6 & & July "Butterworth"

CBButterworth

This is Classical Break on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme, written and researched by

Mike Burrows, is a tribute to

the composer, George Butterworth.

George Sainton Kaye Butterworth was born

in 1885, the son

of a lawyer and managing-director

on the railways, and died as

an Acting Captain in the Durham Light

Infantry during the Battle of the

Somme. At about dawn, in August

1916, leading his company in

A trench-digging

action near Pozieres he was killed

instantly by a sniper in a

moment of sleep-deprived unconcern for

his own safety.  As a soldier,

he had liked to lead from

the front; here, he had made

an elementary slip and raised his head too high. 

Posthumously awarded the Military Cross, he

lived up fully to what had

been expected of him and thus

to the example of his grandfather,

an army General.  Like many of

his contemporaries of the privileged middle-

classes, he died as a junior

officer fighting the Hun, his last

moments spent caught up in the

digging of a trench towards a

well-fortified enemy position amid the

blasted landscape of a sector of

the Western Front, his body never

recovered, his name added to the

famous Thiepval Monument to many of

those Allied troops who were killed

in France or Belgium between 1914

-18 and who have no known

grave.  The monument stands not far

from where he was killed.   At

the time, the earthwork in which

he fell became known as The

Butterworth Trench.

Let’s hear an arrangement of a

folksong arranged by him, one of

his 11 Sussex Folksongs, Roving In

The Dew.  He collected 3 versions

of this song himself, under the

title, Dabbling In The Dew, but

for this arrangement used a version

taken down by another researcher.  

Track 1 Dabbling In The Dew, Arr Butterworth 

It is doubtful that George Butterworth

ever had thoughts of living up

to his Grandfather’s example. Though an

Old Etonian and graduate of Trinity

College, Oxford and one who would

have regarded himself as the social

equal of most of the more

famous victims of the meatgrinder in

the teens of the last Century –

the first-rate Tennants, Grenfells, Asquiths

and Horners of this life - was

no conventional patriot, no Tory, no

euphuist in any aspect of existence. 

Whether learning or teaching music – he

taught piano at Radley, and formed

a choir there – he was an

artist of close mouth and practical

activity.  He was a physically strong,

man who smoked a straight Lovat

briar, grew the expected flourishing moustache

in answer to dark, bushy eyebrows

and tended to look as though

smiling at the eyes – lucent eyes

crinkled at the corners, the lower

lids subject to upward pressure from

his cheeks, humorous eyes, their humour

with a touch of irony or

scepticism, perhaps. 

They were also watchful eyes.  A

graduate in Classics, he attended the

Royal College of Music from 1910,

a late starter in the College’s

eyes  – though a composer from the

age of 9 - who knew where

he was going.  The courses disappointed

him, leading nowhere; he left after

a year.  At University, he had

been President of the Music Society,

noted as one who was

“impatient of humbug.” He had the

clearest ideas of form and harmony

and had made a study of

folk-music, becoming a staunch member

of Cecil Sharp’s Folksong Society.  He

had worked through the expected influences

of the day that wrecked the

work of lesser talents; Wagner left

his mark, possibly Grieg or Debussy

and possibly, at the outside, the

colourful and ingenious style of Slavic

instrumentation.  He remained the most analytical

and clearminded of critics, and certainly

cut through musical problems for that

late-developer, Vaughan Williams.  At the

end of an evening, he took

his pipe out of his mouth

to suggest in his “gruff, abrupt” manner

that Vaughan Williams write a 2^nd

Symphony, The London Symphony, and Vaughan

Williams dedicated it to him before

its premiere in 1913.   When Butterworth

died, Vaughan Williams felt as though

utterly bereft; there’s the matter of

his having volunteered for war-service

as an ambulance-driver but, in

time, changing his battlefield vocation to

become a Royal Artillery officer.  Perhaps

the death of Butterworth contributed to

this decision.

George would not have been impressed

by talk of his bravery in

encouraging his men – mostly hardbitten ex-

miners - to one more effort, or

by admiration of his Military Cross –

which only officers could win.   His

men loved him, but that would

have made the error seem all

the more stupid.   He would have

kicked himself for making the mistake

made by chivalrous idiots just posted

up from home, clever lads who

forgot to duck or who had

no idea how hard it were

to dodge the bullet of an

unseen assailant – the speed with which

death could be dealt in a

modern War in France.   

As a composer, George Butterworth’s work

has come down to us as

a proof of his technical ability

as well as pure expression; he

seems the most humane but poised

of artists, a man who, quite

possibly attained the very highest degree

of feeling and polish; not one

of his works appears blemished by

extraneous or awkward details or developments. 

They appear to have been distilled

and perfected by a musical magician. 

He must have destroyed volumes of

early pieces before leaving for France –

if not sooner.  His complete oeuvre

consists of four orchestral pieces, a

couple of single songs – one setting

Requiescat by Oscar Wilde after the

death of his own mother, three

song cycles – one based on poems

from Stevenson’s Songs of Travel, two

on the Shropshire Lad poems of

AE Housman, one on poems

by WE Henley, Love Blows

As The Wind Blows, a book

of arrangements of 11 Sussex folksongs .

a Suite For String Quartette

and – most famously – the ever-fresh

four orchestral pieces,  the Two English

Idylls of 1911, the Rhapsody:

A Shropshire Lad, (1912) and

An Idyll:  The Banks of Green

Willow (1913).

The Folksong movement in English music

has been decried by modernists and

so-called internationalists ever since its

co-opted member-composers came to

fame.  Not one of the brilliant

minds who have pointed out that

the world of folksong nostalgically revived

was invalid as a form of

artistic expression because dead on its

feet even as it was obtruded

on the minds of sophisticated Rightwing

intellectuals, or just plain substanceless when

contrasted with industrial machine-reality, has

managed to extirpate the public’s love

of its Art-music.   The point

has so often been missed that

folksong-and-dance formed the musical

means of self-expression and

entertainment of ordinary people who did

not attend Public School or University 

or hire a suburban piano.  Ordinary

people toiled and died without mark

save birth, confirmation, marriage and funeral – unless

they attained the charge-sheet, or

entered the Workhouse.

Let’s hear the two English Idylls.

The first is based on three

folksongs:  Dabbling in The Dew, whose

subject is unsuccessful wooing, Just as

The Tide was Flowing, a story

of successful wooing and Henry Martin,

in which a man turns to

piracy on the high seas in

order to support his brothers!

Track 2:  English Idyll No 1, Butterworth 

Butterworth’s use of alto instruments is

a shading feature – voices we made

of oboe, clarinet, violas, cellos, horns,

trombones.  The light and freshness comes

from flute, harp, solo trumpet, violins. 

In rounding out the story how

effective his harp runs are.  The

bass is unobtrusive but mobile or

provides pedals of depth – a depth

of earth like firmness.  The interplay

of instrumentation is lively.  His use

of harmonics and mutes is as

breathtaking in its elemental scene setting

as is his sense of drama

and tragedy.  Full throated, his orchestra

is a formidable force from which

both Holst and Vaughan Williams and

many other composers learned, as the

deep earth settled on its perhaps

one time Wagnerist only begetter.  Constantly,

the blending of timbres is both

subtle and unerringly distinct.

In the English Idyll No 2,

the folksong is Phoebe and Her

Dark-eyed Sailor:  in it, a

girl encounters a sailor; he seeks

to win her; she refuses the

confident well-set up lad until

she suddenly realizes that he is

her betrothed who went to sea

and was thought to have drowned. 

He tried and made his fortune.

Track 3:  English Idyll No 2, Butterworth 

People had flocked from the poverty-

stricken land to the cities, where

pay was supposed survivable.  The cities

swelled with increasingly cheap labour with

predictable results. Thousands were killed young

by machines, dust or fibre-polluted

atmospheres and toxic agents, or by

a home-life best imagined from

the prints of contemporary artists.  The

workhouse – the being a charity-case –

was merely dreaded more than work

or a cholera- or typhoid epidemic.

No wonder many folksongs sing bittersweetly

or longingly of love, usually lost

love, betrayal, death or some other

form of separation, dalliances while going

or coming from somewhere, or sailors,

the season or life-occupation, the

possibility of making one’s fortune – with

plenty of fireside beer, warming spice

and baccy as well.  It has

to be remembered that at his

most utile (and, coincidentally virtuous), the

common man or woman was young,

fit, unmarried, politically submissive and an

abstainer from drinking, smoking and sexual

relations.  When rich enough to feed,

clothe and house children on one

wage, well, a man and woman

could marry, settle down and breed

fit young children of the same

make.  After all, at a higher

differential, this was how professionals not

of independent means ought to live,

to the glory of God and

Capital, and everyone knew what the

alternative was – to be a pauper

and expected to die.  Moral force was

with wealth and the employer; even

the established church, socially enmeshed with

the gentry and middleclasses, would not

or could not ameliorate the conditions

created by tyrannical Mammon, yet one

had to conform.

The conflicts in AE Housman’s

A Shropshire Lad are many; but

central to Butterworth’s probable view of

them would have been that between

living in the countryside or coming

to live and work in the

City, in London, as Housman had

done, and having to hide one’s

own very nature.  Facing up to

an inimical, godless universe of chance

and ill-fate, and to society’s

capacity for damning short-lived man’s

non-existent soul to cowering under

the threat of social disgrace and

even capital punishment as a criminal

was a peculiarly Victorian dilemma – particularly

after the trial of Oscar Wilde. 

The covertly homosexual Housman described himself

as an Epicurian, and Butterworth likewise

was no believer in the Christian

God, but both must have felt

themselves still to be swimming against

the tide of middleclass conventional religion,

politics and morality. Both loved the

countryside, the seasons, the general goodheartedness

of unsophisticated people.  The countryside and

country folk were still there, still

sang and danced in reaction to

life.  The beauty of Butterworth’s orchestral

evocation of Spring in the Rhapsody

is superfine from the opening on

string harmonics, but also as though

of Nature itself.  The woodwind, violins,

violas and cellos shade the music

to perfection, the brass affirmatory of

warmth, youthful happiness or dread fate. 

To judge from the use of

harmony, Butterworth’s study of music must

have included the works of Richard

Strauss.  I’d venture to suggest that

no Straussian nor expressionist composer achieved

a starker, harsher climax than that

of this piece in which vaulting

fanfare builds and is broken by

the tritone as in Sibelius.  A

moment of horror that stays with

one.  (The whole tone scale from

the harp at close may symbolize

death by drowning).  The day is

not saved by the Loveliest of

Trees motif that has opposed it,

all along, but by the phrase

of last line of the song. 

“To see the cherry hung with

snow.”  Butterworth’s modification, qualification or distortion

of song-themes is a brilliant

and original feature of his orchestral

work:  he develops them as might

a symphonist.  He searches out the

harmonic implication or resonance to the

last drachm (dram) or scruple.  The

harp’s rippling wholetone scale near the

end has been suggested to symbolize

a self-drowning.

The main theme of the Rhapsody,

by name, Loveliest of Trees, is

a folksong that was in fact

entirely Butterworth’s own.  In its original

form, it is the first song

in his first cycle of Shropshire

Lad settings.  He ventriloquized Housman’s and

Great Britain’s Lad in a song

indistinguishable from those that move by

every means but the intentional.  To

adapt Wilfred Owen, the poetry of

the art-musician inspired by folksong

is in the pity.  No wonder

the soldiers of his company thought so well of him.

In Butterworth’s music it is never,

to use the Masefield couplet, “The

smoke of…farms lifts blue in

air/As though man’s passionate mind

had never suffered there.”

Track 4:  Rhapsody – A Shropshire Lad, Butterworth 

Turn to 1913 and another

orchestral Idyll, The Banks of Green

Willow, based on two folksongs, the

first eponymous – a woman elopes with

a captain, believes that she will

die in childbirth and begs him

to throw her over the side –

and the second, Green Bushes, in

which a fickle maid finds a

new lover.

It’s interesting that every Butterworth orchestral

piece is in an arch construction: 

first, there is the proposition of

a beautiful tune and contrast material;

then, there is a vehement quasi-

development section; lastly, there is a

restatement of the opening material – long

drawn out, becoming hushed, fading into

a dying fall, almost unbearably poignant,

nostalgic, regretful but too touching not

to be consoling and unforgettable

Track 5:  The Banks of Green Willow, George Butterworth 

Perhaps folk-music survived even the

worst of the 19^th Century’s

murderous advancement of Feudal Capitalism as the

basis for a modern society, partly

thanks to the Folksong Society and

young composers from privileged, even landed,

backgrounds who bothered to listen and

hear; folk-music was popular self-

expression more real than music-hall

popular songs or polite villa-ballads

provided by paid hacks who might

have wished to write symphonies.  It

was national self-expression; it came

of the people, the nation rather

than its rulers – as glorified by

the latest in Art music-technique,

those, for one thing, who bothered

to note it down as played

or sung, not as taught by

the Brahmsian, Dvorakesque Professor Stanford.  Modal,

not diatonic, pentatonic folk-music could

be embellished by being played over

chromatic harmonies, subjected to direct strokes

of development, manipulation, transformation, even counterpoint –

and gain.  There was never the

intention to seem sophisticated.  Sophistication is

not a positive value – it means

capable of glib persuasiveness.  Not exactly

a desideratum in one who pays

tribute to the victims of the

19^th Century British holocaust who,

trapped and left with little or

no real comfort, leisure or notice

created the only natural, meaningful form

of music we had to distinguish

our artworks from superior European models.

Everyone, not the educated connoisseur, critic

or composer, owned folk-music – felt

its pathos or humour – often, its

defiant humour and unintentional pathos.  Socialists

might just look back to the

17^th Century and think of Commonwealth –

wealth held in common. Holst, Vaughan

Williams, Butterworth, Grainger, Moeran and many

others will not appeal to those

who think their music easy or

unpolitical.  Anyone with half an ear

for music will hear what their

music may mean – and find its

influence compelling, magical and inexhaustible, the

musical equivalent of a powerful poetic

tradition stretching back to Shakespeare or

even Chaucer – a bringing together of

the classes, a levelling process, a

voice for us all, harmonies for

our comedies and tragedies, our own

too-often oppressed and distracted lives.

Even if in the Nineteenth Century

the devil preached from holy scripture,

still, pace the hymn or parlour

song writers, he had almost none

of the best tunes. True feeling

was in the distinct lyrics, ballads

and dances of semi-literate and

self-taught musicians.  Ribald, raucous, insolent

or hail fellow, well-met, wistful,

grieving, seeking solace, folk tunes held

the truth of a materialistic, deeply

false and unspeakably cruel age that

had trashed earth and society for

resources and productivity, profit and power.

How heartrending that Acting Captain Butterworth failed

to duck.  Sometimes, it is hard

to see what he fought and

died for on the Somme.  His

music though is a glory of

his generation and our country and,

as the Great War was simply

one more huge atrocity of Industrialization,

capital and utility, his pieces of

lifelong-taken pains are made still

more poignantly beautiful – as well as

ironically bittersweet - by its being in

part his and his lost generation’s

unconscious memorial. 

How would his music have developed

if he had returned to it

after the Great War?  That is

unknowable; like Ivor Gurney, Butterworth was

his own man, his future tendencies

not to be predicted.  He left

one unfinished orchestral piece.  Fantasia.  He

left off work on the full-

-score in the early months of

1914.  No-one knows what

happened to the short-score.  The

work was completed not long ago

by Kriss Russman.  An eight-minute movement,

scored for larger orchestra than any

that Butterworth had used before –

but with no harp nor percussion! -

it makes for fascinated listening, though

always with the caveats that a

major composer’s ideas are his own

and subject to any change he

likes, and his final intentions are

not divined by editors or, as

in this case, a talented fellow-

composer who helps fragments across within

composition of his own.  It contains

a lovely hushed opening, a long

folksong-like theme that reminds one

of the Somerset Sheep-shearing Song;

motifs from Butterworth’s own orchestral pieces,

fragments of Loveliest of Trees and

folksong, The Banks of Green Willow. 

The first 3 minutes 45

seconds are Butterworth’s, ending

in a vivace marking and a

tune related to the melody he

used to set Housman’s poem, When

I was One-And-Twenty..  Russman begins:

passes back the running to the various

other motifs; the solo trumpet fanfares

twice in the course of a phase

uncertain in tone or atmosphere, yet

still holding the attention.

What happens next is a rejigging

at speed of the wholetone climax

of the Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad,

but then,  the Fantasia-material is brought

most movingly to a passionate, almost

Mahlerian unfolding of rich false relations

and enharmonic changes – wonderfully poignant, passionate

and compelling:  the main theme finds

its apotheosis in aspects of others.

The enlarged – even massive-sounding -scoring

favours bass and treble, with modulations coming

from within the alto-register.  Hair-raising.

The violins are supported in their

unison by sonorous brass and woodwind

harmonies.  It is an all-too-

short flight of inspiration, but Butterworth

himself was no chinless rhapsodist, but a

Laconian among British composers of his

time.  From there, the music dwindles

as though suddenly shy and elusive

after such loveliness.  Butterworth fades into

the shadows.  Folksong and dance, Tudor

church- or consort-music go with

him.  What should he have written?

Here, the coda is in all

senses inconclusive, something unprecedented in Butterworth’s

own work save in his having left

behind less than the torso of

a possibly great Fantasia…

Memories of the pieces heard

Earlier in the programme are rife

but welcome, and there is that very

likeable – but brief - hint of a dance-episode

that Butterworth as

a folk-dancer knew well how

to encompass.  Film exists of his 

demonstrating the steps for such a

dance!  Also, there are moments somewhat

akin to Copland’s Appalachian Spring…

This was Classical Break, on Somer

Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. 

Today’s programme was researched and written

by Mike Burrows.  We hope you

enjoyed it and will tune in

again soon.  We leave you with

Fantasia, sketched by Butterworth and “realized”

by Kriss Russman.  Goodbye!

Track 6:  Fantasia, Butterworth/Yates 

30-31 July - 'Richard'

Classical Break:  Richard: C20th British composers

Track 1:  Twelve Little Pieces For Violin and Piano, Preambule, Parry

Hullo.   This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Today’s programme, on British music was written and researched by Mike Burrows.  You have just heard The Preambule - To Gwen (Allegro) from Sir Hubert Parry’s Dvorak-tinged collection of Twelve Short Pieces For Violin And Piano of 1894.  Gwen was the younger of the forty-six years-old composer’s daughters.If calculated to please her, it must surely have succeeded! -  If it is a species of portrait, its hummable, out-of-doorsish but slightly distrait melody with odd asides shows Gwen in a very appealing light.

Now for an orchestral work of some topicality, thanks to recent events in a Leicester short-stay car-park....

The Shropshire-born composer, Edward German is remembered, if at all, for the faded comedy of light operas such as Merrie England and Tom Jones, but as an ambitious young man was highly successful in the field of Art-music - symphonies, overtures and orchestral music of a freshness and complexity admired by many colleagues, including Elgar.  Influenced by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and other non-Germanized continental lights, his style is one of contrasts, sombre fervency and lyrical grace, fleetness and strenuous, often sequential argument, seized-on triplets or other groupings of notes that sway backwards and forwards in the grip of drama, hushed passages and cymbal-capped points of tension.  The orchestration is bold but subtle in doublings.  Here is the Shakespearian Overture, Richard The Third.   

The fugal part of the development was subject to one of the Wagnerist George Bernard Shaw’s sillier shafts as a music-critic for the newspapers; he affected to think that  the fugal entries could have no other dramatic meaning than that numbers of little Richards  were leaping up from trapdoors to chase one-another around the stage.  In fact, this colourful and cogent Overture on the subject of Richard of York, brother of a king, magnate of the North, wicked usurper-uncle and last Plantagenet king, is more accomplished than the satire of German’s critic, to be seen as a character--study and curtain-raiser rather than a summary of the play.

Track 2:  Overture:  Richard The Third, German

Charles Wilfred Orr, born in Cheltenham, in 1893, the son of an Indian Army Captain of means, was educated until the age of fifteen at Cheltenham College, where the study of music was regarded as strictly extra-curricular.  After service in the Artists’ Rifles that saw him invalided out of the army with eczema before he could be posted to France, he cast around for a career until correspondence with Delius decided him on the profession of music.  He studied at the Guildhall School and seemed set on a life in London when ill-health enforced a return to Gloucestershire.  He moved to Painswick, where he lived a quiet life removed from metropolitan rivalries until his death in 1976.  His metier was song-writing, and every song has about it the quality of having been chosen out of personal necessity to express in musical terms the meaning found in the verses, the voice male, the piano unfolding strong but richly lyrical patterns in accompaniment and commentary.  Through Delius, Orr had met Peter Warlock, and the influence of Warlock - as of Warlock’s hero, Delius - on his work is clear. Chromaticism sighs under melodies shaped sensibly to the words set.  Rhythms rock gently throughout the more reflective examples, but monotony is avoided in matchless subtlety.  Here’s Orr’s setting of the Rossetti sonnet, a haunting evocation of Summer in the long grass, Silent Noon.  Written in 1921, it is very different from the famous, more numinous version by Vaughan Williams - soft, but not decadent, sensitive but fresh, sensuous but not cloyingly sensual.  Orr scoffed that the Vaughan Williams resembled too much a voluntary: one suspects that Warlock - instrumental in getting Orr’s song published - would have loved this haut-en-bas opinion on what Vaughan Williams himself would have thought love-music and nothing to do with church!  And perhaps Orr knew how to be on the right side of his friend’s satirical, anti--pastoral, anti-ecclesiastical streak.

Track 3:  Silent Noon, CW Orr

Three songs in contrasting moods by Gloucestershire’s finest song-writer, now.  Whilst a War-invalid in Edinburgh, Ivor Gurney, twenty-eight years old <actually twenty-seven,ed> fell in love with a nurse, Annie Nelson Drummond.  For a time he dreamed that he had found a soul-mate in this well--spoken, middle-class Edinburgh girl - she was actually a little older than he was - who showed interest in his abilities, as who wouldn’t!  He asked his sister to have his cap-badge gilded as a keepsake for her, and joked to a friend that Annie had money, something that he hadn’t known at first...  The romance fizzled out after he was discharged and posted to the shrammingly bleak depot at Seaton Delavel, on the Northeast coast, to prepare for a return to active service.  He was convinced that he wasn’t well, suffering from palpitations that he tried to steel himself against.  His father was sick with cancer of the stomach, and there seems to have been a séance held at which Gurney was present and perceived the spirit of Beethoven: -was this a practical joke got  up against him by mates who found him unworldly?  However unmaliciously the prank might have been intended, it would have destroyed his self-image as a scholar and artist capable of mucking in with the best.  What had his fellow-soldiers ever thought of him during his time with them, the men whom he had loved and those of them whom he mourned?  As to the true circumstances of the seance, during which Beethoven had favoured him, no-one will ever know.  (To add to the complexes arising, he came out of this strange meeting convinced that he was in telepathic communication with his father).  At any rate, just as all the cares of the world and soon-return to the Front were weighing on his shoulders, Miss Drummond ended an affair whose seriousness she may not entirely have realized, although Gurney was never less than forthright in relationships, ideation or cherished hopes. Four songs were written for this cool muse.  One of these, perhaps setting own words, is the beautiful, fey and verbally a little gauche Song of Silence.  Nothing more sweet and poignant has ever come of a hospital crush.

Track 4:  Song of Silence, Gurney

Our second song by Gurney is the irresistible Walking Song, setting  words by his friend, the poet from Minsterworth, FW Harvey, in delightful, throwaway manner fixing his love of his home-county and of the wooded hills outside Cheltenham, extolling Cranham ways, rather than the City!  Only the British can be so mildly riotous, and Gurney so wittily humorous?  As Principal at the RCM, Parry, whose music we heard at the outset of this programme, is said to have seen Gurney the entrance-candidate’s submitted manuscripts and been reminded of the hand of Schubert; seeing Gurney for the first time, he exclaimed, “Good God, it IS Schubert!”  Here’s Walking Song, by Ivor Gurney.

Track 5:  Walking Song , Gurney

For our third song by Gurney, here is Dreams of The Sea (words by WH Davies). In this smouldering, passionate piece, the lad who as a boy had lived not far from the exotic bustle of Commercial Road and port of Gloucester, expresses a love that never left him.  As a student in London, that lad wore habitually a reefer-jacket.  All his life, he admired sea-goers, explorers, wanderers over the oceans; his poetry shows what a gift he had for capturing the sea in all its moods - it matched him passion for passion and its salt depth and power as well as sight and sound entranced him (Baudelaire at Honfleur would’ve been one with him here) as invitation to a voyage.  If you have stood by the sea on a day of irresolute feeling that you projected onto the waves, you will sense every eidetic image in the intent vocal line and its various, yet mesmerizing harmonic and rhythmical piano-accompaniment. 

Track 6:  Dreams of The Sea, Gurney

Another graduate of the Royal College, For many years, Gustav Holst worked as music-teacher at the St Paul’s School For Girls in London, a perfect haven, this job, for a composer.  Amongst his most famous works were two sets of pieces for string orchestra, the St Paul’s Suite and Brook Green Suite, for performance by his pupils.  The second movement of the St Paul’s Suite, Ostinato, is highly characteristic of his technically brilliant but touchingly direct invention in these miniatures, as light as air, playful and wistful.  Perhaps he had the liveliness, hopes and unwitting poetry of the young girls in his charge in mind:  here, such qualities seem to be expressed in the flutter of textures, breathless harmonics and artlessness of the nursery rhyme-like melody.

Track 7:  St Paul’s Suite, Ostinato, Holst                                             

The opening flourishes - and a recurring motif of - Edward Gregson’s Symphonic Study for Brass Band, The Plantagenets owe something to the music for the wizard in Holst’s The Perfect Fool.  Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Symphony may be another ghost summoned up by play made with duple and triple rhythm.  Other moments later may remind of the dark chants and chomaticism of Ireland’s orchestral piece Legend.  To seek to express in musical material of adequate worth something of the character of England’s and Wales’ longest-reigning Royal dynasty in a single movement is a young man’s job, and Gregson was in his twenties when he wrote The Plantagenets.  A striding, all--purpose ‘swashbuckling’ theme is of its time - the 1970s - and less imposing, but soon broken up by cornet and trumpet fanfares and more lyrical strains based on ‘Holst’, slowed elements of the theme and ‘Ireland’.  The Holst flourish brings in a Waltonian fugato - reaching the gallop! -  and the reprise.  The close is curt, the bold bass-drum beats peremptory. This composer has rightly made a name for himself as a gifted and effective writer of brass-band music.

Track 8:  The Plantagenets, Gregson. 

To end our quodlibet, a work from the close of Sir Edward German’s composing life:  written for the Royal Academy of Music’s centenary in 1922 - the year in which Ivor Gurney was certified and removed to a mental hospital -  the Tone-picture for Orchestra, The Willow Song is a kind of developing fantasia on the old traditional song “A Poor Soul Sat Sighing’.  It represents something of a reaction against German’s ‘popular manner’, while retaining to the full his skills in orchestration, with varied use of woodwind and strings, including harp, and strong but controlled use of brass.  The falling fifth contained in the tune’s opening phrase becomes like a fate-motif.  The overall sound is recognizably German’s in the combination of instruments from different sections, particularly from strings and woodwind, and a sighing or soothing quality distantly Tchaikovskian but now more reminiscent of Elgar.  The Willow-song occurs in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello - Desdemona, the slandered young wife of the jealous moor sings it artlessly in her chamber shortly before he confronts and strangles her for her supposed infidelity.  As the fantasia dies away into a time more remote than Tchaikovsky or German’s hey-day, one wonders if this beautiful miniature is an obvious celebratory tribute to the college that he had attended as a young student. Its muted colours, intense atmosphere of grief and scarcely sublimated hurt are representative of a composer at the height of his powers, one who has won through to real vision and constructive skill, building on the objective donnée of a folk-song by an unknown author...  No bitterness, just hurt.    “To tell the truth, I’m afraid to write anymore, they would only laugh at me...”  “I die a disappointed man because my serious works have not been recognised...” 

This was Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham.  Our programme was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope you liked it and will join us again.

Goodbye!

Track Nine:  The Willow Song, German

Somme - 9 &10 July

for my great grandfather and great-uncle

Mike Burrows recites over

Track One:  Lament for String Orchestra, Frank Bridge

Ghosts - Remembrance



 A brown wave without break, ceaseless rocking

 Of arms, back and forth, and if wearier, legs –

The tramp of hobnailed boots crisper than they,

 If they think at all, can feel. Forward march.....

 The weight of their boots still works them along –

The command to halt never came to them.

 The horse-drawn batteries now plod with them,

 In place where place is found in swinging-on,

 No longer whipped up, no longer the pride

 Of polished God of Thunder all pause for,

 The gunners driving or sitting hunched-up -

 Though carried, reduced to the thrill of pride

 Of the Labour Corps or commissariat.

 Maybe, amid column, you catch the sight

 Of flashed stretcher-bearers without stretchers

 Or forms of where or how lost, or ambulances

 Whose drivers feel no drag of inertia

 Or beginning of the end of too much seen.

 All are in the army of the mud-subsumed,

 Yet move, and move on through old potential.

 If they think, and a collection of thoughts

 Amasses across the Battalions,

 The Regiments and Divisions of war,

 Peace never came; it will never now come,

 The endless paces and wheel-turns – God knows –

To Gehenna, clay's triumph of logiastics,

 Are taken, and somehow, death deals no hurt

 Except war – this war that never ended

 Lives on as shades. Through mud, one-bright badges

 Rust with rifles-barrels furred, breeches blocked,

 Bayonets that flashed out with the Summer

 Or Autumn or thinner sun of Winter

 Or Spring, shineless, as old in appearance

 As any Iron Age blade. The wire will not,

 They know now, be refitted into crown

 Of cap. It is Gorblimey now and always,

 Or Glengarry, colonial slouch hat –

Or tin hat disconsolately low in front.

 Can you look at their faces? Can you look

 Them in the hollow eye? Lean cheeks and jaws

 Shrunken in some famine you never knew,

 That consumed them for nation-heroism:

 They were the Grand-parents who never sat

 Dreaming or refusing ever to tell

 What could not be told...and they never joined

 Enemies you might see subdued like them,

 To one earthen colour. You see no peace

 In the dark glint of eyes in which, downcast,

 Is too plain the secret society

 Of gauging distances and flaming fear

 That seems almost to herald chance snipers,

 Mines and booby traps of the long-ago,

 That expects the unexpected in crumps,

 Whether live or dud. For peace never came,

 And now, they are made mute and billetless,

 Perhaps even haltless, for evermore.



 Copyright, Mike Burrows, 11/11/13



                 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 1st, 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

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, eight 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.  With him, were the Pals.

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

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 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.

Mike says:  A man related to me by blood was a Pal and killed at the age of twenty-four on the first day of a military operation of then-unprecedented magnitude.  Possibly the four hundred-and-eleventh volunteer to join the Eighteenth, once Third (Bantam) City or Service Battalion, C-Company, how calmly did Herbert walk up to death, one of nearly sixty thousand casualties, his life one of nineteen thousand lost outright?

When I was twenty-three, I was five feet-eight-and-a-half, weighed eleven stone, with a chest at full expansion of forty inches, capable of over two inches of expansion, and waist of thirty-two.  My vision was perfect in one eye and not to be bothered-with by officials in the other.  I would have been terribly scared to volunteer, and swept along into the Pals.  Anything to have so many Pals and the sense of a great cause.  I should have got through basic training with a few fizzers owing to bad drill, poor handling of equipment and my reluctance to do cross-country runs.  Sergeants would have liked me... 

A lot fitter, I’d’ve gone to France, savouring that rough crossing.  Once there, I’d’ve enjoyed every minute of not being on duty, and the three other individuals in my four would have made me look to the untutored eye pretty much like a soldier.  True, Officers and En-Cee-Ohs would have done a double-take.  Come stints in the front line, I’d have kept my head down and done what I were told.  Come the big push...  I’d’ve at least been able to partake of the Adulterated Rum Ration before the off, and I’d’ve somehow scorned not to climb that ladder as quickly as anyone...  As for my chances beyond that point, the worst’s a tragedy afterwards, for everyone but the dead.  The dead have had their life with us.  Suddenly, it doesn’t hurt anymore; there’s nothing to be afraid-of.  You realize how pointless fear has ever been.  Perhaps I know more than Herbert did, but now, perhaps, it can be taken that he knows more than I do.  We know what his service cost him, but he has forgotten.  To lose an arm or a leg would have been bearable.  There were worse fates than that, and I don’t mean being killed by the enemy.  I hope that my nervous system should have let me move after the bombardment of the German front and that explosion at Kasino Point.  I should say that the chance of my freezing up would be down to how sensitive were my hearing.  The row must have been frightful in itself.  To be windy would have been intolerable to me.  A slow two-mile walk with diversions on the way might have seemed survivable, even with the machine-gunfire, and the tendency for the land in front of me to develop craters.  We’re not like the close relatives who feared that their young men should be denied their part in the Resurrection because their bodies had not been found entire, or at all.  The truly horrible thing on setting off should have been to see Officers and men fall away and have to leave them and go on.

What a story.  His story and my story - through History. Nevertheless, I draw a thick line between me and the relative who was a Number, Rank and Name.
   

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