percy Grainger, who was, in fact, to be counted among Hill’s many friends and admirers. It is big stuff.

Track 3:  Piano Quintet, Life, 4th Movt, Hill (13.41min)

 At Leipzig, Hill met many important musicians.  What he thought of Brahms, for example, was that he was a very large man, not at all like a German, who got very excited when he conducted, and shouted and stamped; if the string-sections, whose players included Hill - didn’t use uniform bowing, he stamped and swore; as to his observantness of the band, the great man – who in fact suffered from extreme short sight and peered through owlish lorgnettes - must have had eyes in the back of his head.  Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, was simply as nervous as a cat!

Hill himself was a small-built man, virile and peppery, singleminded and direct in manner.  He wasn’t excitable in Brahms’ manner, and he would have found Tchaikovsky’s “nerves” – as distinct from the man’s music – tiresome. Both the masters had been shy;  Hill wasn’t.  As private a man as Brahms
and as sensitive to feeling as Tchaikovsky, he created visions with both skill and self-criticism.  As an artist, he preserved himself in a state of absolute artistic integrity.

Grieg’s music struck a lasting chord at Leipzig.  Significantly, students regarded it highly for its unusual form.  In Hill’s eyes, such music perhaps an abiding example of a composer’s using form only as it served his expressive goals.  Then, Grieg’s fresh rhythms, themes and harmonies trumped
“form” as they do to this day.  And what are Hill’s scores notable for?  Trumped form, the hallmark
of a true master.  Like Grieg, Hill was an inspired miniaturist; again, like Grieg, his so-called miniatures wereof a significance not to be called little…

Hill’s Third Symphony has as its epigraph verses by George Essex Evans:
Her song is silence, unto her
Its mystery clings
      Silence is the interpreter
Of deeper things.

O for sonorous voice and strong
To change that silence into song!
         To give that melody release
          Which sleeps in the deep heart of peace
With folded wings.

Three of the movements of a String Quartet (Number 14 in B Minor), were scored for orchestra as
they stood.  Replacing a short “Menuet” intermezzo, a tone poem was recycled to form an effective scherzo – its origins were in music for a film about Aborigines of Arnheim Land.  This new work was done in 1951 and subtitled simply, Australia.

The composer gave us these clues to the poetic meaning of this music and also the piece’s key within a tonal plan.
1 Introduction – The lonely, silent land 
(home-tonality B minor-major)
Allegro (a) The Workers   (b)  The Thinkers
The heart of Australia is lonely and silent.  On the fringe of the great island continent, men crowd like ants into the cities they have made.  Some seek quieter places.

Hill’s orchestration adds to what was to be heard in his quartet.  Woodwind, brass, a full string section and colour and sweep to this movement.  The ritornello-theme is now  trumpet-capped, weak woodwind adding plangency.  The strings’ restatement of the introduction-theme is almost Tchaikovskian in its pathos.  All is yet economy and beauty of lively but fastidious blends of instrumentation.

Track 4 Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 1 Adagio-Allegro Molto (9.08m)

The composer’s programme here is,
2 Australia, mysterious and beautiful (B minor-major)  Australia with its vast plains, forest ranges, and subterranean caves is an eerie place and very beautiful.

There’s no denying that again, here, the Adagio gains in breadth and blend of sound.  Hill is immune
to mawkishness, but the moments of passion and sadness are there, formal but somehow unstereotypical and unsanctimonious in effect.  This is one Leipzig-shaped movement that won’t cloy, that leaves the Max Bruchs of this world far behind.

Track 5  Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 2, Adagio (5.56m)

We come to the movement that replaces the Fourteenth Quartet’s Menuet.  This is one of Alfred Hill’s most impressive inspirations, binding the Two Australias – colonial Australia and Aboriginal Australia – together.  One of the marvels of Hill was that he was able to create consistency within a work while using Leipzigerische idiom, Wagnerian, folk-song modal,  impressionist whole-tone and other stylistic elements.  Here, a bold repeated-note  horn theme is positively heroic in its bluff humour and defiance.  It is unique in symphonic literature – worse luck!  Percy Grainger’s ballet, The Warriors, is made to seem overwrought, overwritten and bombastic in comparison.  The material of the movement as a whole came from music for a film, Arnheim Land, and a tone-poem of that name.

Exotic percussion – woodblocks? - win a place in a mostly modestly-scored symphony.  The movement is an excellent one of plan and contrasting incidents.

3 The Aborigines (G major) In the deep recesses of the Australia they once owned, a few aboriginal tribes still go walk-about.  They have their food, sing their songs and dance their tribal rituals.

Track 6 Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 3, Allegro (6.42m)

The finale is a summation of the symphony, but short and without any evident pictorial element. From the brass-led upward scale (going teasingly wrong), it moves through its moods of determination and ideals with occasional resemblances to Edward German – without the blandness or sententiousness – and to a young Sibelius in use of strings and warbling woodwind.  The coda is curt and without magniloquence, yet very satisfying.

4 The Challenge (B minor-major)

There is a challenge to Australians to build a world worthy of their race and country.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme on music by Alfred Hill was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!

Track 7   Symphony in B Minor, Australia, Movt 4 (part), Maestoso-Allegro