7 & 8 June

CB  America IV

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

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

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

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

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

Track 2:  The Ostrich Walk, LaRocca

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

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

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

Track Three:  Dr Jazz, Oliver

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

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

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

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

Track Five:  March in A, Archishman Ghosh

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

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

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

Track 8: Menuet Rococo, Huss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Track 12:  From The Steeples and The Mountains, Ives   

May 31 - June1

CB America - programme one 
(rpt from 2013)

Intro:  Fanfare For The Common Man: Copeland   

Hello.  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.

Aaron Copeland

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 Giant 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.  

John Williams

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 triangle or 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

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.

John Antes

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

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.

Charles Ives

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, hymns or popular tunes such as Hail Columbia, Dixie and Turkey In The Straw – or, indeed, ragtime - provided this intensely patriotic liberal Democrat with raw material, sentimental value, for reworking in context.  Here is one of his eerier works, Hanover 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 – hymns were another of Ives’ New England inheritance - 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:  Hanover St North: Charles Ives
 

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 he fifty States.  With the growth of the railways from Atlantic to Pacific and North to South, mass-ducation 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.

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.  

Charles T Griffes

 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

Next, let’s hear a piece by another maverick, Henry Cowell (1897-1965). 
  

Henry Cowell

 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 

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.  

Scott Joplin

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 

Another black musician:  the violinist, composer and arranger of Negro music, HT 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 T Burleigh

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: Arr. HT Burleigh

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.

Bernard Herrmann

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!

Track 12:  Swing Your Partners, The Devil and Daniel Webster: Herrmann

CB Gloucestershire 24 & 25 May

CB Gloucestershire

 A Bit From My Gloucestershire Rhapsody

The trees talked it, and horses, went trampling by.

There is no end to glory when blood is high,

And we that are Gloucester’s own, since She has gracious grown

Will take a day of April as it is meant in mind.

Cotswold called an infinite love from the deeps

Of Her – Severn remembered the galley sweeps;

Thought Dane – as Cotswold Roman – and lifted Her whole

Soul to the day; all the history and gossip keeps

She heard in twenty centuries of change, and strange people.

March with Her wind, which might be great, is kept friend;

For one day man is allowed equality, and/of/godlike mind

Comrade with March and Cotswold – Severn broadening

                                                                           all-grand.

All love from all memory called out – Beethoven, Belloc,

The Lament Song – and watching the scarred hills, “Puck

Of Pooks Hill” – and my own music surging up and up.

                 Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), from Best Poems

This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM.  Today’s programme presents two orchestral works by two composers from Gloucestershire:  Gustav Holst’s early work, the Cotswolds Symphony – later disowned by him – and The Gloucestershire Rhapsody.   Neither of these works represented a landmark in British music at the time of their reception, and only one of them was publically performed. 

 The Symphony in F Major, ‘The Cotswolds’,  dates from the end of the 19^th Century, the years 1899-1900; the then Gustav von Holst began it the year after leaving the Royal College of Music, at about

the time that he was writing the Wagnerish Walt Whitman Overture and Winter Idyll, filled with plans, though mainly vocal and operatic, and ruefully aware of the three influences on him, Mendelssohn, Grieg and Wagner.  He was also studying Sanskrit and Indian mythology; his theosophist step-mother being influential.  The transformation from Holst the student into Holst the artist was under way. He was born and brought-up  in Cheltenham, educated at Pate’s Grammar School for Boys, and loved the Gloucestershire Cotswolds-area, with its complex-curved hills and oddly secretive valleys; the bluffs of the hills rise above Cheltenham, sheep and agrarian country with added woods, rocky limestone outcrops, such as the Devil’s Chimney at Leckhampton, tiny local stone-built villages and hamlets, and wildness.  Country fairs take place in larger towns, and yet are a part of the lonely lives and comraderie on one farm – and wider friendships in pubs – of the local people.  In his late teens, he had served as church organist and choir-master at Wyck Rissington and Bourton-on-the-Water, respectively.

The first movement of the Symphony is all too brief, Allegro Con Brio, more like a voluntary for orchestra than a first movement as taught by Professors Stanford or Parry (Holst was one of Stanford’s boys).  F Major is a bright key, held to be evocative of nature:  Holst proves that other keys are bright and evocative by unusual tonal vagrancy, though the harmonies are quite clear and pleasant.  Beginning with a brazen fanfare, this piece is fresh and highly attractive in its mixed scoring, which is effective in all sections, favouring trumpets, higher woodwind and violins; its brief, Parryesque, therefore mildly 18^th Century first subject is robust and a little (attractively), crabbed and stubborn, but active and purposeful; the second is melting, sweet in the style of Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov, airy and with nagging pendants that heighten its happy pathos.  The development is brief-to-unnoticeable, but neat, and refuses to become bogged-down in the hectoring scrabble that often passed for symphonic argument at the time. 

One guesses that Stanford, a hard task-master as Professor of Composition, had left, and had not left, his mark on the frail but innovative and determined Holst, just as he was to do on Ivor Gurney (who referred to his teacher as “that python!”).  Contemporary critical opinion was that the First Movement was the work’s weakest.

 Track 1:  Symphony in F Major, “The Cotswolds”: Allegro con brio, Holst

The mournful slow movement, Elegy (InMemoriam William Morris): Molto Adagio, may explain the Classical brevity and liveliness of the first.  In B Minor, it is in Stanford’s commemorative or symphonic vein, a slow march with pauses and asides that allow for llittle relief.  The brass and lower woodwind are heroic, the violins sighing and sliding in ornamentation.  All is as tightly packed and shaped as in a Brahms symphony, not over-repetitive, but its 8.35 minutes do impose; possibly the movement is too grave and powerful in its place in the scheme of this Symphony.  Holst, a lifelong Socialist, had had deep feelings for the head of the Arts and Crafts movement. He had heard Morris speak.  The Molto Adagio has led an independent life in the concert-hall.   With a different title, it might do duty as a superb War Elegy.  Cheltenham is a military town – officers of the Indian Army and civil servants of the Raj-administration settled there for the waters of the spa, and the Gloucestershire Regiment had had a long and fine career in the service of the Empire, losing many good men in the course of its expansion.  The War in South Africa was a nightmare to Imperialist and Socialist alike, the loss of volunteer soldiers to death, serious injury and, overwhelmingly, disease, sharpened people’s concern at the international disgust with which this cruel and foolish war caused the world’s other powers to regard Great Britain.  The movement ends smoulderingly, as it began. 

Track 2:  ll, Molto Adagio

The Scherzo  in D and B-flat, returns us to the bluff bucolic style of the first movement.  As at least one commentator has written, it is like a fairground-scene.  Actually, for once, one can accept this kind of idea.   It teems with detail, syncopations, changes of emphasis; the trio adds a tone of intimacy or transcendence to the presence almost everywhere of barkers and murmurous or clamorous  crowds dawdling, riding or playing, and music courtesy of musicians or steam  - the eye is on a pair of eyes, or the cloudy-blue sky above bunting, tents and gaudy roundabouts.  Holst met his wife at meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, but it’s tempting to read the couple into any picture of fairs and easy enjoyment of life, particularly after a tortured Adagio Molto.   The movement nips back to D by the close.

Track 3: lll Scherzo

The finale, in the Symphony’s home-key, is marked Allegro Moderato.  It is happy-go-lucky, Holst’s manner brassy,  suggesting assurance and rightful expectancy of the future – of an infinity of hope and joy in life.  His counterpoint and scoring are British Symphonism of the 1880s and 90s, striding out a little coloured by Wagner, but new in practical terseness and spare contrasts.  There is strenuousness, the rhythms are a little square, the brass insistent, but optimism prevails without too much forcing of the issue.  Rationed cymbals add a requisite touch of high-spiritedness.  The music is strong but has its feet firmly on the ground. 

 Track 4: lV Allegro Moderato

During Holst’s lifetime, the Cotswolds Symphony was performed once in full, by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, conducted by the redoubtable Dan Godfrey, in 1902. 

The period from 1918-1922 was, in the life of the composer-poet, Ivor Gurney – who, pace his latest champions, did not love the War - one of the most exciting to be read about for its record of artistic achievements  against the odds and in the face of fairly arrogant and obtuse middle-class appreciation of our own “Schubert” – as Parry – squire of Highnam, just outside Gloucester - called him...  In March, 1919, he wrote to a friend that what with sketches of a Gloucestershire Rhapsody and other musical tasks (including the writing of a symphony), his  life wasn’t worth living!  There was nothing else on hand, save songs, a mass and string quartet, and a piece for violin and piano...

Ivor Gurney's colourful Gloucestershire Rhapsody was  a work of love, following on from his despairing last days as a number in Kitchener’s army.  In it surges the tidal  Severn, as the superfine nervous (and chromatic) system of Scriabin's strings and woodwind and Straussian harmony, soaring violins and burnished brass – a three-note trumpet call seems to have come straight straight from Also Sprach Zarathustra  - mesh with a further weave of British influences.  A recurring grand passage in full orchestra begins in the world of Parry’s Jerusalem, joins with an evocation of Elgar’s

Coronation March, to meet an upward leap that seems to suggest that Gurney may have known Herbert Hamilton Harty’s fine vocal and orchestral setting of Ode To A Nightingale, the climactic spirit of Holst's early Cotswold Symphony (and oompah-bass processionals of later), and Stanford's Brahms-influenced rhapsodic manner... 

The result is yet 100% Gurney, the Gurney of withdrawal from the world into contemplation perhaps of a clay shard or coin found amid the red-brown clods of a ploughed field, or of Sirius during a nightwalk in the hills, but also the Gurney of county fairs, football matches, the Gloucester Regiment in which, even as the convinced Socialist that he became, he was proud to serve, and the society of farm-  and dock-labourers, river- and fisher-folk - a Gloucestershire of the British Empire.  The sudden, mysterious hushes of the Severn plain or Cotswolds are there - moments when one stands on the hills above Cheltenham or by the Severn at Framilode, Saul or Frampton - where willows waft grey-green locks of glaring-backed leaves,and the weighty river feels its own length surprisingly little:  Gurney’s ghost may be with one.  Alto woodwind have a magical descending snatch that seems wood-magic in itself – the sighing response has what may be Straussian sixths and doubling of violins.  Possibly the ‘Moglio’ episode in Elgar’s Concert Overture: In The South – Alassio influenced Gurney.  Later on, there's a little, plodding tune on alto woodwind, to strummed accompaniment that may remind one (very slightly) of an old French Carol or song!  It seems mediaeval, and of course Gurney’s sense of history was profound.  As a Gloucester chorister and apprentice organist, he must have performed much church-music of long tradition.  The development of the tune is predictably lovely in all aspects.  

On the other hand, the Rhapsody has a more extroverted side that seems almost to invoke Georgian bandstand-music.  One trumpets-and-drums passage may seem like a march of adolescence in Summer or Autumn:  Gurney and his friend, the poet,  Will Harvey, arm-in-arm and singing preposterously on a country lane.  The finale of the Cotswolds Symphony seems evoked at the grand close, but the Cotswolds Symphony isn't in it!  The Also Sprach Zarathustra fanfare is almost like a glorified  bugle-call - Lights Out – here (significant, that).  The final chords are quite definite, yet peculiarly unbrassy and austere, almost classical in weight of tone. 

Track 5:  The Gloucestershire Rhapsody, Gurney

That was the Gloucestershire Rhapsody by Ivor Gurney:  a lovely, consequential, yet fantastic piece,  beautifully-scored, with all the light and shade and sense of history that one finds in the embowering Cotswolds and on the lonelier, bleaker Severn Plain... Not Elgar, not Delius, not Vaughan Williams, nor Howells. The Elgarian phrase nags at one - Coronation March? The Young Olaf motif from Scenes From The Life of King Olaf seems closer...  Or possibly a moment from the partly Gloucestershire-based Falstaff .   One hardly expected to hear a rhapsody on the scale of, and written with as much skill as, a Bax tone-poem, from the pen of a composer once thought to be only a miniaturist of the piano and a songwriter. ... And no, it's not remotely like Bax, either.  But Gurney knew from where the word rhapsody was derived: in the ancient Greek, a rhapsode is an epic poet or bard.  A speaker for a nation – or county!  In his vocabulary, a rhapsody was not a japed-up orchestral medley of popular songs!  Gurney hoped for far more than fame; he wanted to live to see Socialism flourish in Britain.  He died in an asylum.

As he lay dying from tuberculosis in late 1937, a parcel of recognitions – including a number of the magazine, Music and Letters, that contained an appreciative article on his work – arrived for him.  It was handed over, he struggled to open it; in moments, let it slip, and relapsed on the pillow:  “It’s too late,” he said. 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  We hope you enjoyed our programme of music by Gloucestershire composers, scripted by Mike Burrows.  We leave you with the War Elegy by Ivor Gurney.  Goodbye.

Track 6:  War Elegy, Gurney