21st and 22nd July

CB Blake

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s rogramme was researched and written by Mike Burrows.  Let’s begin with a nocturne of great beauty written for tenor solo, solo viola, semi-chorus and orchestra, by Sir George Dyson, Night Hath No Wings, a conflation of verses by Robert Herrick and Isaac Williams.  It forms the third movement of a massive “Cycle of Poems” written for performance at the Three Choirs Festival:  Quo Vadis, or in English, Whither goest thou?  The austere timbre of the viola sets the tone for what follows:  an arioso not far removed in melodic or harmonic style from those of the Seventeenth Century of Herrick - incidentally, Isaac Williams was a Victorian and follower of the Oxford Movement.  Dyson sets the words with modest aptness, but smouldering intensity in which voice, viola and strings vie in pathos, woodwind - flute and clarinet -introducing a kind of sickroom closeness.  Pizzicati punctuate.    

Night hath no wings for him that cannot sleep;

And time seems then not to fly, but creep;

Slowly her chariot drives as if that she

Had broke her wheel...

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress...

When God knows I’m tossed about

Either with despair or doubt,

Yet before the glass be out,

Sweet spirit, comfort me...

Consolation comes slowly and unsurely with Isaac Williams’ smoother, longer-lined verse: 

Unto the east we turn with watchful eyes

Where opens the white haze of silvery lawn

And the still trees stand in the streak of dawn...

The sub-chorus sing, first soothingly, then, after further protest from the soloist, with pizzicato tread of strings...

With a restatement of Herrick’s verse beginning, In The hour of my distress, comfort is perhaps felt at the close, with its repetitions of the words comfort me, and a dying fall.  Written for the cancelled Three Choirs Festival of 1939, Quo Vadis was performed in full only in 1949.

Track One:  Quo Vadis, Night Hath No Wings,  Dyson (10.30 min) 

Next, an improvization by the clarinettist, Richard Stolzmann and the percussion-group, Nexus.  Eternal Triangle Beckons. 

Track Two:  Eternal Triangle Beckons, Stolzmann/Nexus (6.23 min)

Now, a group of orchestral songs by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, all performed by Kirsten Flagstad, and the London Symphony Orchestra, under Oivin Fjelstad.  These are marvellously idiomatic renderings.   First off, Since Then I have Questioned No Further, a setting of a poem by Runeberg, dates from early in its composer’s career, and was praised for its folkishly lyrical quality by no less a figure than Johannes Brahms, when performed at a soiree in Vienna.  In his maturity, Sibelius orchestrated the song in customary neutral tones of effectiveness. 

Why is Spring so fleeting,

Why does Summer never last

Thus did I used to wonder

And ask many a person in vain...

Track Three:  Since Then I have Questioned No Further, Sibelius (2.22 min)

But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen is a song from Sibelius’ maturity, around the time of his Second Symphony, and instinct with pity and sadness that gnaws at the heart of mankind whatever the season.  The poem is again by Runeberg.  A girl longs for her lover, who does not return with Spring, the swan, the lark, the curlew...

Track Four:  But My Bird Is Nowhere To Be Seen, Sibelius (2.43 min)

The last of our Sibelius songs today is To The Night, a setting of AV Forsman-Koskiemies from the period of Since Then I have Questioned No Further.  The spirit of the singer hastens to meet comforting night.

Track Five:  To The Night, Sibelius (1.36 min)

Now, a work for trumpet solo and string orchestra by the Armenian--Scottish American composer, Alan Hovhaness.  The great crisis in his career - rejection by his teachers at Tanglewood Music School after the award of a scholarship - was two years behind him when he set to work on this piece.   It portrays a heroic priest, the eponymous Khrimian Hairig, who led his people through many persecutions.  The trumpet intones as the voice of this man, the strings’ block--chordal responses growing in fervour and canonic contrapuntal independence.  Armenian semitones spice modal forms of chant.  There are moments of holy calm as at the beginning.  The fullest statement of the melodic material is reserved until the close, and broadens in typical idealistic statement, the trumpet like a golden crown.  The piece is subdivided into three sections:  The Chalice of Holiness; Wings of Compassion and The Triumph of Faith.  Khrimian Hairig, by Alan Hovhaness. 

Track 6:  Khrimian Hairig, Alan Hovhaness (7.39 min)

Our last work today is the Clarinet Concerto by Howard Blake.  Blake, a Londoner born in 1938, studied as a pianist and composer at the Royal Academy of Music, his lessons in composition given by the Belfast-born pianist-composer, Howard Ferguson.  His catalogue of works is massive, running into over nine hundred opus numbers:  but he has worked intensively as an accompanist and conductor, this secondary hectic career involving much travel and exposure to many styles of music ranging from pop, through jazz, to modern art-music.  A brilliant pasticheur, he has written much music in a tonal idiom recognizably influenced by that of his own teacher, Ferguson, Gerald Finzi, Hindemith, Delius and Peter Warlock.  You will know him by his music for the film, The Snowman. 

It is fair to say that this much-commissioned composer has an ability to create music that is sometimes described as ‘accessible’.  The idiom is approachable and recognizably of a tradition.  

It’s not revolutionary in style, and for many decades, this was to say that music was dull or fake: in the days when a culture of ‘lightning war’ seems to have been the anti-aesthetic believed on by all fashionable terrible infants and BBC Controllers.

Blake’s Concerto is structurally akin to that by Gerald Finzi (who was himself under-appreciated by movers and shakers in his life-time), and covers much the same emotional range, beginning with a flourish - though one provided by the soloist rather than strings.  The first movement, Invocation: Recitativo-Moderato, Molto Deciso,  opens in near-blues, which are supplanted by a mediaeval chant-sounding first subject coloured by the clarinet. Brusque onward movement is held back by the tug of doubt or sadness, complex canonic or imitational textures or semitonal sighs.  The scoring is harsh, with many misalliances in instruments’ weaker registers; the sense of driven-ness not to be put away as the flourish and chant are developed against an ever-changing background of counterpoint.  The semitonal sighs are heard most affectingly in a moment notable for high violin harmonics and held notes in the horn.  The inexhaustible energy and variety in the music builds to baroque or Finzi-like use of high strings with bass accompaniment, leading to a stalking climax, jabbing Dies Irae unisons punctuating the chant-theme.  The opening flourish - and clarinet - enter, and a slow fading chord coloured by the horn ends the movement. 

Track Five:  Invocation:  Recitativo-Allegro Deciso (7.51 min)       .

The Second Movement, Recitativo - Lento Serioso, is possibly haunted by Ravel’s piano-piece, Le Ghibet, another emotionally complex inspiration.  It begins with the flourish that began the first, but soon, the matter is proved to be a development of the high violin harmonics figure in amongst the imaginative thematic transformations later on.  Again, the horns are involved.  The clarinet and violins with cautionary matter from other parts of the orchestra build to a brief climax - underpinned by an upward scale - and a lowish consolatory sound is made by horn and warbling clarinet and other woodwind in exchanges of the melodic line.  Tension comes in on the high strings, stridency bringing back the swaying semitones on misallied woodwind - oboe noticeable - and brass.  Again, the music seeks to expand, and the oboe has its moment, answered by the clarinet.  The upward scale is heard from underneath.  Again, there is consolation, and the strings lead the warmer but quietly peremptory winding-down. 

Track Six:  Ceremony:  Recitativo-Lento Serioso (7.12 min)

The Finale is a Round Dance, marked Vivace.  An impish variation on the solo flourish leads to a jog-trot similar to the chant of the first movement.  Woodwind have a counter-melody that is flat in curve, more blues-like or jazzy and so modern in sound. 

It may remind one of the spikier inspirations of Malcolm Arnold.  The clarinet soon dominates it, as does the opening matter.  The semitonal swaying from the first two movements is heard with pizzicato accompaniment and what become roulades in the solo-part.  The chant-like theme is still there.  A crescendo grows with chuckling outbursts from woodwind and a more haunting air in the clarinet’s restricted figures.  The opening music of the rondo returns - barer, more gaunt.  Time is passing, even the clarinet is audibly flagging - or a final effort is inspired by the counter-melody, scotched at last by horn and rounded off by woodwind, strings and brass - the clarinet in at the very last.

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 that you enjoyed it and will join us again soon.  Goodbye!       

Track Seven:  Round Dance:  Vivace (6.28 min)

14 and 15 July

USA 1

Intro:  Fanfare For The Common Man: Copland (3.15 min)  

Hullo.  This is Classical Break, and

I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme,

researched and written by Mike Burrows,

is a tribute to the music

that established the United States as

a pioneer-nation in the mainstream

of cosmopolitan art-music.

We have just heard the Fanfare

For The Common Man by Aaron

Copland.  Written after the United States

had entered the Second World War,

to a commission awarded by the

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, this is a

crucial work in the history of

North American music, and must have

seemed so from its first play-

through.  At a time when the

world seemed nightmarishly split along racial

lines, a New York Jew had

written music for a great nation

of races, seeming to express the

idealism and determination of this nation’s

response to Pearl Harbour.  In gong-

and timpani-strokes, massed trumpets, more

throaty horns and trombones, fourths, fifths

and triads of purity and brazen

clashes, the stride and power of

the titan is evoked with permutations

of a phrase and answer:  but

in deliberate white-note music, this

is American humanity on the march.

Copland said that he had written

as he imagined others were feeling. 

The Sleeping Dragon has been awoken. 

The brash circus-world of Sousa

marches or music-theatre jazz is

a world away.

We think of this music as

‘American’.  Actually, its jagged aesthetic owes

greatly to Stravinsky, Janacek and Les

Six as well as to what

might be characterized as a settler-

rhetoric.  Copland, like most of his

American contemporaries, studied in Paris.  

Our next piece was written in

a similar style: some fifty years

on.  Saving Private Ryan, a Spielberg

portrayal of the Omaha landing on

D-Day and a small force’s

attempt to return a Mother’s last

surviving son home, suffers from histrionics

and cynically manipulative scenes of mayhem,

but no such faults mar John

Williams’ music, the piece Hymn For

The Fallen, in particular.  True, Bach’s

Air On A G-string turns

up, along with a less noticeable

echo of Delius’ Song Of Summer,

but for the rest, the side-

drum, stoical, close-harmony theme, Coplandesque

brass, not to mention the glockenspiel

and busy string-figuration at the

climax, are both emotionally true-sounding

and affecting.  There is a power

in the deliberately limited melody grouped

about a modal clash between major

and minor, between home-spun harmonies

and the tritone.  This is like

a marching song for ghosts or

for those who knew them.  It

is a fine piece and may

cause one to forget how the

Copland ‘Common Man’ style has been

hijacked for just about any feature-

film that aimed for pathos, patriotic

or spiritual uplift, in the past

thirty years.

Track 2:  Saving Private Ryan, Hymn To The Fallen, John Williams. (6.07 min)

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert

Kirkham.  Today’s programme looks at American

music. 

A Hymn To The Fallen from

the 1990s reminds us that America

has always had a strong tradition

of non-conformist psalm-singing, from

the early years of European settlement

until the period of 19th Century

religious revivals, the days of the

‘camp-meetings’.  Our concept of hymn-

singing dates back to the days

of Methodism and the Wesley brothers -

and the Church of England had

no official hymnal until the 1860s

or so.             

In the main, at first the

music was rudimentary and in unison,

and trained singers led a congregation

with greater or lesser accuracy.

By the 18th Century, Tune-books

were in use.  Here is a

hymn by John Antes, a Pennsylvanian

of this period, How Beautiful Upon

The Mountains, in a comparatively ‘classical’

contemporary arrangement for singers, chorus and

orchestra.

Track 3:  How Beautiful Upon The Mountains, John Antes (3.24 min)

A hymn like Simple Gifts, we

owe to the American Shaker sect,

of course.  The much later Episcopalian

setting of Nearer My God to

Thee by Lowell Mason resounds from

its use in films on the

Titanic disaster.  From numerous westerns and

small-town films, besides the dances

at hoe-downs or balls, hymns

such as The Shining River have

been a valuable scene-setter.

One of the stranger and stronger

figures in United States music was

the recluse Charles Ives, born in

Danbury, Connecticut in 1874.  The

son of a Civil War bandsman,

town bandsman and banker, he was

taught music by his father, who,

fascinated by resonance, free tonality and

chance musical happenings, encouraged his children

to sing in one key whilst

accompanying themselves on the piano in

another.  Ives grew up to be

a fine organist and pianist, playing

in his local church, encountered academic

music at Yale and, after a

spell as organist and choirmaster at

a New York church, went into

insurance and continued to compose in

his own manner.  A fervent transcendentalist

to whom everything sang, between boyhood

and his late thirties, he created

a huge quantity of music that

anticipated every development in modernism by

twenty years.  At the same time,

tunes such as Hail Columbia, Dixie

and Turkey In The Straw - or

ragtime - provided this intensely patriotic liberal

Democrat with raw material, sentimental value,

for reworking in context.  Here is

one of his eerier works, Hannover

Street North, the third and final

piece from his Orchestral Set No

2.  It is a description of

coming into New York as a

commuter the morning the news broke

of the sinking of the Lusitania: 

he remembered that an organ-grinder

began to play the gospel hymn

In The Sweet Bye and Bye -

and one by one, the passengers

joined in - their efforts uninterrupted even

though a train came into the

station.  By its dying fall, this

work has liberated the ear from

fixed notions of rhythm or harmony

in a piano-concertante texture (Ives

was a formidable pianist) that shows

all things in an almost filmic

equality of significance, with broken and

ultimately baleful brass - listen for the

crowd’s voice raised full-throatedly in

its hymn - and treble register ‘atmosphere’. 

The close is as quiet as

the opening, but one has experienced

an event in human experience, an

epiphany of New York America.

Track 4:  Hannover St North, Ives (7.15 min)

   

Before pioneers such as Ives, popular

music, with its intermixed roots in

the world of slave-trade, settlers,

labourers, the Civil War, Indian Wars

and industrialization might have seemed to

be staring the hi-falutin in

the face as a potential source

of inspiration in the 19th Century. 

The folksongs of many European nations,

negro spirituals and work-songs, revivalist

and episcopal hymns, Indian chants, military

marches, parlour- and theatre-songs and

dance-sets, South American ‘latino’ rhythms

and jazz were not only mixed

from the roots but cross-fertilizing

apace in the incredibly varied climate,

topography and demography of the fifty

States.  With the growth of the

railways from Atlantic to Pacific and

North to South, mass-education and mass

publication-methods, the musical establishment remained

an establishment by the skin of

 its teeth.

The open fourths-fifths and pentatonic

style that most think of as

American is present in most countries’

folk-music, owing to systems of

tuning:  the chromatic accompaniment of such

music is artistic licence or literally

accidental.  Like rubato, it permits variety

of emotional nuance, usually on a

descending scale - a flatward tendency in

harmony.  Certainly, it is a demonstration

of skill to find the unovbvious

right wrong note.  Jazz - the word

originally denoted sexual excitement - is founded

on such tricks; spontaneous improvization was

the origin of all folk-music. 

The Land of The Free was

built on conquest and oppression:  folk-

music, to an extent - was

a reaction to rural and urban

oppression of ‘labor’ and crash social

and economic change.

Let’s hear the famous folk-tune,

Ashoken Farewell.  Justly famous, easily as

fine a tune as Shenandoah, it

has come down to us in

many variations and arrangements.  This one

is played on instruments that would

have been available to country people

and ordinary urban folk alike.  It

leaves the darkie-songs and parlour

muse of composers of the Mid-

19th Century, such as Stephen Foster,

for dead.

Track 5:  Ashoken Farewell, Trad. (4.36 min)

The transformation from a land whose

academies had grown modern by recognizing

the genius of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and

Dvorak rather than Liszt and Wagner,

took the better part of a

quarter of a century everywhere but

in the minds of Charles Ives and

Charles T Griffes, a man whose

world was of dreams and such

visions as Xanadu, and whose music

was influenced by the whole-tone

experiments of Debussy and Scriabin.  He

did not represent a nationalist’s dream

of American music, but his success

was possibly to build on the

aesthetic change discernible in the Grieg-

-influenced music of another, earlier ‘modernist’,

Edward Macdowell, and cause comparisons between

the music of an American and

that of the impressionist musicians of

France and Spain, and the mystical

tendency, such as it was, in

Russia.  Here is the second of

his Two Sketches Based on Indian

Themes for String Quartet, Allegro Giocoso.

Track 6:  No 2 of Two Sketches Based on Indian Themes, Charles T Griffes (3.54 min)

Next, let’s hear a piece by

another maverick, Henry Cowell (18-

97-1965).  This was

a man who wrote several symphonies

and other large-scale works in

an idiom not far removed from

that of Ives.  He could be

inspired by a good old Fuguing

Tune, but in many of his

pieces, instruments were played in novel

ways; he specialized in tone-clusters,

microtones and many other innovations, directing

a pianist, for example, to play

with his fist, or pluck and

play glissandi on the strings as

if on a zither.  Here is

his magical miniature, the third piece

of his three movement Irish Suite for

String Piano and Small Orchestra:  Fairy

Bells.

Track 7:  Fairy Bells Henry Cowell (5.54 min)

The works of the urban negro

composer, Scott Joplin, born three years

after the end of the Civil

War and famous for his rag-

time, less so for an opera

about plantation-life, Tremonisha, took

up an uneasy position between Art-

music and popular songs and dances

and the world of the bar-

room, bordello and musical theatre.  He

made a name for himself in

spite of his colour, his uncertain

education and poor health, working himself

hard as a performer and arranger

as well as composer, but died

before he could realize his ambitions

as a serious artist - Tremonisha’s trials

proved fatal to him.  George Gershwin

and others were to fare better

in this direction later on, with

hits like Porgy and Bess and

Show-boat.  Of course, working within

the idiom of cakewalks and other

such black institutions, an idiom whose

holiday strut or weary worksong bluesiness

captivated whites, he was a useful

composer, a money-spinner for others. 

The pathos and efficient melodic and

rhythmical resource of his rags have

conquered the world since his death,

the film Sting - which plugged The

Entertainer - provoking a new wave of

sympathetic attentions from musicians, musicologists and

Civil Rights supporters.  As a kid,

I recall, there were two pieces

the unmusical pianist was certain to

know how to murder, The Moonlight

Sonata - the opening few bars, that

is - and The Entertainer.  Let’s hear

the Maple Leaf Rag.

Track 8:  Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin  (3m15s)

Another black musician:  the violinist, composer

and arranger of Negro music, H

T Burleigh, was taught composition by

Dvorak at the New York Conservatory,

during the great composer’s brief reign

of terror as a professor.  Much-

respected - and liked - by his students,

Dvorak was known behind his back

as Borax, owing to his blunt

but abrasive reactions to their exercises. 

Dvorak’s views on black music were

remarked on; he believed that an

American music of the future might

well be built on the traits

of negro themes and harmonies.  In

his American music -  the Cello Concerto,

the Nigger Quartet - as it was

once known - an American Suite, The

American Flag and the New World

Symphony, he does seem to have

taken his own advice!  Harry Burleigh

admired the dour Czech greatly; and

Dvorak’s respect for folk-song certainly

left its mark on his pupils. 

Of peasant-stock himself, Dvorak had

not impressed the great musical and

other thinkers at Cambridge when there

to receive an honorary doctorate:  “Did

you try him on pigs?” one

of these characters had asked a

colleague who had tried to get

a word out of the man. 

But Dvorak was an inspired composer,

if not the world’s greatest theoretician,

and his good-hearted belief in

and practising of true art electrified

his students.  It may not be

too much to say that Dvorak

was a founding father of the

new American music - Nadia Boulanger of

1920s Paris later to become

a founding mother.  Let’s hear a

spiritual arranged by Burleigh, who himself

became an academic,  My Lord, What

A Morning.

Track 9:            My Lord, what a Morning, Arranged HT Burleigh (3m01s)

Pace Ives, there was a lot

of fine music written between the

1890s and the First World

War by conservatives such as George

W Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Henry Hadley

and Daniel G Mason, some of

which has an undoubted American accent. 

Foote’s String Quartet in D-major,

of 1911, is a work

as inspiring as anything in an

American idiom by Borax - or, indeed,

anything written since.  Unlike most Americans

of the late 19th Century up

until the modernist period, Foote, a

good teacher of music, never studied

abroad.  Born in 1853, he

died in 1937.

This is the song-like, sustainedly

varied slow movement, Andante Espressivo.  It

shares its inheritance with Brahms and

Borodin, but something of its accent,

its melodic turns remains American.

Track 10:  String Quartet in D Major, 3rd Movt, Andante Espressivo, A Foote (7.02 min)  

And that’s it for our programme

of American music - except...  Bernard Herrmann

(1911-75) wrote music for

a film, The Devil And Daniel

Webster, a fable set in New

England, in which a farmer is

led to a hoard of War

of Independence gold by Scratch, the

devil, and proceeds to sell his

soul for wealth and an easy

life as the rest of the

local tenant farmers live and suffer

hard times, and he grows rich

at their expense.

Here is an evocative cue from

the film:  Swing Your Partners.  In

this barn-dance sequence, Scratch strikes

up with a fiddle in Mephisto-

New England-style!

This is Classical Break, and I’m

Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s script was written

and researched by Mike Burrows.  We

hope you have enjoyed our survey

of American music and will join

us again, soon.  Swing Your Partners!

Tracks 12:  Swing Your Partners, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Herrmann (2.34 min)