1 & 2 December

                  (Photo by AJS)

Autumn

Track One:  Elegy For Strings, Elgar

Hullo, this is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is of  music with an Autumnal air.  The script was written and researched by Mike Burrows. 

Our opening piece was Elegy for String Orchestra, by Elgar.  This brief piece was written in the summer of 1909, two years after the First Symphony had been completed.  It was commissioned by Alfred Littleton of Novello’s, Elgar’s publisher, in memory of the late Warden of the Worshipful Company of Musicians.  It is a proof that brief need not mean insubstantial.  Its beautifully worked textures are a masterpiece of scoring, its softly dissonant harmonies - much use of baroque overlapping phrases and seconds-based clashes - and canny interplay of treble, alto and bass instruments creating an illusion of broad yet haunting melody; it sings, but no matter how it stays in the memory, remains unhummable; its mood, likewise, is deeply sad but strangely consoling.  It has something of the Celtic, specifically Welsh about it, a magical reticence and yet plangency whose sensibility is stoical but quick with magic.

Autumn.  No sooner is the harvest gathered, than the work on next year’s yield begins.  It is a nexus of fulfilment, loss and hopes for the future.  This blend of satisfaction and discontent, of curious interplay between present and past, harvest at the full and sad decadence, is the human condition, also the mainspring of all we feel and do.

Here is a short piano-piece, Minnen (Memories), which closes the Second Book of Flowers from Froso, by the Swedish composer, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942).  It is a meditation on the past Summer.  Peterson-Berger had a house in the wilds of Jamtland in Northern Sweden, to which he escaped if possible every Summer from his life as a composer and music-critic in Stockholm.  Famed for the forthright (and crushing) opinions that he passed on other composers - Stenhammar, Sibelius and Nielsen included - he betrayed a very different spirit in the Flowers From Froso, music for the amateur pianist that in every way lives up to the excellent example of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces.  Character-pieces of the period married simple tunes to aquarelle-light touches of modal or chromatic harmony, and maintain their spell of poetic evocativeness of place and feeling.  Peterson-Berger would return most reluctantly by the Autumn to the wars that he himself provoked...  Hence, perhaps, the end-of-school-holidays-feeling to be detected in Minnen, Memories!

 

Track Two:  Minnen, Flowers From Froso, Peterson-Berger

Harvest-time is celebrated the world over, and music is to the fore in the form of songs and dances.  Here is a Dance of The Harvesters by the Finn, Leevi Madetoja.  A pupil of Sibelius, he became a fine composer in his own right, more indebted to his master in style than were many of his contemporaries, he wrote three symphonies, many orchestral suites and two national operas.  The Dance of The Harvesters comes from music written for a film, The Struggle For The Homestead and reissued as the last movement of a suite, Rustic Scenes, Op77.  Its style is marginally neo-baroque, perky and unpretentious, rhythmically generated, with important parts for high woodwind and deep-toned strings, the bass stepping out angularly.  Its mistily oscillating secondary material is perhaps what may appear most characteristic of Sibelius.  Madetoja was a good dancer and in youth something of a gymnast - as a boy, he appeared in a circus tumbling-act with his brother, his short career in the big top coming to include snake-charming, and ended abruptly by a fall from the tightrope!

 

Track Three:      The Dance of The Harvesters, Rustic Scenes, Madetoja

Now, Moonshine In Autumn, a traditional tune from China.

 

Track Four:  Moonshine In Autumn, Trad

A time of produce is a time of country markets.  Autumn is the year’s time of wealth, if it but knew it. 

The American composer, Peggy Stuart-Coolidge wrote the music for the world’s first ballet on ice. Later, she was the first American composer to whose work the Soviet Union devoted a whole gala-concert.  Her music is often pictorial in intention, colourfully orchestral, with broad contrasts, opposing solemn song- or hymn-like themes with pungently irreverent song and dance - the effects are straightforward, the tunes square-cut and harmonies either affecting or briskly astringent.  There is a sense of jump-cuts, of filmic episodes, lyricism alternating with what approaches slapstick or hoedown.  Stuart-Coolidge worked for a time with Ferde Grofé, whose fame as a musical illustrator has remained greater than hers.  Let’s hear New England Autumn - Country Fair. New England always seems to begin in a hymn. 

Track Five:  New England Autumn, Country Fair, Stuart-Coolidge

In similar vein, here’s a short vision of Halloween, courtesy of Charles Williams and the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra!  Witches’ Ride!

Track Six:  Witches Ride, Williams

 

Autumn brings ghosts and spirits and a feeling of the uncanny, perhaps in its storms and stillness that we know is not still while the ferment of decay goes on. 

Henry Cowell was one of a group of early experimenters in modernist music - Ives, Varese, Becker, Ruggles and he were mutually supportive in their own spheres of musical expression - a kind of American Mighty Handful, although  the association was looser than that of Russia’s 19th Century group, Moguchaya Kuchka.  Here is Cowells’ Banshee, a miniature from his Irish Suite for piano-strings and small orchestra.  The atmospherics are achieved by use of harmonics and the powerful resonance built up by playing the strings of the piano with one’s hands.

 

Track Seven:  Banshee, Irish Suite, Cowell

From that to the ghost story in which the ghosts appear flesh and blood until the crisis to which they bring a mortal, when their malevolence becomes belatedly clear. The music for the feature-film, Haunted, in which a ghost-hunter is played for a fool by the ghosts of incestuous grown-up siblings who torment their former nurse, was supplied by Debbie Wiseman. Here is an arrangement by the composer, in which the uncanny and lyrical elements of the score are presented in one movement.  The tritone-based uncanniness at the outset is perhaps more impressive than the love-theme associated with the ghost of Christina Merriel.  In it, chill is established by violin harmonics and trills, some use of the piano’s strings, the keys employed in an abridged and deformed arpeggio, bass chords and tone-clusters played orthodoxly.  

 

Track Eight:  Haunted, Debbie Wiseman

Now, from Halloween, we perhaps reach All Saints and All Souls.  a short choral-piece by the Swede, Fredrik Sixten, born in 1962, who has been much involved in the modernization of Swedish church-music.  Here is his setting of a poem by Erik Blomberg,  Be Not Afraid of The Dark. 

 

Track Nine:  Be Not Afraid of The Dark, Sixten

That Igor Stravinsky studied with Rimsky-Korsakov is plain to hear in his short symphonic poem, Fireworks, a piece written while still a student.  The thematic terseness, whole-tone atmosphere, bright and acerbiccontrasts in scoring got by economical means come straight out of the old master’s late operas.  Something of the Dukas of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is heard in droopingly strange harmony and refined, limpid, violins-led orchestration of a short passage near the opening, the nearest the work comes to lyricism.  There’s a foretaste of the rhythmical momentum of musique mechanique in this functional, not to say, perfunctory exhibition of bursts of colour and clamour.

             

Track Ten:  Fireworks, Stravinsky

 

Here is a short extract from a novel:

“He dreamed of the wandering Somerset lanes, the ashtrees and beeches of the Mendips, the plane-trees of Wells and Bath...  The straggly willows of the levels...  Beech, hawthorn and elder-hedges...  The pasture and arable fields open to grey-white clouds and golden sun in brisk, cold skies...  Or fogs and desolation on the living landscape, cattle, sheep and horses...  Garths filled with fruit, apples, pears, plums...  Wayside berries and nuts provided by chance - for the tramp or middle-class conserve- or wine-maker. 

He, he was the richest man in the world, but he had been that, he knew now, all his life.”

 

We began with an Elegy and, to end, here is another in all but name:  Herbert Howells’s early Suite for Orchestra, The B’s - written swiftly in the Autumn of 1914, and inspired and dedicated to his student-friends pictured within, one of whom was Bartholemew - Ivor Bertie (pronounced Bartie) Gurney.  Howells and Gurney were old friends by the time that they won places at the RCM, coming from the same county, Gloucestershire - Howells from Lydney and Gurney from Gloucester - and sharing the same teachers.  Gurney was just two years older and some inches the taller, and his friendship with Howells was bedevilled by Howells’ early success, which he tended to put down to Howells’ technique and talent for pragmatic ingratiation...  That Howells understood Gurney well can be felt in Lament:  Batholemew, a proud, lonesome pastoral for an awkward character of great inner beauty - and bravely faced conflict.  Professor Stanford told Howells once, “Depend upon it, some day, that boy will be mad.”  It took the War to End All Wars for Bartholemew to fulfil their composition-teacher’s prophecy.  At the going down of the sun, we will remember them.  We play this in tribute to those whom we cannot forget and whose sacrifice we celebrate every November. This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme (researched and written by Mike Burrows) was of music with an Autumn air.  We hope that you enjoyed it and will listen in again soon! Goodbye!

 

Track Eleven:  Lament, Bartholemew, Howells

24 & 25 November

Classical Break “Somme”


This is a repeat from last year, the 24-25th November. 

 

                 Remembrance Sonnet

 

                    (Somme Valley)

 

 Yes - everything - even a girl's rose-musk

 Can haunt the field's wooded edge, whose dark gave
 Clear notes both mystery in a June dusk,
 And reflection; everything, that is, save
 What is not felt. Now, silence sounds Last Post;
 Release comes and free hours in which to think
 Of the owl's cry heard in the close: a ghost
 Of cold brass flared with vibrato, to sink.
 In the camp, some wonder if hope is dead;
 To sink into an acrid clay as man
 Is only a picture to men now led
 By brass, and yet as sure as what began
 Their lives; put off perhaps for days and more,
 Will come the proof of what one has lived for.

 

       (Before Montaubon, July 1^st, 1916,

           The Manchester Pals)

 

A small township, there it is, the future,

A tactical eternal city – near
In the mind’s grasp and, if enough endure,
For fight and wit to bring us to.  So clear
Through the periscope, that slim glimpse of stone
And earthen tiles, of tower part-masked by trees
And calm slopes: lifted by the fields, high-flown
But proffered beyond all casualties.
One man, shot through, whimpering, finds refuge
As explosives strike soul and drape over
Worlds with earth’s mud, yet some feel the deluge
Moves with them.  They help him into cover,
And find ways towards that town on the rise –
Ducking as his shellhole doubles in size.

 

Copyright, Mike Burrows, 20/11/12

 

 

Track One:  I Love only You, Grieg (arranged for orchestra)

 

This is Classical Break, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme is a continuation of our remembrance broadcasts and was researched and written by Mike Burrows. 

 

Of partly Danish blood and born in 1892, the son of an interior decorator from South Shields, the Mancunian, Herbert Ingoe, was a typical recruit to the British Army in 1914.  Ninety-eight years have passed since his medical.  He joined the Eighteenth City Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, on the Fourth of September, Nineteen Fourteen.  He was described in the report as a clerk, aged twenty-two, dark-haired, of a sallow complexion, with hazel grey eyes.  He was five feet three-and-a-half inches in height, with a girth, at full expansion, of thirty-one-and-a-half inches, capable of an expansion of two inches, and weighed in at one hundred-and-six pounds, that is, seven stone-eight pounds.  He was passed as being in good or normal health apart from low weight, which could be soon increased.  His eyesight was categorized as D-Six, which one takes to mean poor.  In other documents, 1810411, Private Ingoe, Herbert was described variously as a Congregationalist and Wesleyan by faith.  He was teetotal - no impediment to his becoming a Pal.  Here is a patriotic song:  The Deathless Army.

 

Track Two:  The Deathless Army

 

Basic training in drill, physical fitness, care of equipment, musketry, use of the bayonet on straw, trench-digging and combat in attack and defence were got through.  The only records are of innoculations and postings; Herbert left no trail of fines, fatigues and CBs - Confinements to Barracks.  He would have had a few days of leave during this time, and stayed with his parents - he had a sweetheart who lived not far away from them.  A song by Grieg, now, one of his Melodies Of The Heart, setting a poem by Hans Christian Andersen: I love But Thee.

 

Track Three:  I Love But Thee, Grieg

 

A popular song that sent many men to France and the Battle of The Somme was Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kitbag - it was much satirized even at the time...  Here, it can be heard – sung amid a medley as played by HM Coldstream Guards at the Wembley Military Tattoo of 1925.  The other tunes need no introduction.

 

Track Four:  March Medley

The Eighteenths, now the Eighteenth (Service) Battalion, arrived in France on the Sixth of November, Nineteen Fifteen. They marched ten miles to Folkestone on route-march-hardened feet for a rough channel-crossing to Boulogne.  During his time in the Army, poor Herbert was guilty of one minor infraction of King’s Regulations:  he was reported by Corporal Beattie and had up on a charge of losing an oil-cloth through neglect, on the Twenty-first of November.  He was directed by the court to pay for a replacement.

 

A march and train-journey brought the unit to Amiens.  As for Herbert’s service in France, between drill, route-marches, training in trench-warfare and labour on a British Army railway-system to expedite the moving of men and materials to the front, there were short stints in the lines, and further preparations for an up-coming push.  There were periods of rest, though nothing to compare with the Manchester Pals’ celebration of Christmas.

 

Easter would have been celebrated most richly in men’s hearts. 

 

Unattrib. Track:  Rejoice, the Lord is King, Wesley

 

For a man like Herbert Ingoe, the Easter of 1916 may have seemed all-important, the season of resurrection amid the Spring of the French countryside and blasted landscapes of War, where somehow, Nature lived on in battening corvines and giant rats  but also as larks nested and flowers and grasses sprang somehow from contaminated mud and the dead bodies of men and horses.

The expectations of those at home weighed heavily.  Here’s a patriotic arrangement of a song by the Irish composer, Balfe:  The Trumpeter.

 

Track Five:  The Trumpeter, Balfe

(The Trumpeter was actually by Dix.  Apologies to the shades of both for this misattribution!)

 

One asks oneself what hi-jinks the smart soldier would have come to expect by the Spring of Nineteen Sixteen.  Victory, owing to overwhelming numbers and superior equipment, perhaps!

 

At last, the momentum of preparations reached their height.  The Eighteenths left greatcoats and other unnecessary equipment in constituted warehouses:  on the eve of the push, they paraded and were addressed by their Commanding Officer via a megaphone.

 

Track Six:  Moto Perpetuo, Variations on A Theme Of Frank Bridge, Britten

 

That was the Moto Perpetuo from the Variations On A Theme of Frank Bridge by his pupil, Benjamin Britten.

 

As a component of the Thirtieth Division, they moved up through an expanded trench-system to the front line. Their task was to assist in the rolling back of the local German defences and capture of the fortified town of Montaubon beyond.  To reach Montaubon, they would have to advance some three thousand yards, almost two miles, over rising ground, in the face of strong opposition.  The Germans had been bombarded by heavy artillery for a week; in spite of big, concrete dugouts, they had not coped well.  Yet how well-protected they were would cause some surprize to the British Tommy.  It was believed that most of those manning the German forward defences had been killed or that concussion had reduced them to confusion or numb incapacity, and that special shells filled with metal balls and fused to burst in the air had cut the barbed wire defences ahead of them to shreds.

 

This was one occasion when the barrage was heard in England:  the poet Thomas Hardy wrote a poem, Channel-firing.  Here is Gerald Finzi’s setting of that poem, from another defining year in our country’s recent history, 1940.

 

Track Seven:  Channel-firing, Finzi

 

In fact, thanks only partly to the concrete dug-outs, the weight of artillery had not come close to doing all that had been asked of it - even of the shells fired, many had been duds, and the fusing of the shells meant to break the wires had been left far too much to chance. 

 

Now, overnight, Stokes mortars - an invention of the previous year - were employed from the front trench, many  their spherical projectiles aimed at barbed--wire to make assurance doubly sure.  Soldiers who took part in the assault spoke later of seeing numbers of football-like objects lying amid and around the unbroken wires - mortar--shells that had failed to explode.  On the sector that Private Ingoe and his comrades were due to go over, occurred one of ten preparatory acts of man well-diguised as God that erupted at fortified points on the Somme front that day.  To add to the destruction and terror caused by bombardment, at three minutes to zero-hour - Seven twenty-seven A M - miners detonated a large explosive charge under the German position known as Kasino Point.  Some elements nearby had gone over the top prematurely, only to be injured by debris from the huge spout of earth and stones.  What goes up must come down.

 

Track Eight:  Climax from the first movement of Sinfonia Da Requiem, Britten

 

A moment from the Sinfonia Da Requiem, by Benjamin Britten. 

 

At Seven-Thirty, the whistles were blown along a wide Front; bayonets fixed, the British, Commonwealth and French troops involved in the attack scaled ladders.  They emerged in three mighty waves, one hundred yards apart.  Try to imagine going over the top while carrying a back-pack, rifle with bayonet fixed, ammunition pouches - one hundred-and-twenty rounds had been issued to each man – iron rations, admittedly of the barest, a full canteen, gasmask and trenching-tool, two grenades for the use of trained grenadiers and two empty sand-bags, a burden in total of about seventy pounds...      

 

Selected sections were given extra duties - carrying large rolls of barbed-wire, further trenching-tools, wire-cutters, duckboards, machine-guns and ammunition-boxes, or other equipment, over and above their own - men would be marked out by white shoulder-flashes, or yellow triangles in addition to the standard--issue metal discs worn on the back so as not to draw friendly fire on oneself.  The duckboards were to be placed across the trench-walls to enable men following up to advance quickly over them, and the rolls of barbed-wire would be set up on the far side of the captured positions.  During the advance at a walk -in order to keep everyone, including artillerymen, machine-gunners and mortar--firers in supportive rather than unwittingly lethal phase - casualties were heavy, but a German Redoubt, Glatz, was taken, the enemy trenches were overrun  and then, Montaubon beyond, fell.  German counter--attacks were repulsed over the next few days.  On the First of July through, the spirits of troops facing heavy resistance had risen with the taking of prisoners and, ultimately, the chief objective.  This in spite of no-man’s-land being torn up by shellfire.  As they overran comparatively light resistance in the German front-line, an enfilading machine-gun post caused many casualties, but could not halt the British attack.  A Battalion was normally divided into Four Companies; one imagines that C--Company was in the second wave.  The second wave of the Eighteenths had a relatively easy advance; the German lines were neutralized and crossed with less wastage of shock troops than in other Sectors.  Junior Officers kept their companies in strict formation, armed with Webley revolver and whistle only.  Soldiers had been ordered not to halt to assist wounded comrades.  The remaining in close order was intended to ensure that the men were defensive of one-another but, more particularly, offensive in weight of numbers, an effective force in hand-to--hand combat.

 

Military policemen followed-up in the British trenches, encouraging ‘stragglers’ to face the front and do their duty...  Courts-martial cost time and money.  The story is told of a wounded man - walking wounded’s - seeing two young soldiers cornered by Red Caps where they were hiding - as he stumbled on down, he heard two revolver--shots.  In another touch of thrift, it had been laid down as a point of honour for the walking wounded to return to Field-dressing stations carrying rifle and as much as possible of their other equipment.  Furthermore, at the outset, soldiers had been repeatedly warned to be frugal with their personal canteen of water...  The combination of the rum-ration and shock must have left soldiers with a deadly thirst. 

 

Track Nine:  Funeral March from Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Britten

 

Day One of the Battle of The Somme cost the British Army its greatest-ever number of casualties:  57,750, of whom 19,240 were killed.

 

From his Mother, Mike heard the unsubstantiated family-story that a young soldier, distressed and badly wounded, was left to sit in a crater; when his mates sought him, later, they found only a crater doubled in size. 

 

There it is.  As a member of C-Company, the Eighteenth (Service) Battalion, 180411 Private Herbert Ingoe was killed on the first day of the Battle of The Somme.  Of how he had met his death there are no details.  He was noted on a form as having been “Killed in the field”, the words scribbled and signed at Headquarters.  His last effects, signed-for, were sent home in two groups:  first, a notebook, photo and ribbon; second, one disc with chain, two letters, one postcard, one diary, two notebooks, one French and English dictionary, one New Testament, three visiting cards, two newspaper-cuttings,  Herbert’s Father, George William Ingoe, signed for these and also later accepted his son’s scroll and Victory Medal.  Herbert’s body went uninterred, but his name is inscribed on the Thiepval monument for those with no known graves,  Pier and Face 13A and Fourteen C.  He is remembered elsewhere, too, on the War Memorial at Boggart Hole Clough and on the Blackley Wesleyan Sunday Schools Roll of Honour.    

 

In spite of his age, he had been little more than a fairly puny boy on joining up, weighing only seven stone-eight pounds and being possibly of impaired vision - yet he had volunteered and been catapulted into the armed forces.  What had he had to offer but willingness to serve, and his life? 

One unfamiliar term in the military records haunts the reader:  ‘embodied’, obviously means ‘attached to a body of men’, but it seems almost as though the recruits were given their physical persons by the Army. 

 

Perhaps Herbert lost his through neglect, one thinks bitterly.  There are two photos of him in uniform:  he looks tall and well-built, his features rather noble, if curiously inexpressive about the mouth.  There may be signs of strabismus, a lazy right eye.  He seems defiant.  His physical stature was increased by apparent inner strength, no doubt to do with Faith as a devout Wesleyan.  Like his signature on forms, his appearance is confident.  His autodidactic bent is hinted at by that dictionary returned to his family!  Also, his sentiment - witness New Testament, photograph, letters and ribbon.  One wonders what was in the notebooks and diary?  The real Herbert emerges as a physical entity, even as a mind, but what of his voice, his opinions? 

 

How sturdy and weighty a citizen was Herbert when expected to hurl himself and seventy or more pounds of equipment up that ladder and over the parapet?  To add to that burden, what a weight of years and decades of international hatreds and expectations he had to carry, as an ex-City clerk of twenty-three or -four!  You have to ask yourself how much taller this Private had been than a Lee Enfield rifle with bayonet fixed.

 

Track Ten:  Lament for String Orchestra, Frank Bridge

           

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s script, the story of a Manchester Pal, was researched and written by his Great-nephew, Mike Burrows.  We hope you enjoyed it and will tune in again soon. 

 

Goodbye!

 

Track Eleven:  I love Only You, Grieg (arranged for orchestra)

 

The Ingoe children:  At left, Alfred (a stretcher-bearer during the Great War - he survived postings to the Dardanelles and Belgium, and was discharged to the Army Reserve at Charleloi in 1919); Centre-back, Herbert; Centre-front, sister Edith, (who lived until 1983); At right, Harry (who died aged 11, in 1910). 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

17 & 18 November

Owing to technical difficulties beyond our General Staff's (or Junior Officers') control, the broadcasting of this week's intended programme, the story of a soldier of the Great War, must be postponed until next week.  Repeated from the Autumn of 2010, here is CB85, a pleasant survey of music with a theme of Autumn and Remembrance.  The script is given below.

           

 

 

CB 85           Autumn

 

Track One:  Signature tune:  Nielsen:  The Mist Is Lifting

 

Hullo, this is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  You have just heard the Danish Composer, Carl Nielsen’s short piece, scored for flute and harp, The Mist Is Lifting, from his incidental music to The Mother.   Autumn and remembrance in music are the theme of this programme, and this wistful little piece appears to distil both remembrance, farawayness and fresh air in which remembrance seems most poignant. To me, it is an honorary Song of Autumn.

For us, inescapably, Autumn is a time to remember; not only because of the dead of the world’s never-ending wars, but because after harvest-time, we know what earth has contributed: decay settles over where   our cereal, fruit and vegetable-crops, forage for life-stock and manure for fertiliser were gained:  all around us, its reeks add to mists and valley-covering morning fogs, and the smoke of bonfires, though wayside fruits glisten brightly or are scattered about nut-trees.

Nature itself prepares for hard times about us; in reeling down leaves, its wildlife prepares for privation or hibernation where emigration has begun, on the land we have parcelled out, and on the unused land between boundaries.  Already, we prepare for next year’s yields.  If there are expectations of John Barleycorn’s and the orchards’ cheer, the farm-crops are vital as food; dairy-products and meat come of the soil, too.  We have much for which to be thankful.

A time of cool winds, grey skies and undispersing wood-smoke, or of brisk, crisp, frosty air and royal colours; in all weathers, Autumn is a time of spooks, and not only of spooks in khaki.  The countryside and everything and everyone in it are instinct with all who ever lived and died here. Those wayside fruits?  Sloes, blackberries, crab-apples and elder-berries and beech- and hazel-nuts used to be poor man’s treats or the perquisites of WI Hedgerow Industries, Limited.  In the home of a jam-,pickle- or wine-maker - there is a conserve or cordial glow to this time of laying in home-made food. 

Gathering fruit in a wet, windy wooded lane or Crickley quarry has a peculiar Autumnal brilliancy about it. Afterwards.  Autumn is generally regarded as a wild season for weather, the baring or evergreen trees still or tossed passively by a collision between temperatures and as if by the restlessness of conscious life. 

Hallowe’en, All Saints, All-Souls, Bonfire Night, are a progression that is ticked off by those who await Advent and Christmas, not all of whom are children.   

Elgar’s Piano Quintet is a late work, one of three chamber pieces begun towards the close of the Great War. 

Having retreated from the world, he was living with his wife in a small cottage, Brinkwells, in Sussex, not far from Petworth.  It was a time for the burning of the leaves for him:  he spent hours wandering in the woods, learning carpentry and making bonfires, and improvizing and composing the only chamber music that he would publish, a Violin Sonata, a String Quartet and Piano Quintet, and, at the same time, his Cello Concerto:  over all these works there is a deepening sense of unease, sadness and sensations too vivid to be borne.  The spirit of Beethoven’s Late Quartets, and the chamber-music of Schumann and Brahms.  His Wife, to whom he was devoted, was beginning to ail; he felt that he no longer shared his work with an interested public, and he looked to the future without any of the hopes of peace that many were beginning to feel.  In the slow movement, the great Adagio, of the Piano Quintet, he found a reply to despair.  It seems steeped in the season. In inspired apparent improvization amid controlled organic development; the piano decorates certainty and haunting moments in the strings, underlines or swells the melodic matter with rich expressiveness.

 Track One:  Elgar:  Piano Quintet, Adagio. 

 

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  Today’s programme is based round music and poetry of Autumn and Remembrance.  

Autumn Scene, by Jack Brown, captures something of the air of Autumn, to me.  Perhaps it is that it is music that was closer to the culture of my childhood than the Eighties would be to kids of today.  Really, it is made by the simple arpeggios in woodwind from the opening and held notes in the strings, followed by the simple chords held against arpeggios, which form languorous harmonic sequences similar to those found in a composer like Delius, the flute-capped instrumentation providing what contrasts there are, the violins given the affecting moments; it reminds me of boating on the Avon in Bath, the slow onward movement on the currents revealing now and then some new deep tint and shade in the cold water and the trees’ overarching traceries of turning and falling leaves and ripened fruit.  Autumn is a time for leisure, one may think, watching the unrowed progress of a fallen leaf.

Track Two: Jack Brown,  Autumn Scene

                                           

Now, one of Tchaikovsky’s Twelve ‘Seasons’, a group of piano-pieces written to a commission from the St Petersburg journal Nuvellist, for publication month by month in the journal’s pages. To each of the pieces he gave an epigraph, that for the eighth being from Tolstoy:  “The fall, falling on our poor orchard, the yellow leaves flying in the wind.”     Its pensiveness is the stillness of contemplation - the orchard is seen from the window.  Always intensely gregarious or as intensely misanthropic - as he himself put it - Tchaikovsky loved to escape Moscow to live the dacha-country-life while working, but isolation, the low chances of visitors who were pleasant company, perhaps, lend this music the truth of a well-understood loneliness.  The style of interplay between right and left hand, canons, imitations and appogiatura, cause it to be akin to the outer sections of a Chopin Nocturne.  Its mood remains not so much lighter as less untreatable with life.  There is no middle section in terms of fresh contrast, but the long melody gives the illusion of it before a second statement and dying fall.

Track Three:  October - Autumn Song, Number 10 0f Tchaikovsky’s Seasons. 

 

A work for male voices, brass and percussion, Gustav Holst’s setting of the American poet Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem was written in 1914.  Holst, a lifelong socialist and pacifist, had none of the pro-War hysteria of the British Establishment and people.  Swedish by descent, and born and brought up in Cheltenham, his family name was von Holst; he was belatedly forced to drop the ‘von’!

 

In this work, he foresaw the breaking of hearts by the unremitting energy and stoicism that a long industrial War demands of the humans who work machines of death and destruction.  A slow march, Dirge prefigures the music of Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age, and seems as if shattered by the turmoil and brutal cruelty of Mars, The Bringer of War.   Beginning with voices only, trumpets hector, trombones - Holst’s own instrument - plod on more or less in harmony, hushed or loud as the text is followed; at times, the trombones are uppermost in dynamics, at others, just there in dryness, until silenced for a few bars shortly before the close as deepest feeling is disclosed; when they pick up again, as if the procession had been halted for a second by some casual, unforeseen obstacle, it is to die away quickly in the distance.  It is a ghastly vision of a march such as fresh formations saw on roads behind the reserve trenches as old hands on rest came away.  Holst was forty at the outbreak of War, and was old enough to see no armed service - though his friend Vaughan Williams, two years older, served as an ambulance-man, then an artillery officer.  Eventually he found himself far from home organizing YM CA concerts for the troops in Salonika.  The poem instances the funeral of two soldiers, a father and son killed in the same attack; the poet watches the passing of the procession to the new-made grave; the sabbath sun completed, the moon rises.  The dead veterans have the dignified circumstance of their military funeral and the moon, the poet, the sight and sound of it all, and their heroism.  It should be noted that the moon is traditionally a symbol of madness and object of hopeless wishes.  The father and son killed together is proof of faith and national unity, or a prodigy affording the nation a symbol of national disaster.  Is there a future where father and son die side-by-side in the same slaughter?  Is it only defiance of humanity’s self-generated fate?

Track Four:  Holst:  A Dirge For Two Veterans

 

The Gloustershire poet-composer, Ivor Gurney, Ivor Beegy as he called himself to close friends, should be remembered.  He returned from the Great War on a half-pension because though disturbed and suffering from possible shellshock in addition to the effects of gassing, he had had a spell of neurasthenia whilst a student, before serving for a year on the Western Front.  That they had taken him on as a Private in spite of this and that he had exhibited no signs of strain on active service could be of no account.  That he survived service may have been down to having a sympathetic officer:  in one of his many poems about his War, he described how after seeing a favourite NCO mown down on a night-attack,  he refused an order to advance under fire:           

 “But I weak, hungry, and willing
                       only for the chance          

 Of line - to fight in the line,
             laydown under unbroken         
 Wires, and saw the flashes
                    and kept unshaken,
 Till the politest voice, a finicking
                                    accent, said,
 "Do you think you could crawl
            through there:  there’s a hole.”
  Darkness shot-at:  I smiled, as
                                 politely replied,
  "I’m afraid not, sir.”  There was no
                        hole no way to be seen
  Nothing but chance of death,
             after tearing of clothes.”  

 

His skin was more important to him than his uniform, but his uniform was up there, very likely with tea and tobacco.

His life after service was erratic but productive of poetry and music that took until long after his death in an asylum to collate, edit and publish.  Most of his music remains unpublished and unplayed.  For now, his songs are his chief glory.

October the Twenty-first is the anniversary of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, another Autumn celebration. Gurney’s The Night of Trafalgar is a pre-War ballad, a setting of a poem from Hardy’s Dynasts. 

Gurney longed for popularity in a time when good and sometimes bad Art-songs sold well to amateurs as well as professionals in this country.  Of course, it was not to be, though this strophic song has enough echoes of Stanford’s Drake’s Drum, amid its general Gurneyesque of melodic and harmonic vagaries, to seem a good try.  Inspired by Stanford?  A man who had grown up in Gloucester of the Eighteen Nineties and turn of the last century felt that he had the sea in his blood, and as a youngster, Gurney had turned up at the RCM in his blue reefer jacket and often wished to go to sea.

Track Five:  Gurney:  The Night of Trafalgar 

 

November The Fifth, Firework Night, Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Night to those who think it a good old traditional British custom to celebrate a King’s survival by burning a Catholic who has already been hanged, drawn and quartered - perhaps it is.In this country, Handel’s Music For The Royal Fireworks has always been popular, witness the large range of long-playing records once issued with the Water Music on one side and Fireworks Music on the other.  A very responsible custom that; so long as Side B remained dry, we could have fun.  It was all rather like British fireworks on a British November evening, in fact.The Music for The Royal Fireworks was written for our second Hanoverian Monarch, George The Second, a military man, he had very little time for music or professional musicians.  Reputedly, he disliked violins and stringed instruments as a race.  For him, brass, woodwind and percussion were music. The Royal Fireworks takes the form of a French Suite scored for a band that was found acceptable to His Majesty, heavy on brass and percussion, light on the strings.

Here is the brisk and brassy La Rejouissance.

Track Six:  Handel:  Music For The Royal Fireworks

 

Gerald Finzi (1901-56) was a minor composer who never wrote a less than considered or less than considerable note. 

His music came from deep within him, and projects might take him years of quietness puntuated by flashes of inspiration to complete.  This does not explain why he was known as Frenzy to his friends.  He was perennially aware of lost time, his childhood and early youth having been punctuated by family tragedies and the Great War, in which his most admired teacher, Ernest Farrar, was killed and the artist whom he later idolized, Ivor Gurney, was maimed. in mind.

Finzi waited as his songs ripened: the piano-part was secondary, the scansion of the poem that he set most important; words were set syllable by syllable with at all times a natural stress, the tune arising having to be grateful to sing.

That he could do this to Hardy’s at the same time dense and loose-woven poetry is a wonder in itself.  As it was, the concrete details and crack-jaw abstractedness in this verse, not to mention the thorough use of dislocated rhythm or enjambment never defeated him.  What results isn’t modern, but it is new when you first hear it, and each time you listen, you find it remains, if not new, then still beautiful - and pure Hardy and Finzi.

From the Hardy Cycle, A Young Man’s Exhortation, a cycle that follows an idealist from youth to his lying peacefully in the grave under the yellowing trees, here is the sixth of ten songs, Shortening Days.  The first fire since the Summer is lighted.

Track Seven:  Finzi, From A Young Man’s Exhortation, Shortening Days

 

The air of the English Autumn is nowhere better described in music than in Finzi’s orchestral piece, The Fall of The Leaf, the full-score of which was left  incomplete at his death, having been begun decades earlier.  Recast more than once, it had been envisaged as a movement in a Symphony.  It is of that order but in some way programmatic in sound:  from the tremulous opening, in which flute - hollowly cold - and oboe warm as if more from the heart, it seems that The Fall of The Leaf is a fine title.  The brassy climaxes, of which there are two, with surging strings are of life or the chill wind in which man’s mortality is felt so keenly and so often in the course of one’s years.  The scoring is magnificent in its use of the tone-colours of flute and oboe in particular, consolatory, together, almost speaking as well as singing; the hesitant strings are yet passionate - the violins given brief chances for lyricism; in certain hollowed-out moments – heavy pizzicati in the lower strings, brief figures in high and then low woodwind and swelling, warning sounds from the horns, out of which comes violin-protest that is dashed by momentary metal percussion and downward scales, there are hints of the style of another composer, Sir Arthur Bliss, who was a friend and Finzi’s opposite in general temperament and personal confidence, an out-going, much-commissioned composer of large-scale works. 

There is much use of brittle, clashing harmony, grinding appogiaturas as well as tiny motifs like birdcalls and with little support.  The dissonance of the two climaxes is mastered by unisons as inflexible as the discords under them, and if the underlying song shape is regathered after the first, after the second, flute and oboe are reunited in a new theme and orchestral dying fall - the music of the very opening returning on low woodwind, clarinet and bassoon. 

Let’s end with Finzi’s Orchestral Elegy, The Fall of The Leaf.

This was Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.  I hope you enjoyed this programme and I’ll have your company again, soon.

Track Eight: Finzi:  The Fall of The Leaf, Elegy for Orchestra