17th and 18th December

This week's Classical Break (repeated from 2011) is a celebration of the music of Sibelius - particularly that which was influenced by his love of traditional Finnish folk music. Read the script - it's all there! Rupert and Mike.

Classical Break - Sibelius

Intro:  Runic Song Interrupted By War-music  

Hullo, this is Classical Break and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is a tribute to the nationalist Finnish Composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), whose birthday falls on December The Eighth (two days after Finnish Independence Day).  We’ll be playing music inspired by Finnish national folk-poetry, primarily by the epic, Kalevala.  Inspired is the word.  Sibelius dedicated his life to what he saw as the heritage of a proud people denied nationhood for some six hundred years.  His own life was relentlessly mythologized by the Finns and Western world until it came to seem as potent a symbol of determination by self and environment as anything to be found in Kalevala, enchanting in its stories of endeavour, legend and magic. 

You have just heard Runic Song Interrupted By War-music, a movement from the Karelia Music, written near the outset of Sibelius’ career, in 1893:  it was composed for a festival of folk-poetry and music held by Viborg University, specifically to accompany tableaux vivants of significant events in Finnish history.  The province of Karelia, most of which now lies within the Russian Federation, is held by Finns to be the cradle of Finnish culture and nationalism.   The chant heard here is a representation of the peculiar, pentatonic melodic patterns of Kalevala-singing, in which two performers tell a story by statement and reply.  Kalevala is written in lines of a trochaic rhythm familiar from Longfellow’s poem Hiawatha, which was written in imitation of it. Sibelius was educated at a Finnish Duchy Grammar School, where he learned Finnish - his first language was Swedish - and first read folk-poetry.

Now, here is Laulu Lemminkaiselle, Song To Lemminkainen.  This is a Spring poem, dedicated to a journey made by Lemminkainen, an important character in Kalevala, and often compared to Don Juan!  This choral and orchestral work was an offshoot of a vivid group of tone-poems, The Four Legends, completed in 1896 a colouring in musical terms of stories about this character.  Originally, it formed a purely orchestral passage found towards the close of the last legend, Lemminkainnen’s Homecoming.  Sibelius excised the passage and modified it to create the new work, completed in the same year.  By this time, Sibelius had become a master of homophonic Kalevalan singing wedded to techniques of Late Romantic Classical music.

Track Two:  Laulu Lemminkaiselle

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and this is Rupert Kirkham.  We are presenting a tribute to the Finnish Composer, Jean Sibelius, whose birthday falls on December The Eighth.

The Kullervo Symphony was Sibelius’ first large-scale orchestral and choral work, for baritone and soprano soloists as well as choir and orchestra.  Massively and powerfully scored, it was completed and performed in 1892.  In every sense, it is an extraordinary achievement.  In five complex movements, the third and fifth of which are choral, and lasting about 70 minutes, it was later withdrawn  by its composer, but never revized.  Its style was unique in 1892.  The Symphony was written  the year after he first heard Kalevalan folk-singing by a mistress of the art, Larin Paraske.  It is a work of instinctive inspiration and imagination as well as study, a unique synthesis of late Romanticgrandeur and pictorialism and ancient music usually played on a five-string zither.

Kullervo was the dispossessed hero, his inheritance seized and Parents murdered in his childhood.  The Symphony tells his story, culminating in the overwhelming finale,  where Kullervo commits suicide:  the baritone asks his sword if, now that he has revenged his parents, he can use it to kill himself!). 

Sibelius’ elemental imagination is fully displayed in depicting the wooded scene of Kullervo’s Death - where he unknowingly committed incest with his sister.  The sister, discovering afterwards that he was her brother, despaired and threw herself into a nearby cataract.  Incidentally, their act of love in the third movement is represented with amazing verism for the time.  The symphony’s end is dominated by a blazing motif of fate first heard in the first movement.

Track Three, Kullervo’s Death

Lemminkainen’s Homecoming was composed in 1896.  In the definitive form found four years later it is a locus classicus of Sibelius orchestral style, particularly his mastery of pacing, economic thematic consequence and judicious scoring.  After many adventures concluding in his being torn to pieces and thrown into the river of hell and his reanimation by his mother, he returns exultantly to Kalevala - the domain of the national patriarch, Kaleva - from the land of the North, Pohjola.  Sibelius never wrote anything with more élan, humour and understated but true nobility.  It has real sweep.  As he himself observed, as Finns should, it wears its cap on the side of its head.

Track Four:  Lemminkainen’s Homecoming

Tiera was a male companion of Lemminkainen.  Here is a short piece named for him and written for

brass septet and percussion in l898.  

Track Five:  Tiera

The tone-poem, Pohjola’s Daughter is a work of Sibelius’ maturity, written in 1906, as he was venturing into a new region in his musical thinking.  It tells of how the Maiden of the North, who spins sitting above the rainbow, is wooed by the elderly musician-wizard, Vainomoinen.  In mockery, she sets him various impossible tasks to prove his suitability as a husband, which he accomplishes easily by his magic:  until she challenges him to make a boat from the fragments of her spinning-wheel (a spinning-wheel gloriously portrayed in one of the themes of the tone-poem).  He strikes his shin with his axe and departs, unable to stanch the bleeding!  There is a Wagnerian quality to the harmony at this point, but physical pain is most effectively expressed!  Incredibly, Sibelius originally intended this piece of organic musical argument and seeming pictorial exactness to tell the story of the Daughter of The Air - Luonnotar - who gave birth to creation. 

Track Six:  Pohjola’s Daughter

Luonnotar is a nine-minute scena for soprano and orchestra written for Aino Acté, and was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in 1913.  The Daughter of The Air becomes pregnant and gives birth to the world.  This may have a claim to be Sibelius’ most uncanny evocation of the elements and also, of the spirit of Finland.  It is like an apotheosis of womanhood and childbirth, its moods strangely and beautifully conveyed by a vast range of vocal and orchestral touches.  It has been said that the greatest beauty is always strange.  Sibelius is often portrayed as a granitic-faced nordic hero, almost a statue in himself.  He was probably the warmest and most sensitive of men, with a strong streak of the feminine in his nature.  As an artist, he would have seen obvious parallels between the mother of creation and the creator of music.  Certainly, he suffered dreadfully in writing the majority of the pieces in which he sought to do real, lasting justice to his art and country, not to mention himself.  The pain drove him to drink, caused a cancer-scare in his forties and silenced him as a major composer for the last 30 years of his life.  “You must not join in any race,” he wrote; his artistic ideals must be his own and right for the work in hand.  On the other hand, he could describe in music of unforced greatness a unique myth of the creation of the universe.  Here is Luonnotar.

Track Seven:  Luonnotar

Kalevala was a collection of some one hundred and more sequenced (and resequenced) fragments of the poetry of the ancient Finnish people.  Its compiler, Elias Lönnrot, also gathered folk-lyrics in a book, Kanteletar, The Daughter of The Kantele. 

The kantele is the Finnish national instrument, a form of zither; it is the instrument of the wizard Vainomoinen, and accompanies most forms of songs.  In 1894, Sibelius wrote a set of part-songs based on poems from Kanteletar:  Rakastava - The Lover.  One likes to think of the work as being associated with his wife of fifty-five-odd years, Aino Järnefelt, whom he had married in the Summer of 1892, not long after completing Kullervo.   Here is the delightful The Path Of The Beloved.

Track Eight:  The Path of The Beloved (choir)

To end this programme celebrating Sibelius’ inspiration by Finnish folk-poetry, let’s hear his setting of verses from Kalevala, Venematka, The Boat Journey of Vainomoinen.  This was written in 1893 and re-arranged in 1914.  The rearrangement is for mixed choir, Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.

 

This was Classical Break and I'm Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme on the music of Jean Sibelius, was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon!  Goodbye!

Track Nine:  Venematka

                   

3rd and 4th December

Classical Break this week is presented by the Vicar of St. John's Church, Midsomer Norton. Christopher Chiplin takes us through a journey of organ music from Bach to Elgar, played on some of the most interesting church organs in Europe by some of the most well-known organists. Christopher knows his organs, so stand by for a fascinating talk first presented as a lunchtime concert at St. John's this Autumn.
Classical Break can be heard at 0900 Saturday, 0800 and 1500 Sunday and at 0200 Monday for you insomniacs.

26th and 27th November

This week's Classical Break is a re-run of the first of our programmes dedicated to American music, first broadcast earlier this year, in recognition of the fact that it was Thanksgiving in America this week.


Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday in November. It has officially been an annual tradition since 1863, when during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26.^[1] As a federal and popular holiday in the U.S., Thanksgiving is one of the major holidays of the year. [Wikipedia].

The programme contains works by  Aaron Copeland, John Williams, John Antes, Charles Ives, Charles Griffes, Henry Cowell, Scott Joplin and Bernard Herrmann.

Swing your partners and enjoy!

November 19th and 20th - Remembrance 2

Further to last week's edition of Classical Break Music for Remembrance Day, here is another selection of music of remembrance, with works by Bernard Herrmann, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Copland, Delius, Finzi, Gurney, Bliss and Walton, two hymns - Eternal Father, Strong To Save and Crimond and the Last Post.  It opens with an orchestral piece, For The Fallen, which evokes the atmosphere of the large Allied war-cemeteries in France and the Low Countries. 

Other highlights are a Letter From Home, a Spring Offensive (an orchestrally-accompanied reading of the poem by Wilfred Owen) and a Battle In The Air.

There's also a new poem about the return from war, by Mike Burrows, Classical Break writer and producer.

SCRIPT

Classical Break -  Remembrance Plus

Intro:  For The Fallen, Herrmann (6.19 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert

Kirkham.  This programme was researched and written by

Mike Burrows. There’s so much music based around the horrendous effects of war,

that we've decided to do an additional Classical Break

of English and American remembrance-music this week –

a sort of Remembrance Plus. 

We have just heard For The

Fallen, by Bernard Herrmann, an evocation

of the sunlit spaces of Western

Europe’s War Cemeteries.

Let’s hear the Prelude to the

1940 film The Forty-ninth

Parallel, by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Track Two:  The Forty-ninth Parallel, Vaughan Williams (2.33 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM.  Today we're playing more Remembrance music.

Sir William Walton wrote music for

the film The Battle of Britain

(1968); much of it

was discarded by the director, but

not the eidetic cue, Battle In

The Air.

Track Three:  Battle In The Air, Walton (4.50 min)

And now, Letter From Home, a

short orchestral idyll written for Paul

Whiteman in 1943 by Aaron Copland.

Track Four:  Letter From Home, Copland (7.20 min)

Now here's a new poem from Mike Burrows.

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) wrote a secular Requiem

during the First World War, which,

as an expatriate Englishman with German

blood and resident in France, was

a time of great bitterness for him. 

Here is the fourth movement,

I Honour The Man Who Can

Love Life.

Track Five:  Requiem, 4th move, Delius (4.16 min)

Next, a setting of Thomas Hardy’s

First World War poem, In The

Time of The Breaking Of Nations,

made by Gerald Finzi in his

Requiem Da Camera of 1924.

Track Six:  Requiem Da Camera, 111, Con Dignita  Finzi (3.57 min)

Here is a brief song by

the soldier-musician and poet Ivor

Gurney (1890-1937),

The Cherry Trees:  it is a

tiny elegy founded on a poem

by  Edward Thomas, who died at

Arras at Easter on the first

day of the Third Battle of

Ypres, in 1917.

Track Seven:  The Cherry Trees, Gurney (1.07 min)

A melodrama from Sir Arthur Bliss’

Symphony, Morning Heroes of 1928: 

Spring Offensive - illustrating the poem

by Wilfred Owen.  Bliss was wounded

but survived the Great War, his

brother Kennard did not.  The symphony

was dedicated to him and to

those of Bliss’ comrades who had

died.  It was written after a

series of worsening nightmares, and proved

cathartic.

Track Eight:  Morning Heroes, Spring Offensive, Bliss (5.59 min)

A hymn for the Senior Service now:  Eternal Father Strong To Save.

Track Nine:  Eternal Father Strong To Save (1.07 min).

Now, a work for choral and

orchestral forces, Ode To Death, a

tribute to fallen musicians by Gustav  Holst

(1874-1934), dating from 1919 and

setting Walt Whitman's “When lilacs last

in the door-yard bloomed.”

Track Ten:  Ode To Death, Holst (12.27 min)

You've been listening to Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM with Rupert Kirkham.

Thanks go to Mike Burrows for

researching and scripting this programme.  We hope you

will join us again soon.  Our last

piece today is Crimond and Last Post.  Goodbye!

Track Eleven:  Crimond and Last Post.(2.44)

Homes For Heroes (read by Mike Burrows)
They march towards me, in fours of all hope
To now, crumpled and muddy, their helmets
Dipped or level-brimmed, their rifles a-slope
On pack-blistered shoulders, and bayonets
Hanging in scabbard: they swing the free arm,
Their spare figures upright to the pale neck,
Some with undone collars. They swing by farm
And up streets, and the push goes without check.
No snipers, no mortars, no machine-guns -
No booby-traps. They will take the country.
God knows, they did not expect it - it stuns
So that they do not ask how silently
They sing, tread or banter - or how the land
Ignores them. They will never understand.   

November 12th and 13th, 2011

SCRIPT: Remembrance

Intro:  Gas-bombardment and Tipperary

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme is an anthology of

music inspired by war and dedicated

in respectful remembrance to the armed

forces personnel and civilians of all

nations who have endured the conflicts

of the past ninety-seven years. 

Let’s go back to the year

that the First World War, the

Great War, broke out, and hear

a patriotic song of the period,

performed by Helen Clarke and Chorus

and recorded in 1914. Your

King And Country Want you.  Such

a gulf of experience lies between

it and the art-music that

came of this terrible time and

successive decades, even though many would

face up to the end of

Britain’s policy of appeasement in 19-

39 with a sense of moral

release, and popular songs then spoke,

for instance, of hanging out our

washing on the Siegfried Line.  Your

King And Country Want You.   

Track One:  Your King And Country Want You (3.50 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme is an anthology of

music inspired by war and remembrance.

By 1918, Goodbye-ee was the

kind of song that appealed to

those about to go overseas.  No

contemporary patriotic song was popular in

the British armed forces at any

time during the War.  They sang

nostalgic songs, they sang dirty songs,

they sang folksongs, music-hall songs,

and, most of all, songs of

futility and getting through somehow - or

not.  We’re here because we’re here

was sung to the tune of

Auld Lang Syne - just those words,

none other, repeated with dull insistence

on the rhythm of the old

tune, and they loved the sardonic

Goodbyee.  Sadly, those who marched out

to Goodbyee faired as badly as

those who had gone before them: 

it was Spring, 1918, the

Eastern front had closed and the

Germans were about to launch their

last great offensive.

Track Two:  Goodby-ee (1.47min)

Here is Cortege, a movement of

a projected Suite for Small Orchestra,

Behind The Lines, by the Scottish

composer, Bandmaster Cecil Coles (1888-

1918).  It had to be

scored for performance by Martyn Brabbins

to be performed;  the blood-spattered

manuscript was sent home with other

personal effects from France, after its

largely German-trained composer, a friend

of Gustav Holst, died from wounds

received in an attempt to bring

in wounded from no-mans-land.

Track Three:  Behind The Lines - Cortege - Cecil Coles (5.39 min)

George Sainton Kaye Butterworth (1885-

1916) was a friend of

Vaughan Williams, an Old Etonian who

studied Classics at Oxford.  He was

briefly music master at Radley College,

a collector of folk-music and

talented morris-dancer.  As a composer,

he knew a brief period of

maturity and served as a 2nd Lt

in the Durham Light Infantry.  Recommended

for award of the Military Cross

during service during the Somme Campaign,

he was shot through the head

by a sniper before he could

receive his medal.  A brief attendance

at the Royal College of Music

in 1911 perhaps told him

that he knew what he needed

to know; certainly, Vaughan Williams never

got over the death of a

staunch friend whose guidance in musical

matters had always been fruitful and

whose own slender output - four orchestral

pieces - three of them based on

folksongs - three song-cycles and arrangements

of 21 Sussex Folksongs - remain

works of sheer and profound inspiration

to this day.

Here is his song from

his second cycle of Housaman settings,

Bredon Hill And Other Songs, On

The Idle Hill Of Summer:  it

tells of how manhood answers the

summons of army drums heard however

distantly, leaving idleness and a beloved

behind.  Of all the War’s killed

musicians, Butterworth was possibly our greatest loss.    

Track Four:  On The Idle Hill of Summer, Butterworth (3.01 min)

Ivor Bertie Gurney (1890-19-

37) was the casualty who did

not die. His wounds were slight,

but the damage to his personality

and welfare were incalculable.  He joined

the army in the same year

that Coles did and served for

a year in the trenches, narrowly

missing the bloody Paschendaele campaign of

late 1917, when he inhaled

gas and was invalided home.  Like

Coles, he achieved composition in the

front-line, in his case, four

songs, instinct with either nostalgia

for prewar Gloucestershire or close personal

identification with the poets of his

day and of the Elizabethan and

Jacobean ages.  His style is hard

to describe.  He was capable of

writing light parlour-songs, songs that

owe much to Stanford - his teacher -

and Elgar, and songs in the

arioso style of the Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Century, but all his songs

justify the use of the word

Gurneyesque.  He took what he found

and made it anew.  He can

conjure up an astonishing vivid simplicity,

as in his setting of the

poem, At A Bierside, by Masefield.  

This processional aches with humanity and

nobility:  if anyone has to ask

why Gurney and his generation chose

to fight, this song written to

the low trembling light of a

candle-dip as he worked when

he could and his neighbours turned

over and slept where they lay,

may at least serve to show

what was believed in.  An elegy

to all who fell, all who

lived, fought and slept about him,

all who lived to drag on

disabled lives in peacetime and support

their loved ones if they could. 

The sanity of art was the

sanity of compassion, deep feeling, the

impulse to seek and create beauty

out of what Keats called the

holiness of the heart’s affections.  With

good reason, Gurney is perhaps the

best-loved as well as one of the more-

-admired of our soldier-muscian casualties. 

Track Five:  By A Bierside, Gurney (4.06 min)

If Gurney cited the folk- and

army songs of his fellow-soldiers

in letters and poems, there was

no doubt as to which Ivor

won the war so far as

Gurney’s tailor- and ex-soldier-brother

Ronald was concerned.  Why couldn’t Ivor

be like Ivor Novello, and make

money?  “His mind is a huge

unwieldy mess,” he told one of

Gurney’s London friends after the poet-

-composer was committed to a mental

hospital in September, 1922.

Let’s hear the wartime hit, Keep

The Home-fires Burning on penny-

piano, a popular mechanical music-maker.

Track Six:  Keep The Home-fires burning, Ivor Novello (1.47 min)

Remembrance Day falls on November the

11th, the eleventh hour of the

eleventh day.  For over ninety years

we have placed poppy-wreathes and

sounded bugles over local monuments and

war-cemeteries.  On that date and

at that time, the Armistice ended hostilities. 

Even so, some soldiers died

in sporadic actions after silence had

fallen on the many sectors of

Europe’s greatest bid for mass-

suicide.  others lived on, horribly torn

and disfigured or living with the

deepening despair of lung and heart-

damage brought on by breathing poison

gas.  Mental injuries, shellshock, paranoia, speech-

problems and unwanted thoughts prevented the

resettlement in peacetime society of others. 

The War ended for most, to

be followed by a period of

harsh social and economic conditions during

which wealth reestablished methods of predatory

capitalism, In many countries, failure of

investment brought on by self-preservation

of capital and the problems of

national debt and reparations caused mass-

unemployment, homelessness and the punishment of

so-called idleness by a refusal

to assist the needy with finance.

There were no progressive social programmes

of social insurance and healthcare in

Britain, while, as in wartime, the

wealthy coined it and avoided all

the real material and spiritual privations

visited on the lower orders.  The

defeated lands, reconfigured to form new

independent countries and forced to pay

huge reparations by peace-treaties endured

endless suffering, but austerity ruled in

even lands that called themselves victors,

nowhere more cruelly than in ours. 

It was as though huge wagers

had been made and lost; the

man in the street must work

off the debts - if he could

find work.  If the poor were

angry, they were brave; the rich

led them and were mad.  In

unreconstructed nation-states and economies such

as Imperial Great Britain’s, worse fiscal

stringency and stock-market irresponsibility were

on the way, and true Slump. 

Do you recognize this world?

Track Six: Symphony No 6 in E Minor, 1st Movt, Vaughan Williams (8.18 min)

That was the first movement of

Vaughan Williams Symphony No 6 in

E Minor, of 1947.  At

the time of its first performance,

the Second World War had just

ended, a time of austerity and

resettlement begun; former allies sat in

two vast camps and confronted eachother

with the assurance that they would

destroy their enemy morally or militarily. 

To end the Second World war,

whose mechanized character, logistics, scope and

savagery had quite eclipsed that of

the First, conventional bombing had devastated

Germany and Japan, and atomic bombs

had been dropped on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, possibly to inform the Soviet

Union of the Western Allies’ means

of predominance in any post-war

settlement.  As in this music, songs

of brotherhood, however beautiful, however humane

and aspiring, were crushed. 

Many heard in the Symphony’s cruel

violence, raging, twisted compound-time rhythms,

obsessive fanfares, jazz-inflected satire and

ultimate long-drawn-out hushedness that

ends on alternating major and minor

chords, the hubris and apocalyptic horror

of an atomic war.  The critic

Frank Howes described it as a

‘War Symphony’.  The composer retorted that

it never seemed to occur to

some people that a man might

just want to write a piece

of music!  One can be on

both sides in this matter.  He

had written a 4th Symphony, full

of the 1930’s nightmare and

the cantata, Dona Nobis Pacem for

peace.  In 1943, he had

written his autumnally glowing 5th Symphony,

a vision that owed something to

that soul of England, the John

Bunyan of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and

in 1945, a Song of Thanksgiving.  Now,

the 6th seemed minatory as had

the 4th, if anything, it seemed

more frightening still: so was the age.

In 1939, the First World

War had seemed European Man’s best

effort to destroy himself.  Few of

those who had known it could

stomach the idea of a second

If it could be avoided.  In

Britain and her dominions alone, they

remembered the loss of nearly nine

hundred thousand lives.  Perhaps the world’s

losses stood at ten million, perhaps

they had been higher.  That there

was optimism during the Second World

War was partly down to popular songs –

anyone middle-aged or older

can reel off the names of

a half-dozen of these even

after seventy years - popular classical concerts

by figures such as Myra Hess

and military-sponsored musicians, leaders of

dance-bands mostly, and newsreel, documentary-

and feature-film music.  Recorded music

became public during war-years in which

armed forces personnel and war-workers

were beguiled by cinema, radio and

tannoy as they relaxed or strove.

An example of popular war-music

from those days is Eric Coates’

brightly-scored march, Calling All Workers. 

Similarities  between its material and working-

out and those of the same

composer’s Dambusters March are instructive.  The

Dambusters has a far better trio.

Track Seven:   Calling All Workers, Eric Coates (3.20 min)

Clifton Parker’s Seascape, from his score

for the Crown Film Unit’s Western Approaches -

which was unusual in being made

in colour - shows another face of

music for a purpose, finely evocative

and mysterious in its wash of

sound: it invites the long view,

as in 1944.

Track Eight:  Seascape, Clifton Parker (4.11 min) 

Even before the end of the

War, the British - many under arms -

chose overwhelmingly for the future - the

National Coalition fell and was replaced

by Labour:  to create a welfare

state in which all were supported

by the nation and the judgement

of deserving and undeserving that had

permitted the rich to tyrannize the

less-well-off seemed to die;

private speculation, estates and ownership were

strictly regulated and taxed; living conditions,

health and safety and employment rights

were strictly regulated; strategic industries, the

railways, the public utilities, too, would

be controlled by the people through

the ballot-box - and funds for

education, social services, social and

medical insurance were made good by

progressive central taxation based on the

ability to pay, surely the only

logical method if public welfare is

the aim.  Everyone’s allegiance might ultimately

be to the King, but now,

there was a commonwealth within this

country’s borders as well as without.

This was perhaps a land fit

for the heroes of 1945,

certainly, it seemed worthy of the

British lawyers who drew up the

UN’s Human Rights Accord - the

basis of the

European Court

- in

the post-war period.  Those who stand

for two minutes of silence in

remembrance of primitive modern man should

contemplate the millions of people throughout

the world who have paid with

their lives for our empires and

wars. 

To end, here is the lento

moderato slow movement of Vaughan Williams’

3rd Symphony, The Pastoral, completed

in 1920.  This was Vaughan

Williams’ War Symphony.  Predominantly slow-moving

and developed from pentatonic motifs strongly

of folksong, this contains at least

one very definite attempt at reportage: 

He served as an ambulance-driver

and later artillery-officer, though forty-

-two at the outbreak of war. 

At sunset, from a hill above

camp near Ecoivres, he viewed a

Corot-like landscape and heard a

bugler practise; every time the man

sounded his call, he played a

seventh instead of an octave.  In

prosaic life one finds the

uncanny, the poetic, the meaningful.  The

trumpet in C sounds this tommy’s

peculiar variation on the official call;

in the restatement, the more shady

French horn replaces the trumpet - dusk

is further advanced. 

The portrayal of dusk is as

cool and subduedly colourful; a bugle

in light, a French horn in

last light; trees rustle in the

strings, their rising, then hushing sounds

are almost like a nurse’s tending

voice and hands; birdcall-like, woodwind

wind about the calls of the

bugler, answering a little in canon -

all rises to a passion twice,

and falls away, at last falling

away into night, sleep, rest.  Wherever

the Lord is, the countryside and

bugler seem to be with us. 

This was Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert

Kirkham.  Today’s script was written and

researched by Mike Burrows.  Keep the

two-minute silence with your own

counsel and join us again next time. 

Goodbye!

Track Nine:  A Pastoral Symphony, 2nd Movt, Lento Moderato, Vaughan Williams (8.O9 min)