19th, 26th & 27th February - The Sea

CB The Sea 2

Track 1: Whiskey Johnny, Trad

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I'm Rupert Kirkham. This week's programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows, and showcases music inspired by the sea, the ships that sail on it, and the men who work them. You've just heard the shanty or work-song, Whiskey Johnny. It would have accompanied concerted efforts of hauling on deck: in the days of sailing-ships, the common toil was sufficient almost to blind the sailor to the dangers of being on the open sea: led by one voice, the responses are from the watch; the result seems almost like unholy liturgy.

Next, Alan Rawsthorne's characteristic music for the 1953 film,The Cruel Sea, based on the novel by Monserrat. This combines fanfare-motives in portrayal of the bravery of the men who undertook convoy-escort-duties in the Atlantic and Mediterranean throughout the last War, and impressionistic washes in which those fanfares are made to sound gaunt and hollow – washes both beautiful and delicate and menacing born of chill fogs and mists of broken scoring and strings divisi. The harmonies are bitter and subduing, filled with multiple downward steps, discord and false relations, shifting unexpectedly to undercut the more certain, recognizably consonant moments; the fanfaring favours angular fourths and fifths, Waltonian or Hindemithian in their sardonic edge, and dissolved in the sea's fluid chromaticism... Still, however laconic and ironic the music appears at first, it discloses considerable hypnotic, evocative power. This an affecting elegy for the “many good ships and good men” lost to German bombs and torpedoes, and to the common enemy – the sea, whose moods have a strange, deceptive and cruel beauty.

Track2: The Cruel Sea, Rawsthorne

A tone-poem by a Scottish composer, now, The Ship O'The Fiend, by Hamish MacCunn. Born in the ship-building city of Greenock in 1868, and known more as a conductor than as a composer in his later years, MacCunn in fact began as a composer, and wrote many impressive orchestral works in the last decades of the 19^th Century. His career as a concert-composer began with the superb Overture, The Land of Mountain And Flood, when he was still a teenager. His style is an interesting blend of Scots folkishness, Mendelssohn and Wagner, economically scored, avoiding excess in either mood or manner., but bold in contrasts. His tone-poems evoke Scots ballads and the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott. He is equally at home writing for the brass, woodwind or strings. His percussion often capped by cymbal clashes that punctuate themes portraying the dashing courage, triumphs and disasters of his heroes and heroines. This mannerism is devoid of toe-curling Lisztian bravado. His orchestration is mixed well, to permit the sections to share and share alike the spotlight. A theme that begins softly in an introduction on horn, oboe or strings will perhaps become a strident chant dominated by trumpets at the climax.

The Ship O'The Fiend is a ballad that tells of how a captain returns to his sweetheart, carries her on-board with him. In the course of several stanzas it is borne in upon the sweetheart and reader that the ship is a ghost-ship with ghost-crew and ghost-captain, heading for hell... The music acquires hollow, Wagnerian brass (trombones prominent), and a clock-like jog-trot in the lower strings, where until now the fullest mingling statement of the thematic material in duet – oboe and horn standing for girl and man - and ardent conversation ending in outright passion - has lured us into thinking only of love. Trumpets and cymbals over stormy seas of string-rushes render as climax the theme of the demon-lover, now an elemental force beyond belief. All subsides as it must. A hushed few rippling and then pityingly quiet moments on the strings – are ended by quiet held notes on horn answered by what sounds like muted brass and strings, and a single loud, curt last, trumpets-and-cymbal-capped chord. No trace remains of theShip O''The Fiend.

Track3: The Ship O The Fiend, McCunn

Galway Bay is the Atlantic at its roughest. For centuries, the men-folk of the Aran Islands had left their rocky shores in light craft to fish and hunt basking--shark for a living, and to supply their communities with food and oil, when the nationalist musician, playwright and poet, John Millington Synge visited, studied their people's Irish dialect, gathered their legends and customs. He returned to the mainland with enough knowledge and experience to write a book of reminiscences and stories and a short but powerful play, Riders To The Sea, inventing an English that followed the local speech-rhythms for the characters of the latter to speak.

Vaughan Williams once notated the preaching of a Scottish minister, interested in the element of song in the man's speaking voice. When he composed his One-act opera to Synge's text, he made no attempt to celticize his music; evocative as it is of sea, human courage, death and grief, there was no need... As Synge wrote a play that follows Aristotelian principles of unity of time and place, and death takes place off-stage, Vaughan Williams very likely saw in this piece a universal, Englished Greek-style tragedy, Irish speech-rhythms – to which he remains sensitive - and all. The final soliloquy in the spartan, through--composed opera is typical of the work as a whole: the main character, Maurya sitting in her thin-walled cottage with the relics of her lost ones, and white coffin-boards prepared for the penultimate lost son, sings of the last of her children and menfolk's being gone now – all dead, all drowned in the sea. The sea can do no more to her. 

Ghosts and presages of other Vaughan Williams works haunt the piece: a later work in Dona Nobis Pacem – a protest against War; an earlier in Flos Campi, based on The Song of Songs!; the symphonic works and film music of the late period. One of the notable features is the use of soprano voices keening Irishly, an elemental, menacing sound like but not like the screaming of the wind (a wind-machine is also called-for in this opera): this device was later to recur in the music for the film, Scott of The Antarctic. Synge's words have a beautiful simple dignity, and are the stuff of tragedy in the face of the sea.

“No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied.”

Track 4: They Are All Gone Now, Riders To The Sea, Vaughan Williams

Highly successful before the turn of the century with his song-cycle, Sea Pictures, Sir Edward Elgar approached the life of seamen some years later, via the verses of Kipling. 

In The Fringes of The Fleet, the true, unofficial poet laureate had published a tribute in poems and prose to Britain's seamen at the end of 1915, a kind of seaman's eye-view of the War at sea. Elgar seized on the verses and wrote a cycle of four songs for performance in revue at the London Coliseum Theatre. He did ask Kipling's permission, but was not to know that Kipling had lost his adopted son, John, an athletic but acutely short-sighted youth, during the Battle of Loos, a matter of weeks before the booklet's first publication. Last seen wandering on the battlefield with his lower jaw shot away, John had no known grave. In Elgar's “best bloomin' beggar”style – as Stanford might have called it - and 'broad, saltwater style” as he himself did call it - well-sung by chosen singers, the songs proved an instant hit at the Coliseum. Thereafter they received a number of performances at theatres around the country – until Kipling stepped in to end the tour.

The songs are good of their kind, highly effective in all aspects, and form a cycle that expresses the experiences of many men who served at sea during the Great War - experiences at the hands of the Navy – and the sea itself.

The very effectiveness of the songs perhaps damned them in the poet's eyes. He was sick of war: later, the man who had written of “the Hun at the gate”, popularizing the cause of the Imperial armed forces in this war to save Western civilization, would publish a couplet:

“If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

There is, in fact, an astringency to the verses Elgar set, a weariness, a cynicism, yet determination to do one's duty and carry on, side by side with the stoicism of the men, that Elgar would have understood well.

To complete the work, a fortnight after the beginning of the show's run, Elgar added a fifth song, setting Sir Gilbert Parker's poem, Inside The Bar. Most sea-shanty-like of the songs it is a song of home, men free ashore, and fickle sweethearts...

The performance you will hear is from an acoustical recording made on the 21^st of July, 1917, by the original soloists – without the benefit of costumes or a set portraying the yard outside a dock-side pub - and their highly professional band, conducted by the composer in the first four songs only. The star of the show and recording was – and is - the gifted young baritone, Charles Mott, an excellent singer and actor who lost his life on the Western Front in the following year. Kipling ended the progress of the show in the theatre only after the recordings had been made, and the resultant album of records remained a hugely popular staple of the HMV catalogue for many years.

A loud, susurrating sound-effect heard during the 3^rd song, the deep and murky Submarines, was achieved by the use of blocks of wood surfaced with sandpaper!

The five songs are entitled, The Lowestoft Boat; Fate's Discourtesy; Submarines; The Sweepers; Inside The Bar.

Here is the song-cycle, The Fringes of The Fleet, by Edward Elgar.

Tracks 5-9: The Fringes Of The Fleet, Elgar

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. Goodbye!

11th and 12th February 2017 America 4

CB  America IV

Celebrate America's heritage, before it gets Trumped on.

This is Classical Break on SomerValley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today, we continue our exploration of music of the United States. The script was written and researched by Mike Burrows. We began with a setting of Psalm 121, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, for mezzo-soprano, choir and organ by the Michigan composer, Leo Sowerby (1895-1968).  This work was written in the composer’s late twenties, after war-service in a US Artillery unit, and is remarkable for its serene, blues-tinged simplicity.  The melodic line is narrow, overwhelmingly syllabic, the accompaniment sparse and largely chordal, the choral counterpoint limited but effective, the soloist preceding and following the affirmatory chorus, who have the last word – a single, syllabic Amen.  Sowerby was a great and well-regarded writer of music for the Anglican Episcopal Church.  He held a number of positions as organist and choirmaster – for example, at the St James Episcopal Church – now, cathedral – in Chicago.  Self-taught at first – studying from books and the scores of composers such as Franck and Reger – and taking a correspondence-course with the Chicago Conservatory whilst in the Army, he was a modest practitioner who may have had much in common, as man and artist, with Cesar Franck, the ‘Pater Seraphicus’ of St Clothilde’s and Paris Conservatory. 

Any ‘blues’ in this piece are owed more to the innocently Wagnerian Franck than to the jazz that as beginning to enliven most forms of American music in the first quarter Of the 20th Century.

 Track 1:  Psalm 121:  I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes, Leo Sowerby

Some of the most tatty, rackety Instrumental playing ever recorded was issued In the teens of the Century In albums of New Orleans jazz.  It has a raffish gloire all its own that increases the breadth of one’s smile when one is told of how  American church leaders, social crusaders and municipal authorities campaigned with high zeal for crackdowns on jazz-clubs, and Jazz-performances after midnight, if not for a total ban!  Jazz destroyed the moral fibre of all who heard it; it was the music of sexual abandon, alcoholism, drug-addiction and gambling!  Jass was the negro word for sexual arousal!  This appalling threat to religion and public morals began at revival meetings, in theatres, dance-halls, restaurants, bars and brothels  and on bandwagons; many of the performers were blacks or poor whites, self--taught and, worse still, talented and, to a high degree, rightly cocky. 

Growing out of rag-time and blues,and also Jewish klezmer, Jazz’s busy textures and frantic manners would be nothing without the momentum Created by characterful rivalry for predominance in the hectoring vividness of the band.   Cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano and percussion – a typical early jazz-line-up - form a brilliantly humorous or sardonic combination – possibly originating in the theatre orchestra-pit: a raucous, gaudy combination, razzing all classical or romantic concepts of their natures .  Here is one of the earliest jazz-recordings:  The Ostrich-walk, composed by Nick LaRocca, cornetist extraordinaire, and performed by him in the company of his Original Dixieland Band, in 1917.

 Track 2:  The Ostrich Walk, LaRocca

One may say that the aggressive on-olling sound moves faster than tanks of the day, to crazy effect. 

The tune comes in for treatment – It is made to be an indestructible ‘standards, made up by someone who had a  talent for invention; apparently, LaRocca  was the only member of his band who could read music:  improvisation, very often an informally-acquired skill, took over, the piano and percussion maintaining rhythm, the cornet,clarinet and  trombone given the spaced, repeated hooks, imitations and discoveries that characterize this idiom.

In contrast to LaRocca’s “white jazz”, here are Jelly-roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers in Dr Jazz, by King Oliver, recorded In 1925.  It Is matter for conjecture why the boys of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, surrounded as they were by black bands, were the First recorded jazz-musicians.  They have impetus and blague not matched by Morton and his fellow band-members, a comic timing hard to define but real.  In comparison, the black band appears less abrasively assertive, but it is arguable that LaRocca and Co have less poise and self-awareness, less independence within their ensemble –less-developed solos; overall,  theirs seems the less fluent accomplishment...

Track Three:  Dr Jazz, Oliver

There’s no doubt that early jazz, whether white or black, was an accomplished form of music; its practitioners could say that if they were not concert-hall musicians, it might be equally said that concert-hall musicians hadn’t the first idea of how to make jazz-music.  The skills of self-taught folk-musicians who conceal awkward note-acquisition, pentatonic modality, unmigrating tonality and harmonies discovered whilst a-wandering  behind quick tempos, repeated notes and daring or wrong-right harmonic or contrapuntal shifts, are often coveted by trained virtuosi.  So it is between jazz- and Art-musicians.  At the same time, folk-music has a lyrical pathos of simplicity, and jazz had developed in that direction, too, in slow blues and Spirituals.  The blues originated in work-songs, The spiritual in white hymns.  Jazz is neither Black nor White.  It is migrant:  it is the music of the oppressed – of Italians, Jews and African Americans – all victims of the post-Civil War settlement and a competitively capitalist industrial society  in which the Dollar is President, and slum-dwelling, low-paid labour, deprivation and the poorhouse are the lot of those who give him his wealth in return for uncertain  employment and subsistence.  How’s this for thrift:  the poor turn misery and defiance into music - and that music beggars spoilt rich people’s best efforts in verve and expressiveness:  sooner than wealth can synthesize this elixir vitae, it finds itself paying true exponents, whose genius changes and reinvigorates bourgeois art-music forever.  Good jazz is a locus classicus for unpermitted culture and dexterity, spirit, intelligence and expressiveness.  It was once seen as revolutionary.  It is a music of passive or active resistance and folkish self-assertion, a music that illuminates fashionable life to this day, at its most characteristic when provided by brilliant, burn-out-risking illuminati among the poor or descendants of the poor of all races.

Let’s hear the traditional song, I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven,performed by the Hall Negro Quartet, in 1941.

Track 4:  I’ve Heard of A City Called Heaven, Trad 

Archishman Ghosh is a young Indian scientist and musician.  He composes songs and piano-pieces in his spare time, inspired by German romantic poetry and the music of Romantics such as Chopin, Wagner, Wolf, and, most recently, Grieg and Grainger.  He earns his place in this programme as he resides in Florida and as hewrites as well as anyone, having both the ‘can-do’ attitude and faculty of stern self-criticism to boost his undeniable technical skills.  Out of many influences, he appears to be forming himself, as any American would be proud to do.  One has a few small but well-made piano-pieces, and thoughts that potential is already realizing itself.  Here is the March in A, a droll march and more searching trio.  The piece ends with both flourish and question-mark – an achievement in itself!    Its material is rich and enharmonically modulatory, while the direction remains adroitly clear. 

Track Five:  March in A, Archishman Ghosh

Peter Boyer, born in 1970, wrote a work that expresses much of the awe, gratitude and trepidation felt by immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island, the immigration reception-point lying off New York City, watched over by the Statue of Liberty.  Ellis Island:  The Dream of America is a melodrama – a piece for speakers and musical accompaniment, in this instance, a symphony orchestra.  Actual memories are linked by orchestral commentary and interludes.  The style of the music is filmic. Its sturdier moments, in the currently revived everymanish Copland-era idiom, are surrounded by a neo-romantic lyricism suited to epic movies, and more imaginatively conceived passages of menace – of which modern film-composers are well-capable.  Here are the Second Interlude and memories of Lillian Galleta, who emigrated from Italy in 1928.  

Track 6&7:  Ellis Island:  The Dream Of America

The United States had its share of pianist-composers formed in the mould of the European tradition.  Such an one was Henry Holden Huss, who hailed from Newark, New Jersey.  Born to an affluent, musical family – his father was a friend of the much-travelled lion of the keyboard, Anton Rubenstein – he was trained at Munich and became not only a Fine pianist with a national reputation, but also a purveyor of excellently-crafted salon-pieces that became popular with pianists of the parlour.  Books of character-pieces, dances, album-leaves, reflections and the like flowed from his pen.  A class or more up from hymns, patriotic or sentimental songs, ragtime or darky-music, it is music wonderfully well-turned by a hand that has worked hard enough to conceal all effort in the making.  Then again, it is of its time as experienced by a very isolatedly cultured class. Formally unexceptional in every regard, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, tonal and developmental, it must be heard on its own terms.  Isn’t this true of all music of another age?  Much of it was of another age when composed.  Francophile, Russophile, Brahmsian? It is none the worse for its conservatism, it seems.  Here is theMenuet Rococo,  Number one of Three Pieces, Opus 26, published in 1917.       

 Track 8: Menuet Rococo, Huss

 All Day and All Night, Music.  The 13^th Century Sufic poet, Jelaluddin Rumi Wrote a work of six books, the Mathnawi; 64,000 lines of verse that have exercised men’s minds ever since.  Once a source of wisdom for New England’s Transcendental philosophers and novelists, Rumi has inspired a thirteen-movemented cantata by that hugely active figure in modern American Art-music, Christopher Theofanidis.  At the time of its composition, there was increased curiosity about Islam, owing to the suicide attacks on the WTO buildings and Pentagon.  Nine-Eleven Is not to be seen as An inspiration or influence on the form that this work took.  Written in an idiom similar to that of Carmina Burana, with clear lines and harmonies and rhythmic spring percussively underlined, largely homophonic or chordal writing for the choir, and bold contrasts in orchestral tone, The Here and Now is a further example of contemporary attempts to relate post-modern Art-music to the moods and musical sense of the public.  It reminds us of concepts of Gebrauchtsmusik of the ‘20s and ‘30s of The Last Century, perhaps without the sense of educational zeal.  This is practical music with a social purpose, a commissioned message.  Here is the Fourth Movement, All Day and Night ,Music.

 Track 10:  The Here and Now, 4. All Day and Night, Music, Theofanidis

 Meredith Willson, from Mason City, was given formal training at the Damrosch Institute in New York, where he became a flautist, paying his way through school by performing as a cinema-pianist.  He was offered a place in Sousa’s famous band, and from there made his own name as a composer.  A hit on Broadway with such musicals as The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, he also wrote concert-music, including two symphonies in the pictorial manner of Ferde Grofe.  His Second Symphony, The Missions of California, dates from 1940, and commemorates in particular the missionary work of a Spanish Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra.  The finale is a celebration of the building of a road that connected the missions.  As might be expected of an alumnus of Sousa’s band, the writing for all sections of the orchestra is impressive in blend and contrast, bright-toned, and the overall mood both active and optimistic.  Themes from the earlier movements are redeveloped and combined and come to a brassy, bell-capped climax.  A fine work.

Track 11:  Symphony No 2, lV, El Camino Real, Willson

 The murder of a President of the United States causes reverberations that last for decades.  Horror that such a deed against the person of the supreme elected official of the Union remains possible is increasingly succeeded by suspicions as to who ‘put the assailant up to it’.  The United States has a highly organized Society, with powerful sectional interests that have very little to do with democracy if they can help it.  In September, 1901, it was President McKinley who lay dying, reportedly singing Nearer, My God, to Thee. In New York digs nicknamed Poverty Flat, Charles Ives wrote a Memorial Slow March that has sadly not come down to us in its original form.  On the other hand, he worked on another piece at about this time.  Scored for trumpet, trombone and four sets of bells pitched in different keys, From The Steeples and The Mountainsoriginated in a childhood memory of his father’s trying to reproduce the effect of Danbury’s church-bells on the family piano as they were rung in a rainstorm.  George Ives was every much as revolutionary a musician as his son, a Civil War Army bandmaster – thus the Taps-call at the outset - who had his own ideas.  Charles’ mother remembered that the bells were rung in alarm in the middle of the night, after a lightning strike on a row of a houses.  This piece speaks of those bells – and, also, of how the age-old New England hills take up the shout of New England bells.  It sounds like a reaction to the death of a McKinley – or a J F Kennedy.  From The Steeples and The Mountains,by Charles Ives.  We began our programme looking to the hills, like Leo Sowerby, and end it by looking to them in the manner of Charles Ives.  It’s the American way.

This was Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, on music of the United States, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon.  Goodbye!   

 Track 12:  From The Steeples and The Mountains, Ives  

CB Winter 2 - 4th & 5th January

Classical Break Winter 2  (this programme is a repeat from 2016)

Intro:  In Freezing Winter Night, Britten 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of winter music and was researched and written by Mike Burrows  We have just heard In Freezing Winter Night from A Ceremony of Carols for three--part treble voices and harp by Benjamin Britten.  This is Winter standing all about one:  everywhere one looks, the frost bareness, a merciless beauty. Our earth is cold; yet the Christmas story of birth and rebirth in love warms deep in one’s soul; we need never lose it.  Wonder is in the frost whiteness as in the white fire of remote stars.  Is this one’s everyday world?   In awe, two boys’ voices move in canon, a third moving with the frost-feeling accompaniment.  This music was written in a cabin on a neutral Swedish freighter crossing the Atlantic, as Britten returned tardily to Britain from the United States in 1942.  Minus its generator-hum, a nearby refrigeration compartment perhaps aided his imagination...  The stiller and sparer it becomes, the more brittle the human mind is made by winter:  and yet, we have the Christmas story; this time of seeming frozen stasis is the illusion.  If much sleeps or shivers, Spring is gathering its force under it all, merely in wait. From John Playford’s English Dancing Master of 1651, and words written later for broadsheet

-sale, here’s All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away).

Track Two:  All Hail To The Days (To Drive The Cold Winter Away) Trad 

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows.  Its theme is Winter. 

Gian-Francesco Malipiero was a lonely figure among the Generation of The Eighties - 1880s, that is.  His style was personal:  he was capable of close musical reasoning, a brilliant sense of instrumental colour in combination, but held to no one system of any aspect of music, save instinct.  His music harks back to pastoral and courtly Italy, and forward into regions that are not for nostalgia or the musically faint-hearted.

It can be frankly illustrative of early music, birdsong, bells - or harsh, terse and distorted, and working progressions of thought through regardless of who can follow.  Here is the fourth partita of his Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, which begins in chant and strict, four-part canon!  It is in three movements, for this Sinfonia is in twelve subdivisions - one each for the zodiacal signs - and divided equally into four ‘Partite’ - Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...  The composer denied us the crutch of a detailed programme:  what programme there was was, he said, not to be told.  The Sinfonia was written  in 1951.  For its social context, the postwar period in Italy was a time of great bitterness, of the settlings of scores arising from the Fascist regime and its ruinous involvement in the Axis cause, an era of poverty, unemployment and the Marshall Plan.  American aid in funds and food-parcels had as much to do with support for the Left in Italy as with the privations and sufferings of a defeated nation.  In the 69 year-old Malipiero’s complex vision of Winter, there appears to be no place for hope, though there are moments of fleeting beauty and consonance.  It The Partita and Sinfonia end in cruel, growling discord. Perhaps, as Thomas Hardy put it, 

“If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.’

Tracks Three to Five:  Sinfonia Dello Zodiaco, Winter, Malipiero 

A near-contemporary of Caplet and Ravel, and taught by Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, Deodat De Severac was a composer of the Languedoc in Southern France.   His output was largely of character--pieces descriptive of everyday life in this distinct region named after 1the language of its people, Oc.  Here is a movement from his  Georgic Suite, Le Chant De La Terre, or The Song of The Land.  Les Semailles, The Sowings - of seed.  In Winter, we think of - and look forward to - Spring. 

Track Six:  Le Chant De La Terre.  Les Semailles, de Severac  

To see a light moving on the ground in winter darkness is to wonder who carries it, where And why.  It is one of the memorable images from long winter nights, when wits are sharpened and curiosity excited that much more strongly, or when we are tired and reflective, the cold slowing our minds so that we take time to watch and think.  There can be thoughts of threat; who would be walking abroad on a night like this?

For the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lantern that moves along the night and that interests our eyes is the light of soul.  In his late choral and orchestral work based on Hopkins’ poetry, Inscape, Edmund Rubbra set this idiosyncratic sonnet in a nocturne of some gravity.

                        “Men go by me whom either beauty bright

                          In mould or mind or whatnot else makes rare.
                        They rain against our much -thick and marsh air
                        Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite...”

Hopkins cannot help them, ultimately as out of sight is out of mind; but Christ minds,

                      “Their ransom, their rescue, and first, last, fast friend.”  

Rubbra’s setting seems, aptly, to grow out of chant; the harp has an important, though sparely speaking role, heard bell-like and intermittently against other sombre colours of accompaniment.  

 Track Seven:  Inscape, 2nd Movt, Rubbra 

A song by Ivor Gurney, now, I will Go With My Father A-Ploughing.  The words are by the Irish poet, Joseph Campbell.  There is a wild quality to melody and harmonies - in Gurney’s musical vocabulary, they could be Celtic or Northern:  a similar quality informs his songs On Black Stitchel (a poem with Northumbrian setting), and The Fiddler of Dooney (setting Yeats).  This song has a tragic significance.  Gurney’s Father, a Gloucester tailor, was his hero, and had lately died; Dad, of all his relatives, had understood and admired his musical talent and ambition:  he had died during Gurney’s troubles after discharge from the Army, before he had so much as seen his son’s music in print... 

Track Eight:  I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing  

The poor are always with us, as the scriptures have it.  For some, there is a simple explanation.  However unwelcome their attentions, however greedy and cruel they become in pursuit of other people’s fair shares; however many lives are broken or ended to provide that last refinement of power and luxury - the rich, too, are always with us.  A folksong now, a carol:  Cold Winter is Come.  Let’s not tolerate its message.  ‘A time to remember the poor’ is an institution in default of refusing at any time to regard poverty as social justice.  The person or persons who composed it have earned no posthumous fame, owing to his or their class.  An enlightened professional recorded it in 1891, before it, too, could die.

Track Nine:  Cold Winter Is Come, Trad 

Here’s a sonnet on Winter, written and read by Mike Burrows:

                                    Winter

         What comes down on the world is not held back

            By words, and protests remind of others –
            Others when mankind was less far off-track,
           That were demeaning enough.  Earth mothers
           The dead as well as she does the living –
           If anything, hugs the dead with more ease,
           The uncomplaining dead to whom giving
            And taking go deep beneath clay and freeze.
            Below the living root they have to lie:
            The poor man lies below the conduit
            Of available wealth, and his sad sigh
            Or rage is a matter of unspirit
            To the soulless for whom those sacrificed
            Are dwarfed by wealth as by the tree of Christ.

That last sprinkle of gold dust on a one-k-snifter as the world goes bust  is a particular pleasure and acquired taste. Local charity replaces the Welfare State,the poor have no cultural ambitions nor skills, no worthy hopes in life, only the dignity of work that they don’t choose.  Off waltz public amenities and common humanity and the rich do rather well - 60 Billion last year alone added to the assets of a thousand people now ‘worth’ between them nearly £400 Billion...  Those who cut, close and sell off our inheritance at will, and those who cost the country over £100 Billion pounds in lost tax-revenues each year, and Billions more in expropriation-contracts, evidently think winter smiles on local charity and ‘austerity’... The relevance to music in this is who writes, performs, criticizes and broadcasts the art-music of tomorrow?  Who grows up sufficiently in this atmosphere of falsehood and denial to create or assist creation in a rich tradition of a thousand years, the phenomenon of mankind’s musical communicativeness?  As music-charities scrabble for a scatter of pennies, children from less well-off backgrounds, it seems, have no entree and need not apply, as most outlets and institutions concerned in musical development close or raise their fees and we return to the days of the common man’s carol we have just heard - of two nations, two musics.  A composer once watched people as they took their seats in one of our opera-houses and said, “Music starves, but the wealthy could live for months on the fat between their ears.”  Let’s hear Winter Wakeneth All My Care from John Rutter’s choral song-cycle with orchestral accompaniment, When Icicles Hang.

Track Ten:  Winter Wakeneth All My Care, Rutter

Here’s another song by Gurney.  It sets a poem by Edward Thomas. Snow is a brief portrayal of a little girl’s thoughts as she plays in the snow.  The little girl in question was the poet’s younger daughter, Mywanwy.  A strange, dream-like epiphany of universal suffering is treated with fugitive strokes as in a sketch.  The after-impression is of sensitivity and kindness:  the human warmth that snow cannot pretermit.  Gurney loved children and shared their games, preoccupations and humour with genuine enjoyment.  Edward Thomas was a less certain companion, oversensitive, afraid of derision and often simply impatient;  there is a stressed unease in his words:  you might say that in his anxiety to be truthful and avoid sentimentality, he could not find the way back to being young.  He would have been surprized and made sadder to know how his children loved and looked up to him...

 Track Eleven:  Snow, Gurney 

From snow to The Snowdrop, a song for female choir and orchestra from 1909-10, by the late romantic Russian composer, Alexander Grechaninov.

 Track Twelve:  Snow-drop, Grechaninov

Born into a highly musical family in Whitchurch in Shropshire, Edward German began as a composer mainly of symphonic and orchestral works and incidental music for the theatre, but in middle life became a successful tunesmith in light opera, regarded as a successor to Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre.  Rather dead-headed criticism by George Bernard Shaw and other commentators had deterred him from more ambitious work, suggesting that his style was too theatrical! The tragedy of German is very English.  ‘Successful’, he wound up confessing, “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...”    A scrap of paper found among his last effects stated, “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...”  To put his real talents into perspective, it’s believed that Elgarenjoyed his music more than that of any other contemporary.   The trick is to listen to what German composed:  it is obvious that he was a progenitor of most of our tradition of ‘British Light Music’ in the 20th Century, but if the imitations are discounted, he can be heard as Elgar heard him, as a fresh, cosmopolitan voice influenced by French and Russian rather than Teutonic models.  His sound owes something to his Welsh blood (and the Welsh hymn-tradition), and the Marchlands in which  he grew up, but nothing to the music of British academicians.  Written for the Leeds Festival in 1899,  The Suite, The Seasons, is a Symphony in all but name.  The finale, Winter, is written in sonata--form, and is a stirring juxtaposition of a solemn hymn and brilliant tarantella, developed and combined at the close with Tchaikovskian fervour; the movement’s qualities are not a million miles from those of early Sibelius.  

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM.  I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Thanks go to associate producer, Miss Suvi Burrows, aged eight, who requested the Edward German!  Goodbye!

Track Twelve:  Winter from The Seasons, German