DENIS APIVOR TWENTY YEARS ON

by David Hackbridge Johnson

(scroll down to older posts for essays on other topics, including a survey of the music of Avrohom Leichtling)

In the twenty years since the death of Denis ApIvor (1916-2004), there have been very few signs of those green shoots of revival that have helped other British composers of his generation to climb out of barren soil.  Whereas recordings have appeared in recent years featuring the work of such contemporaries as George Lloyd, Harold Truscott, Humphrey Searle and Richard Arnell, ApIvor’s music remains absent from the catalogues of even the niche CD companies.  As his obituarist[1] in 2004, I feel like having to reiterate much of what I wrote then – that he was a voice of comparative modernity in the 1950s and 1960s, that he was ably supported in those decades but that his neglect has silenced that voice.  In 2004 I was hopeful – the last time I saw Denis was at a concert including two of his string quartets, a concert sponsored by the Vaughan Williams Trust – but since then I can’t trace another public performance of his music.

Denis was somewhat mystified by his neglect in later life – here was a composer who once had three works running simultaneously in London theatres, who was championed by Constant Lambert, who mixed with Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Lutyens, Edward Clark and Alan and Isobel Rawsthorne in post-war Fitzrovia, and had received broadcasts of his major works on the BBC.  Denis never struck me as someone who took things lying down – I'm certain he wrote to the BBC about his disappearance from their schedules from the 1980s onwards and for his trouble probably ended up in John Drummond's apocryphal Black List.[2]  Do composers date?  Do changing fashions render them passé?  Are they side-lined justifiably when playlists of radio stations and project-plans of recording companies ossify around a cluster of masterpieces or sure-fire hits?  There is very little room at the top and there is always new talent demanding that the old let go of the reins.  It might be easy to write Denis off as a minor figure but I don't believe he is – on the contrary, such music as can be heard on the collection of cassette tapes bequeathed to me by his widow Surawee and on a number of works uploaded to YouTube, reveals a startlingly original voice, one that takes its cues not from British traditions stemming from Elgar and Vaughan Williams, but from continental figures such as Berg, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Webern.  This is not to suggest that continental influences were any more vital than those home-grown but that they indicate a more unusual path for a composer to take at the time Denis began composing in the 1930s.  Denis may have followed the lead provided by Humphrey Searle and Lutyens in their engagement with the Second Viennese School, but his syntax proved so malleable that he was soon producing extraordinary works where 12-tone series were utilised in combination with his acute ear for unusual textures and his natural sense of rhetorical gesture learnt from his years in the world of ballet.[3]  Sonorities obtainable from non-standard instrumentations always fascinated Denis.  His later post-Webern works, by which I mean those he wrote after the experience of hearing the Austrian master's music for the first time in the late 1950s, show a sudden burst of discovery in the use of unusual timbres.  The Bartókian voice that shadows works like the Sonata for violin and piano,[4] and his choral-orchestral setting of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men, recedes in favour of a pointillist approach as heard in works like the Symphony No. 2 and Neumes – threads, glimmers, the deft chiaroscuro and attention to line of an artist ApIvor deeply admired, Paul Klee.  Amongst the small amount of sheet music once belonging to Denis that I have here, are the full scores of Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Luigi Nono's Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schoenberg, giving some sense of where he was taking inspiration for what is a radical change of style in his middle period.[5]

Rather than engage in blow by blow accounts of key ApIvor works – the kind that frustrate by there being no available recordings to relate them to – I present a few choice pages from ApIvor’s manuscripts in my collection, with such comments as may be pertinent.  Perhaps in showing these pages interest may be generated among those with opportunities to mount performances.

Figures 1 and 2 are from The Hollow Men Opus 5, ApIvor’s setting of T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name, written in 1939 and showing an unusual awareness of dissonant melodic shapes reminiscent of Bartók.  Figure 1 is how the work opens and figure 2 is the entry of the chorus, suitably in hollow-sounding parallel 5ths.  The piece dates from 1939 but World War Two delayed its performance until February 1950 when Constant Lambert led the LSO and the BBC male chorus with Redvers Llewellyn, baritone, at Broadcasting House.  In readiness for this performance, ApIvor omitted the horn and tuba parts and added parts for 2 saxophones.  The work was subsequently published by OUP.  There is a very murky cassette recording in my archive, itself taken from a reel-to-reel tape.  Through multiple degradations of the original recording, the taught power of the music can still be heard.     


                                                 Fig. 1




Fig. 2



 

Figure 3 is a page from Seis Conciones de Federico García Lorca, opus 8, written in 1945.  This wonderfully evocative song cycle was recorded by tenor Wilfred Brown – fans of that singer would surely be interested in the tape of this recording which is in a better state than that of The Hollow Men.  ApIvor was inspired by Lorca throughout his life – in my archive is the 3 volume vocal score of his Lorca-derived opera Yerma which he composed between 1955 and 1958.  And he undertook the extraordinary task of translating most of the Spanish poet’s work into English – all the volumes, which were never published, are here in my archive.  ApIvor wrote dozens of songs and took poetic inspiration from the earliest English lyrics up to those of his friend Dylan Thomas.  With pianist Michael Jones I recorded a substantial set of early songs, as yet unreleased.


                                                            Fig. 3



 

Quite possibly it was ApIvor’s engagement with Lorca that attracted him to that quintessentially Spanish instrument, the guitar.  As well as several solo works, there is the vigorously neo-classical Concertino for guitar and orchestra, opus 26, written in 1962 – for an extract, see figure 4.  Schotts published the piece in guitar and piano reduction.  The idiomatic writing for the soloist shows the composer's determination to master an instrument that he didn't play himself.  In my possession is Denis’ sitar with indications of notes written in felt tip pen on the fingerboard – I wonder if he once had a guitar similarly marked up.

 

                                                               Fig. 4



 

As an example of ApIvor's middle period where the influence of Webern, Nono and even Boulez is most evident, see figure 5 – the first page of Symphony No. 2, opus 36, written in 1963 – a work of exquisite lyricism and tenderness.  This piece can be heard on YouTube[6] in a 1970 performance by the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Carewe.  In correspondence with the conductor Lionel Friend about this work, he described it as ‘masterly’ and also hinted that no one really writes music like this anymore, a mark not of ApIvor’s irrelevance as a composer, but of his startling originality in an age where many regard the project of high modernism as a dead end.[7]

 

Fig. 5



 Figures 6, 7 and 8 show two pages of technical instructions and a sample page from one of ApIvor's most original works, Harp, Piano, Piano-Harp, opus 41, written in 1966.  The title simply describes the instrumentation: a piano, an harp and a piano-harp – the latter being an upright piano with its action and casework removed to allow for the execution of extended techniques by the player who can reach into the very bowels instrument.  The sonorities the composer marshals are extraordinary – a work of a type is not found often in the canon – one thinks of Henry Cowell, John Cage and Horațiu Rădulescu in this context, but not an obscure British composer.

 

     

                                                          Fig. 6


  

                                                 

                                                            Fig. 7





Fig. 8



 

ApIvor was to use the piano-harp in the context of larger ensembles, notably Neumes, opus 47 written in 1969 for a large orchestra.  In the 8th variation of the piece – each variation is named after a neume as used in Gregorian chant – the scintillating sound of the piano-harp is added to the orchestra – see figure 10.  Figure 9 shows the highly rhetorical start of the first section, ‘Virga', and figure 11 is a two page spread from the 5th section, ‘Porrectus', showing a frenzy of activity redolent of the orchestral version of the Notations of Boulez.

 

Fig. 9



 

 

 

 

Fig. 10



 

Fig. 11



Finally, figure 12 is from ApIvor's Resonance of the Southern Flora, opus 54 from 1972.  Here the composer utilises a huge orchestra including 6 horns, chorus, organ and a large percussion section.  Often the textures are chamber-like and the large forces are used sparingly.  The page chosen is one of the awesome tuttis, complete with wordless chorus in the manner of Delius but in a rather different stylistic context.

Fig. 12



I hope in showing these fragments that something of ApIvor's great gifts as a composer can be glimpsed.  I can't think of a more deserving figure for arts bodies and trusts to resurrect from oblivion.  Perhaps the BBC, once his great champion, might again take the lead in bringing these challenging, vital works to light.  In the next twenty years I hope this plea will no longer be necessary.  The last two figures show a self-portrait of the composer taken in 1956 at the time of writing his opera Yerma, in Trinidad, where he was working as an anaesthetist.

Fig. 13



Fig. 14





[2] See John Drummond, Tainted by Experience: a Life in the Arts, Faber, 2000.

[3] There are seven ApIvor ballet scores: The Goodman of Paris (1951), A Mirror for Witches (1951), Blood Wedding (1953), Veneziana (1953), Saudades (1954), Corporal Jan (1967), Glide the Dark Door Wide (1977).

[4] Which I revived in the early 2000s with the pianist Yeu-Meng Chan, playing it for the composer at his house in Rottingdean, and at the British Music Information Centre, Stratford Place, London.

[5] Mark Marrington in his unpublished PhD on ApIvor’s music has delineated three periods: the early where Bartók is the main influence, the middle where serial techniques dominate, and the late where the composer made a return to modally-derived melodies.

[7] Email communication with the author, 13.x.2022.