In this issue: The Nostalgia and Romanticism of English String Music
Well, I now know for sure that somebody is reading A Musical Odyssey, because three people wrote in with corrections to my ruminations on rock and roll rumination in the last issue. Doug Wagoner and Aaron Brown both wrote to tell me that a 12/8 time signature is not nearly so uncommon as I had stated, giving me all sorts of examples, mostly from baroque music. Tom Radcliffe wrote to tell me that the quote "90% of everything is crap" was not uttered by Norman Spinrad but Theodore Sturgeon. What does that say for 90% of my citations?
In other news, I finally got to see the film of "Buena Vista Social Club." For those who missed it, "Buena Vista" was a best-selling album of classic Cuban music, produced by and featuring American guitarist Ry Cooder. The real stars, however, were the musicians, men in their 60s, 70s or even 90s who were coaxed out of retirement by the promise of a last hurrah. The documentary follows these musicians around their neighborhoods and homes in Havana, into the studio where the original album was made, and onto the stage in Amsterdam and New York where they received the adulation they deserve for their talents. I can't recommend the album or the movie too highly. (One very touching moment in the film is when we go sightseeing in New York with some of the old gentlemen and they keep exclaiming how lovely the city is.)
In our next issue we will be trekking to Argentina, there to visit one of the twentieth-century's most interesting composers, the creator of the Nuevo Tango: Astor Piazzola.
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS/ELGAR, THE LARK ASCENDING, SERENADE FOR STRINGS AND OTHER WORKS, LONDON CHAMBER ORCHESTRA, CHRISTOPHER WARREN-GREEN, MUSIC DIRECTOR, EMI/VIRGIN (bargain price)
This disc was originally the second in a series of ten released by Virgin at mid-price in an attempt to make classical music more appealing to the general public (the tenth was a "greatest hits"). The London Chamber Orchestra is a small group, only 17 strings for most of the pieces on this recording. They play standing up, with no conductor. Their pace is quick and their sound is vivid. They were dedicated to making classical music accessible - even hip. (I was hoping to use LCO as a springboard to a discussion of the influence of conductors, but that will have to wait for another issue.)
In keeping with the orchestra's philosophy of playing music that is vital to its audience, two of the nine discs of original material are devoted to British music (another is a collection of minimalist pieces). The disc that concerns us contains music by Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams; the other contains music by Benjamin Britten.
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) has long been held up as the musical voice of British imperialism. He is the author of the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, one of which is familiar to Americans as the graduation march and to the British as the patriotic song "Land of Hope and Glory." Ironically although Elgar was held up as the British composer par excellence, he actually had a hard time making a name for himself in Britain because he was the son of a tradesman and a Roman Catholic.
Elgar was largely self-taught, a project greatly aided by his father owning a music store. Many of his works sound somewhat Brahmsian, although one would never confuse the two. This is none too surprising since Brahms and Wagner were held to be the Alpha and Omega of music in Elgar's youth. Elgar's favorite word to describe the sense of life he was trying to capture was "Nobilmente." But the adjective most often applied to Brahms also describes Elgar quite well: "autumnal." Elgar is represented in this collection by two works. "Introduction and Allegro for Strings" is a very dramatic one-movement piece that starts with a big SWOOP and ends with a plucky pizzicato. In between it contains what Elgar called "a devil of a fugue" and material inspired by English and Welsh folk songs, although "folky" is the last adjective I'd use to describe it. It is a lot less stuffy than the some Elgar, partly because of the fugue, which gives it a dangerous kind of headlong motion through the middle section.
The other Elgar piece, the Serenade for String Orchestra in E minor, alas, more fits the stereotype of Elgar's music. It is still pretty, but compared to everything else on the album, it is amorphous. After dozens of listenings, I'm still never sure where it begins or ends. All three movements are slow, dreamy, pastoral, autumnal.
The three pieces by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) are all wonderful. Vaughan Williams frequently went back to English traditional music for his inspiration, yet the first VW piece on this album is not based on traditional music but on a popular poem:"The Lark Ascending" by George Meredith (1828-1909). Vaughan Williams was not actually trying to set the poem to music - it's not a choral work but a romance for violin and orchestra. What he was striving for was to create a kind of higher program music, wherein the strings, especially the violin, embody the lark's activity. It works quite well, even if after a while you want to swat the damn thing. All kidding aside, "The Lark Ascending" is a very inspiring work, full of rising gestures, innocent twittering, and a kind of rise -and-greet-the-sun enthusiasm. There are big chunks of pastoral floating around in the soup but even I with my general dislike of pastoral am appetized.
Vaughan Williams' most famous use of olde English music is his "Fantasia on 'Greensleeves'" wherein he takes the famous tune and gives it a new setting. It opens with a brief flute and harp prelude, like something out of Rimsky-Korsakov, then the strings pick up the familiar melody. From the beginning Vaughan Williams ornaments it and adds counterpoint to it. In the middle section a second subject based on a folk tune called "Lovely Joan," takes over for awhile, before relinquishing the stage to the original theme, this time given more complex harmonic development. It's a gorgeous exercise, even if I prefer Benjamin Britten's arrangement of Purcell's Chacony in G minor. (My favorite version of which, conducted by Richard Hickox, is, alas, out of print.)
The last piece on the album is also the most amazing: Vaughan Williams was editing _The English Hymnal_ when he discovered a tune by Thomas Tallis (one of the great Elizabethan writers of religious music, including the incredible 40-part "Spem in Alium"). This tune Vaughan Williams scored for two orchestras of different sizes, the smaller one off in the background, sounding vaguely like a ghostly organ. (I can only barely hear it without turning up the volume so loud that the bigger orchestra chips the paint.)
The piece is full of the big swellings of strings, washes of sound and lush harmonies I typically dislike in Romantic music, but perhaps because the theme is Elizabethan and eerie rather than Romantic and, well, romantic, the effort at painting on a huge emotional canvas works on me, even when for the life of me I can't find a melody to hum.
Swirled in the mix I thought I heard hints of "Greensleeves" and, improbably, of the famous Albinoni Adagio! That's the problem with intertextuality: soon you starting hearing everyone everywhere.
The playing by the London Chamber Orchestra is immaculate. Music director and solo violinist Christopher Warren-Green does an outstanding job.
For RealAudio sound samples from this album at CDNow, click here.
And now for the tail that wags the dog: The sad truth is, England is one of the least musical of the European countries, at least in terms of great classical composers. It has a lot of interesting folk music, a lot of church music, if such is to your taste, and of course tons of great rock and roll. But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England could scarcely boast of a single noteworthy composer. There was Händel of course, but like the British kings, he was an import from Germany. Other than him, I can't think of a single first-rank English composer between Henry Purcell, who died in 1695 and Elgar, who was born in 1857. That is a long dry spell.
Why should this have been? The period in question so closely corresponds to that of British imperial expansion and the industrial revolution that it is tempting to trace a link between them. (A similar link might be found in the United States, which did not have a single noteworthy composer until the twentieth century, but unlike Britain the U.S. had no previous classical tradition and was a "developing nation" in a sense that Britain was not.) Another possible explanation is that the upheavals of 17th-century Britain (a civil war and a revolution) interrupted British culture. This does not seem likely, however, because the other arts flourished even as music languished.
I have an hypothesis I'll offer for the amusement of the reader. I say "amusement" because the idea is so little grounded in research, it might be just a joke. The idea derives from Cleanth Brooks's _Modern Poetry and the Tradition_ which is a work in the school called the New Criticism, I was browsing. ( I've been unsuccessfully trying to read it for over 15 years.) Part of Brooks's pre- occupation is with why the tradition of poetry he likes - basically metaphysical poets like John Donne and Elizabethans like Shakespeare - ended abruptly and did not resume again until the coming of T.S. Eliot. He offers an answer, which I'll adapt his answer to the question of the disappearance of English music.
Of all the major European classical traditions, that of England was and is the most closely tied to folk music. Lute songs and music for mixed consorts persisted in Britain long after other, larger, more formal forms began to evolve in Italy, France and Germany. Part of this is due no doubt to the geography of cultural diffusion in Europe, which, starting with Renaissance Italy, went north up the middle, then to the west and more slowly the east. But another cause of this, it seems to me, is the British character, which is more pragmatic and nostalgic, closer to the land and more willing to be eccentric than some of the other European traditions.
Whatever the reason, British music was still very close to its folk roots at the end of the seventeenth century. Now here's where Brooks's thesis enters in: according to Brooks, English culture was drastically altered by the advent of the Scientific Revolution, especially by the ideas of Newton and by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who was a defender of Progress and a rationalist. Under the influence of these two, quirky and striking Elizabethan-style poetry died. The strange juxtapositions and oddities of a Donne were forbidden by Hobbes's rationalistic strictures, and Shakespearean-style tragedy was contrary to the idea of progress.
So my hypothesis is that English art music, being so close to its folk roots, could not thrive in the atmosphere of rationalism and "progress" and so it withered. Furthermore what composers in the old style came up probably could find no patrons. British music continued as folk music and church music, of course, but as art music the tradition was broken. And once such a nebulous web of development is interrupted, it is difficult to renew. Note that if this hypothesis is true, it dovetails very nicely with the idea that the industrial revolution interrupted British music.
But there is still the deeper question of the relation of a rational world-view, a rationally-ordered society and art. Does reason in some sense kill art, as Nietzsche claimed Socrates killed Greek tragedy? Or does it perhaps only kill some kinds of art and foster the development of others?
Perhaps a Shakespeare could not be a Shakespeare - a mirror of life's richness but no philosopher - in an Objectivist society. I'm not the first to consider such questions. Peter Saint-Andre's essay on the subject, Artist Shrugged, repays meditation.
What I would like to think, however, is that once people get used to living by principle, it will be possible once again for a Shakespeare or a Purcell to exist, a new kind of Shakespeare who can marry reason and experience. Perhaps the Objectivist Shakespeare - an ideal like Nietzsche's "the Socrates who makes music" - will only come about once Objectivist philosophers have achieved a more perfect sophistication in their integration of concepts with reality. But it's just possible that the artist will figure it out first and teach it to the philosophers, if they're willing to listen.