13-14th July

The 99th Anniversary of the opening of the Somme Campaign fell on the 1st of July 2013.  Our programme, repeated this weekend, tells the story of one recruit in Kitchener's Army, a Manchester Pal, Herbert Ingoe, who went 'over the top' with men of the 18th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and of other units at 7.30am on that fateful day.




Classical Break “Somme”

 

                 Two Sonnets Of Remembrance

 

                    (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.  Goodness lived on in the companionship of men who may gradually have come to find a new faith in one-another, whether it could bring them through or not...

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.  This is about a naval exercise held off the Dorset coast, but the bombardments on the Western Front must have aroused similar feelings to the poet's when heard in London and on the South-East Coast.

 

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 somehow found time to search for him, 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 eight 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.  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)

6 & 7 July

The Agony and The Ecstasy

Signature Tune:  The Path of The Beloved from the Suite Rakastava (Op14), Sibelius

This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM. Today’s programme consists of music from the 1965 feature film, The Agony and The Ecstasy. This Hollywood epic, Directed by Carol Reed and starring Charlton Heston, and Rex Harrison, Diane Cilento and Aldofo Celi, may seem an odd place in which to find music for a classical music-slot, but in fact the score of the main part of the picture, by Alex North and Alexander Courage, is a fascinating attempt to meld music of the renaissance with a Respighi-like pictorialism that suits fully a cinemascope keeping, the vivid colours and vibrant imagery of a film from the mid-‘60s. 

Alex North was the second most nominated film composer In Hollywood and received an honorary award In recognition of his brilliant artistry.  He provided music for films As various as Spartacus, Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dragonslayer and Good Morning Vietnam. 

He was nominated for an Oscar for The Agony and The Ecstasy in 1966.  In this film, location-work and studio-shot scenes are beautifully lit, a world of rich vestures and palaces, glinting armour and weaponry, bright banners and desolate, smoking scenes of military defeat, all captured in their gentility and horror. In dark interior scenes of chapel and tavern or in front of the vibrant, living frescoes of art and theocratic politics, there glowers the gaunt, paint-spattered figure of Michelangelo Buonarotti – the driven artist forced by Papal commission to break the habit of a lifetime and paint a ceiling with ‘appropriate designs’. The warrior-Pope, Julius the 2nd suffers, too: “Michelangelo, when will you make an end!” - “When I am finished!” and there is a danger that between showing that the Pope is driven also, in his case, to hold together the Catholic Church in a country of duchies and Europe beyond, and that Michelangelo has to suffer and be impossible with authority to paint like one inspired, the film earns another title, “The Mahogany and The Hickory - Or How The Sistine Chapel Gained A Ceiling (In The End)”.

Nevertheless, there is the score, in whose brilliance and half-tones the story of transcendent Art is most truly told through the use of Romantic organ and bells, brash handling of brass and side-drums, bucolic, courtly and agonized use of woodwind in weak register, moments of veil-like expectancy or surge at height and plod de profundis of strings. Snatches from mediaeval pipe-music, a martial galliard here, pastiche of consort- or choral music there, a Shostakovich-like angularity and lacerating implacability of line, chantlike melody and chromaticism that both hark back to Cesar Franck through the Gregorian Respighi; leading motives to represent characters or states of mind are also heard, a common thing in film-scores: with an incredibly wide range of musical influences, Alex North and his assistant, Alexander Courage, wrote a masterpiece expressive of the suffering and isolation of the true artist.  Here is the first cue: a scene in a precipitous marble quarry, The Mountains of Carrara.

Track One: The Mountains of Carrara

The second cue accompanies pastoral scenes (two piping oboes – oboes d’amour – and cor anglais in imitational piffero style) suddenly broken in on by skirmish:  relentlessly rhythmical cavalry pursue infantry into a maize-crop – slaughter ensues; by far the most of the music occurs to denote victory - the leader of the cavalry is soon revealed to be Julius the 2nd as he takes off his helmet and assumes his calot and white mantle.  Here occurs the in fact anachronistic reference to a galliard, ‘La Bataille’, from the Danserye of Tielman Susato.

The Warrior-Pope.

Track Two: The Warrior Pope

The Florentine family, the Medici, have been Buonarotti’s longest-serving patrons. Cardinal Giovanni de Medici and the Contessina De Medici, his sister, have won Buonarotti a commission to build Julius’s tomb; now, the Pope wishes the artist to paint images of the twelve apostles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Buonarotti is a sculptor, and has scruples... So the adventure begins. The Medicis – a pastiche consort flute-and-strings number written by Alexander Courage - the flute closely attended by imitational figures.

Track Three: The Medici

In deep, brooding music, combining the Gregorian influence with that of what sounds like the Fifth Symphony slow movement of Shostakovich, work begins on scaffolding high in the vaults of the roof of the decayed chapel:  The Sketch of The Apostles.  New plaster is smoothed on. Outlines are laid.  Paint is applied...

Track Four: The Sketch of The Apostles

The Artist is dissatisfied with his commission. The faces of ordinary persons make the best faces for Apostles; nothing formal will do. Sketch Destroyed accompanies strokes of an adze and a flung bucket of red paint...

Track Five: Sketch Destroyed

Having fled and been pursued into the mountains of Carrara, Buonarotti has a vision of God and Adam in the clouds at dawn... There is a growling sonority to the quiet grandeur that, mollified, becomes alternately ethereal and more full-throated and ends terse, staggering, brazen and percussive...

Genesis!

Track Six: Genesis

Having successfully presented plans to the literally embattled pope... there follows The Return to The Sistine Chapel. Now, more than 300 figures must be painted, including seven OT prophets, five sybils, nine stories from Genesis, portraits of the great figures in Christ’s lineage and four scenes from the OT.

Track Seven: The Sistine Chapel

All begins with the quietly anxious cue, Painting!

Track Eight: Painting

Hours of working to all hours with toxic paint inches from his face, lack of rest and forgetting meals, and the necessity of shouting or sighing, “When I am finished,” or disputing  aesthetics and morals with cardinals brought in to witness progress, lead to The Agony, as Buonarotti working on alone at night by the light of a candle-stub suffers loss of sight, attempts to move down the scaffolding, falls clutching onto a rope and is swiftly let down onto the floor of the chapel, unconscious and in a fever. The music follows this quickly growing disaster with highly effective use of instrumentation, the growling bassoon particularly sinister.

Track Nine: The Agony

Michelangelo recovers in the care of the Contessina de Medici. This is another of Alexander Courage’s contribution, another consort-piece, like a pavane. Michelangelo’s Recovery.

Track Ten: Michelangelo’s Recovery

Again, haunted by the Susato Galliard, the Pope returns to Rome in brassy triumph. Festivity In St Peter’s Square.

Track Eleven: Festivity In St Peter’s Square

In the evening, Julius visits the recuperating Michelangelo to release him from his contract... Raphael may complete the ceiling...

Julius In The Garden.

Track Twelve: Julius In The Garden

Back at work... This time, progress is suddenly suspended as Michelangelo arrives in the chapel to discover workmen are dismantling the scaffolding...

Track Thirteen: Back To St Peter’s

The Pope and Michelangelo have come to a parting of the ways over the Pope’s desire to show the ceiling half-finished. Julius must go to war again – his enemies in Italy regrouping and victorious – without knowing if he will live to return or be able to see the ceiling completed. Brazenness is moderate in the music, the imploring strings bringing a feeling of pathos above side-drums and intermittent low brass.

Woodwind and low brass prefigure the next cue.

The War.

Track Fourteen: The War

Michelangelo seeks reconciliation with Julius on the battlefield... Julius’ military defeat inspires some of the best moments of the entire score – jagged, hollow horn, trombone and muted trumpet fanfares of desolation; the imploring tone returns in strings, answered by the implacability of deep-toned brass and woodwind.

Track Fifteen: The Battlefield

To brief, bright fanfares, the grievously-wounded Julius creates a new cardinal for a fee sufficient to permit Michelangelo to complete the ceiling... Michelangelo returns to work, and the tattered remnants of the pontiff’s army are portrayed on their blood and dust-stained horse and cart-borne journey to Rome. New Cardinal.

Track Sixteen: New Cardinal

Back in Rome, Julius, though reacquainted with the wonderful ceiling, soon lies close to death: only to be angered into rising from his bed by Michelangelo, who proposes to return to Florence with the ceiling incomplete! 

The Pope’s allies in Europe have gathered and defeated his enemies. The official soundtrack CD takes up the story with a mass celebrating victory and the completion of the ceiling... The finish has been hard-earned.

Track Seventeen: Michelangelo’s Magnificent Achievement – and Finale

In an affecting final scene, after the congregation and church staff have left, Julius tells Michelangelo what the ceiling means to him.  Commissioning it may be what he is remembered for; before the Seat of Judgement, he will present it as something to be placed in the balance; it may shorten his time in Purgatory.  Asked what he has learned, the artist says, “That I am not alone.” He refuses a further commission for an altar-piece fresco of The Judgement:  he was promised that he could go back to his interrupted work on the tomb; Julius admits that there is need of the tomb.  They part: Michelangelo is left to watch the Pope’s faltering progress from the body of the chapel. To Work My Son.

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was written by Mike Burrows. We hope you enjoyed it and that you will join us again soon. Goodbye!

Track Eighteen: To Work, My Son

29 & 30 June

Another chance to hear this programme from June 2012!

CB  Cooler

Track 1: Sicilienne, Paradis

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

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

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

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

Track 2:  Prelude in D-Flat, Ivor Gurney  

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

Track 3:  Genevieve Waltz, Adler 

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

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

Track 4:  Faulte d’argent, Willaert

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

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

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

Track 6 :  Fantasia in C Minor, John Jenkins

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

Track 7:  Song of The Seashell, Yashima

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

Tracks 8-10:  Variations On A Memory, Eustacio 

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

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

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

Track 11:  Shave The Donkey, Trad  

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

Track 12:  Sleep, Gurney

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

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

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

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

Track 14:  Andalucia, Granados

©  Mike Burrows 06/12