By David Hackbridge Johnson – an
extract from the book, ‘Ramble on Music’
When I was about 16 my parents took
us all on the first of several family
holidays to the Black Isle, a remote peninsula to the east of Inverness. Although I had been in the country before,
this holiday was the first time I really felt the presence of nature. It was a feast for the senses that I have never
experienced before; the sky with its changing colours and passing clouds of
different shapes and density, the leaves of trees wet with dew in the mornings,
the smell of wood smoke and burning vegetation, the sound of the cockcrow and
the scurry of hens. Not many people live
on the Black Isle; nature has a firm grasp on this unspoilt territory. We used the Black Isle as a base from which
to travel into the mainland of Scotland,
visiting many villages and lochs. The
rolling, valleys and streams were beautiful and the purple heather and ferns
captivated me . I well remember the
beautiful fishing town of Ullapool,
where I noticed for the first time in my life the kind of light that only
exists in the presence of the sea. I
seemed to feel an energy pass through me - not something I can be specific
about - but I definitely had a physical sensation in the presence of these
riches. I suppose I could never be
regarded as a nature lover since I have always lived in towns and always will,
yet occasionally I will seek a necessary experience of the solitude and
magnitude of the hills and rivers.
All these scenes of nature could be
depicted in music, many composers have done so.
Certain works of Bridge, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams and Delius
immediately conjure up pictures of the English countryside when I listen to
them. Often such composers use folksongs
in their works. Interest in folk song
was acute in the years surrounding 1900; witness the field-work of Vaughan
Williams, Sharp, Holst, Grainger and Kennedy-Frazer. Whenever I hear folksongs I am immediately
transported to the winding lanes of Devon or
the gentle rolling hills of the Borders.
Folksong in music can be something
of a contentious issue. Elizabeth
Lutyens dismissed composers who associate themselves with folksong and
landscape, as members of the 'cowpat school' - one of her most inspired
jokes. (Composer Hugh Shrapnel, who
studied with Lutyens, remembers vividly how funny she was - lessons were always
peppered with amusing incidents. He also
relates the fact that she never listened to what anyone else was saying, and
that her anti-Semitism had all the students squirming.) We might expect such an
attitude from Lutyens; she had signed up to Stravinsky's absurd notion
regarding music's ontological purity.
She also no doubt suffered at the hands of the fuddy-duddies whose
blinkered attitude to any composer interested in modernist styles deprived many
of the oxygen of performance. Folksong
is often dismissed after the manner of Lutyens.
It is considered a limitation when used in concert music. English composers particularly are
criticised in his way. I remember having a fascinating debate with
composer Edwin Roxburgh
on this subject; he felt that Bartok had been much more resourceful in his use
of folksong than English composers. I am
not so sure about that - Brigg Fair by Delius is an amazing set of
variations on a folksong. In it are
found many extraordinary things that could be analysed for their purely musical resourcefulness,
rather than for their reference to cows revolving in a field. Because of the difference in speech
intonation, the folk music used by Bartok will always sound rather exotic to
English ears, yet our own folk music is all too familiar in its lilting rhythms
and old modes. Perhaps deep down this
music is so ingrained that we can't invest in it the trappings of
modernism.
Vaughan Williams wrote many folksong
inspired pieces yet not all of them are pictorial descriptions of the
countryside. In fact I would like to
consider three works by Vaughan Williams that to me are quite as shocking as
the music of expressionism. On
Wenlock Edge, for Tenor and Piano Quintet sets poems by A.E. Housman. Housman is regarded quintessentially as the
poet of the English countryside.
Literary critics such as Germaine Greer consider him a rather bad poet
and certainly very dated. I think
Housman has been misunderstood - his themes of betrayal, loss, recollection and
hidden emotions are surely relevant to any age.
The fact that he set his poems in a half imaginary Shropshire
should not beguile us into thinking that he represents a dated literary
offshoot - a poetic 'cowpat'. After all,
the lads are still dying in their hundreds.
No one who has visited Shropshire can
fail to be moved by the beautiful countryside, yet that is not all there is in
Housman and it is not the only concern of Vaughan Williams either. The music of
On Wenlock Edge is utterly ethereal and as expressive as anything in Alban
Berg. The musical language is also extraordinary;
true, he does not favour the dissonant intervals of Bartok or the Second Viennese
School, yet his use of
consonant intervals is often subversive.
This free use of consonant intervals reaches its apogee in the Symphony
No. 3, 'Pastoral'. In giving this
symphony that subtitle, Vaughan Williams has been able to wrong-foot listeners
and musicologists alike. It is
categorically not a piece about the
countryside, surely any fool can realise that.
It is rather his profound reaction to the events surrounding the Great
War. These are not recollected in
tranquillity; Vaughan Williams did active service it must be remembered, indeed
he lost many friends in the carnage. The
way the supposedly friendly parallel triads bleed into each other in his work
makes it one of the most shocking and moving experiences in music. The third piece I would like to talk about is
the Tallis Fantasia. This is such
a familiar work and its warm bath of string tone seems so comfortable, that we
forget the incredible impression this work made and indeed still makes to
people who hear it for the first time.
It is a thoroughly modern piece of music, not a nostalgic backward look
to the golden age of Tudor composers. It
is a work that had a profound effect on other composers, among them Herbert
Howells. Lots of contemporary composers
surely owe a lot to this work - John Tavener, Harrison Birtwistle, Arvo
Pärt.
Both Vaughan Williams and Bartok
wrote folk music of their own invention.
The two composers became so steeped in folk music that it affected the
way they wrote their own melodies. A
composer who best exemplifies the influence of folk music on his own writing is
Percy Grainger. He made many folksong
settings but there are also a large number of works where his own melodies
sound like folksongs. He also wrote a
masterpiece for ever associated with the landscape of Scotland - Hill-Song
No. 1. It is thought that Grainger's
visit to Scotland
in 1900 was his liberation as an artist.
His experience of the countryside might have led to a number of
pictorial works. His remarks about Hill-Song
No. 1 reveal something rather different.
He wanted to write a 'soul-shaking hill-scape' and in his conversations
with Delius he was at pains to point out that he didn't want to describe the
hills but he wanted to encapsulate 'the nature of the hills themselves'. What does this mean? I find it helpful to consider the writings of
Gerard Manley Hopkins in relation to Grainger's concept. Hopkins
speaks of the 'inscape' of an object - that is, it's essence. These are difficult concepts indeed, and will
have the ontologists tapping their, oh, so neatly folded spectacles against the
spines of their learned tomes. Yet part
of human experience surely, consists of our attempts to describe the world in
which we find ourselves. We may not
always do this to the satisfaction of the philosophers, yet these attempts may
be worth expressing in any number of ways according to the individual. Grainger was an idiosyncratic thinker to say
the least, so we can't be surprised if he shuns a lovely Argyllshire-inspired
tone poem and instead, writes a through-composed, organically conceived
structure lasting some 20 minutes, where the 'hills themselves' are
depicted. One day, to satisfy the
ontologists, I would like to prove the greatness of Hill-Song No. 1 in
purely musical terms. The way the music
evolves from bar to bar, spreading vegetally across a large canvas without any
recourse to conventional development or recapitulation, reminds me of Schoenberg's
Erwartung. Schoenberg's harmonic
language is of course far more radical, yet in terms of compositional
procedure, Erwartung shows a lot in common with Grainger's work. Grainger was essaying this type of
composition many years before Schoenberg, yet he has not been given credit for
this and remains a somewhat marginalised figure. What comes forth from both composers is the
emotional force of their responses to natural drama - be it the drama of
Grainger's landscape or of Schoenberg's female protagonist. I will have more to say about Grainger later
- he wrote several masterpieces worthy of extended discussion.
I have not visited the Black Isle
for many years and during the time of my holidays I did not know Grainger's Hill-Song
No. 1. Had I done so, I might well
have sung his soul-shaking melodies as I tilted my head to hill and
horizon.
©David Hackbridge Johnson, 8/2006