THE
DISAPPEARANCES OF JUDITH WEIR
David
Hackbridge Johnson
(scroll down for older posts on Doris Lessing, Frances Cornford, etc.)
There was much surprise at the announcement of Malcolm Williamson as Master of the Queen's Music in 1975. Surely it was going to be Malcolm Arnold or William Walton. A case of the wrong Malcolm? The Australian, Williamson, then in his prime as a composer of a sometimes wildly eclectic nature, was a commonwealth candidate – perhaps the thinking was that the ancient and noble post needed to be opened out beyond a perceived establishment. Not long after Williamson's appointment, I remember watching a television programme purporting to be a profile of the composer, and yet it contained a particularly acidic interview with an Australian musicologist, who said, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, everyone knows that the post of Master of the Queen's Music doesn't generally go to the best composers. Who did she mean? Bliss, Bax, Walford Davies, Elgar, William Boyce? We know that William Walton was extremely anxious not to be appointed to the role, not because he couldn't have produced ceremonial music along the lines of Crown Imperial, but because as a notoriously slow composer he would have hated having to produce music to order. It is thought that Elgar craved the appointment and did all he could to achieve the ultimate goal of someone always self-conscious of his relatively lowly background. If they existed, the backroom deals and string pulling of Louis Grabu and Nicholas Staggins have not come down to us.
I don't know if any ophidian-tongued
critics greeted the appointment of Judith Weir to the post in 2014. There are those who may wish to offer up a
list of composers they think greater than Weir.
Let's leave the question of who might be on it unanswered. The only view I can speak for is my own, and
as with that of her predecessor Peter Maxwell Davies, the decision to appoint
Weir was inspired, since both composers are capable of writing music that
doesn't alienate but still provides challenges. Maxwell Davies, a former member of the avant-garde,
a republican, a passionate environmentalist (and by extension anti-corporatist),
was certainly not an establishment choice.
He ended up producing a large number of ceremonial works, including a
9th symphony dedicated to Her Majesty the Queen. What did the Queen think of it I wonder with
its anti-Iraq war positioning, weird off-stage brass bands playing skew-whiff
marches? I remember listening to the
premiere on the radio with my friend, the composer Marcus Tristan. We got to the end and he said with a sigh,
‘Well, Max has finally gone off his rocker.’
The wider question to be asked is, did Maxwell Davies' music tail off in
inspiration under the pressure of writing to order? The current writer certainly thought the 9th
symphony was a falling off, only for inspiration to be revived in the 10th
and then his last great work the String Quintet. Maxwell Davies' natural fecundity probably
meant that it didn't matter how many pieces were ordered that particular month
– he would always find a way to spool out another piece, magic squares to hand or not. And in any case, with such
a huge work list, there are dips in form to be discerned throughout his career.
The question of an artistic falling
off is particularly pertinent in the case of Malcolm Williamson – rumours of
commissions unmet, whisperings of drunken behaviour at Buckingham Palace garden
parties, tales of casual sex with lorry drivers in motorway service
stations - all the tittle-tattle beloved
by a voracious media that wouldn't know the composer’s irritating ear-worm Procession of Palms or his highly
inventive opera Our Man in Havana
(‘What is a two-way nozzle?’) from its collective elbow. After a number of years, a monumental work
was announced: Mass for Christ the King,
which was written to honour the Silver Jubilee of the Queen’s accession. The premiere, for which we as a family
avidly crowded round the radio set to listen to, was somewhat
embarrassing. The music had plenty of
ceremony yet felt forced and bombastic.
Unforgivable was the fact that the work was clearly unfinished, ending
after about 45 minutes with several movements of the Ordinary of the Mass
uncomposed. Wasn't the premiere held at
Gloucester cathedral? After the final
notes drifted into the cavernous echo chamber, there was an uneasy silence
before a scattering of bemused applause.
Yes it was over already. Was
Williamson even there? It is thought
that he had made such a scene during rehearsals that he had to be escorted from
the premises. If Maxwell Davis revelled
in the role, it could be said that Williamson disappeared into it. A 4th symphony was announced but cancelled by
the conductor Bernard Haitink when the parts only arrived on the day of the
performance. Has this work ever been
heard? Then increasing silences from the
Queen’s master, fallen deeper into his cups.
It wouldn't be right to suggest that
Judith Weir was a compromise candidate in the wake of Williamson's disasters or
Maxwell Davies' occasional prickliness – her music is simply too good to be
seen as a soft option. There may be
those who saw her as a way of diversifying the role by the fact of her being a
woman. Weir needs no special pleading, as if it were somehow a surprise that a
great composer could be a woman at the same time. The question remains as to whether she
disappeared within the role. Since
Maxwell Davies’ taking on of the role, there is no longer the expectation that
it need be a tenure for life – it seems to have settled into ten year
periods. With compositional distractions
and disappearances into ceremonial compromises, it would be possible to recover
oneself after the 10 year period is over. I wonder if Maxwell Davis, who was Judith Weir's
teacher for a time, gave her a few pointers as to how to survive and thrive in
the role.
All the aforementioned is a red
herring. The present concern is not really
whether Judith Weir fitted the template of the cynical Australian critic, or whether
she was the right woman for the job as opposed to the right man. Neither did she show much sign of
disappearing before, during, or after her fulfilling of the duties as master of
the monarch’s music. There are far more
interesting disappearances relating to the actual music Judith Weir has written, more interesting than that obscuring fog of journalistic
gorging perpetrated upon people raised high, only for their peccadillos to
bring them down to voyeuristic applause.
In general terms Judith Weir has an
unusual, elusive and allusive style. She
is tonal and then not. Really she's
modal but then again there will be odd notes foreign to the mode. She alludes often to Scottish folk song
patterns. She is a lyrical composer capable
of epic concentration. She might have
learnt her vocal style from Purcell and Britten were it not so inflected with styles
relating to folk singers. She proceeds
by short figurations and snatches of triadic harmony that might label her a
minimalist, would that they didn't move within a harmonic space that is to an
extent goal orientated. Lyricism arises
despite the short-winded nature of her melodic gifts – rarely does she fulfil
an arc implied from an incipit. When a
fluorescence of melody arrives it is all the more telling for having emerged
from a bed of small cellular organisms.
In this she resembles Janáček. It
could be said that the larger-breathed sort of melodies found in composers like
Holst and Britten, composers with whom she has much in common, have disappeared
into the rests between their occasional glimpses. In this way she is anti-romantic but not
anti-melodic. Despite these melodic
ghosts that may lie in the substrata of her music, she isn't a miniaturist in
the strict sense. Her music always feels
of longer duration than it is, since there is an under-tow of momentum that
unites her fragmentary style. Her music
doesn't feel longer than it is in the same way as Havergal Brian's music does,
because Weir keeps a strict organic control over her material as opposed to
Brian's tendency to create monstrous medleys that hang together as magnificent craggy
edifices despite crumbling disparities.
All these characteristics are on show
in what may be Weir’s masterpiece, The
Vanishing Bridegroom. Her propensity
for disappearance is also visible, if you will.
The libretto by Weir herself is derived from J. F Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands and features
groups of interlocking characters spread over three tales that are always short
of one or more member through disappearance. The first tale features a man already
disappeared by death and a missing legacy.
One of his three sons might have stolen it. The story shifts when a
doctor tells the story of a woman whose love is promised to her lover but she
must bow to social pressure and marry a rich man. In the second tale a husband goes out to find
a priest only to be lured by fairies into the hillside. His moments in faeryland become twenty years
in the real world. This yawning absence
is represented beautifully by Weir’s ghostly off-kilter lyricism – as if
musical time is being warped. No one can
believe that the husband has returned looking as young as ever twenty years
later, as they examine their own grey hairs.
The third tale features a daughter approached by a beguiling stranger
who turns sheep's droppings into gold coins as an enticement for her to go with
him. It takes a preacher to reveal him
as the devil. The only hope for the
daughter is yet another disappearance, into the sanctity of a holy place. Folk songs are often about disappearance: a
lover goes to the next village and never returns, a mother mourns for her son
gone to the wars, a widow counts the grains of sand on the beach finding it but
a small task if her husband would return to her at its completion, the broken-hearted
drown themselves in lakes. And many an
innocent is taken by fairies whose sirensongs hypnotise and strip them of
resistance. Judith Weir’s music inhabits
this world by its balancing on the liminal – the fractional space between the
real and the unreal, the space where modality and snatches of folk song disappear
into snarling dissonance. The fairies
intone their songs in Gaelic, an almost disappeared language, and they ride the
waves of melodies that are not quite easy on the ear. The lynchpin between the two worlds is the
set of timpani, used as a continuo instrument and as a rhythmic stitching
between the various elements, musical and dramatic. Often the words and the music are of
disarming simplicity, but they aren't simplistic or trivial – each gesture is a
balancing act, each filament of sound is connected, however tenuously, to a
central trunk. If the present writer is
happy to admit to a deep fondness for The
Immortal Hour of Rutland Boughton, it can also be said that Weir goes
somewhat further in her evocation of the in-between-ness she seeks to
capture. Her voice is grainier, more
hard-edged than that of Boughton – she doesn't see the world of folk song and
fairyland through the clouded lens of nostalgia – Celtic mists can be sharp and
bracing as well as dreamy. We don't see
them do so, but we might imagine that her fairies bite. We have to guess their machinations since they
have disappeared off stage to do whatever violence they have in mind – just as
in Greek drama.
The recording of The Vanishing Bridegroom features a rather unfortunate
disappearance. Despite the fact that
none of the three tales is much more than half an hour, and despite the
beautiful recording quality, the producer has decided to break the music into
sound bites of a minute or two, despite the fact that the music is through
composed. Why was this? Do listeners really want to flip backwards
and forwards between tiny gobbets of music like a moth confused between twenty
alluring candles? Probably I could work
out how to programme my CD player to get the many dozens of tracks to play
continuously, but that would mean finding an instruction manual disappeared
within days of purchasing the equipment.
On a more serious note, these unwelcome hiccups interfere with the epic
quality of the opera, its inexorable narrative thread, whereby disparate groups
of characters in time and space are brought together in the overarching myth of
the self and the other, the fissure between joy and longing, and the
meditations upon that final disappearance that mark us all.
To return to the subject of melody, I Give You the End of a Golden String, a
piece for string orchestra, its title from a line of William Blake, reveals
much about Weir’s methodology. It is a
piece rooted in heterophony where stringed instruments are hitched to a
gradually emerging melodic idea, but are allowed diversions from it in order to
create a kind of illusory polyphony. Listening
to it is like a stream damned with pebbles whose free flowing energy is
released only by gradually picking out the pebbles one by one, or it could be
like peeling an onion and then setting the curled pieces end-to-end – everything
still looks the same in colour and texture but the structure has been
completely unravelled. Weir’s programme
note for the full score of the work is one of those rare occasions where a
composer can talk about their music and then the listener finds confirmation in
its hearing. I am sure there was a
period in the 1970s when composer’s explications bore no relation to the sound
of the music itself, so laden-down were they with the thickets of theory and
the sort of verbiage sometimes found in ‘Pseud’s Corner’. In her statements about her music, Weir
evinces an admirable clarity that is borne out by her music. Even in her large-scale works such as the
operas, everything can be heard, little is left to chance, and although this
might suggest a composer caught in the intricate maze of her own workings,
there remains of feeling of freshness and spontaneity to much of her output.
Staying with music for strings, her
string quartet is another model of clarity, but not one where a genuine feeling
for the keening quality of stringed instruments is absent. The first movement might be an amalgam of
medieval organum techniques and melodic tropes derived from Scottish folk music
– Guillaume de Machaut meets Miss
Gibson's Strathspey, but the whole stretched out like a pale sky over the
mountains. Benjamin Britten could
readily hear these tonal structures, and sometimes I feel there is a great
deal of Peter Grimes acting as a kind
of subliminal cantus firmus in Judith
Weir's work. After a few minutes of this
cloud-wisped landscape, the viola delineates in stately rhythm what might be an
actual strathspey from the folk tradition or one of Judith Weir’s own. Its contours are proud and prancing, as if a
dancer were flexing their limbs grandly.
The other instruments provide a wheezy drone as of the bagpipes. Another composer comes to mind here, Ronald
Stevenson, who although born in Lancashire became a domiciled Scot, and in the
manner of converts became more Scottish than the Scots. Although coming more out of Busoni and
Bernard van Dieren than Holst or Britten, Stevenson's embedment in Scottish
folk music both by direct transcriptions and by the infusing of his original
works with tropes from folk music, runs in parallel with composers like F. G.
Scott, Erik Chisholm and Judith Weir. These
are composers who might be considered together as folk-inspired artists of the
post-collecting generations, that is, none of them to my knowledge went into
the field armed with cylinder recorders, notepads, pencils and spare pennies
for ancient farmers and dairymaids, yet the work of such important figures as
Margaret Faye Shaw, Sabine Baring Gould, Cecil Sharp, Percy Granger, Gustav
Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, provide a springboard for these composers
who have the folk song collectors’ endless trampings through Lincolnshire
villages, or Hebridean islands at their backs. Peter Maxwell Davies is also part of this
group and I can't help but wonder if he was encouraging towards his student in
this area. Typical of the next segment
of Weir’s string quartet is a long melody on the violin that isn't really
highlighted as such by the other instruments in the manner of discrete
accompaniment. Weir doesn't do this kind
of texture very often, so it is with the quartet – the other instruments set up
what start out as accompanimental figures but then wish to assume dominance in
the texture in their own right. This
technique is akin to equal part writing as found in the Renaissance period. The second movement begins with what very
much sounds like a vamp with an easy swing to it, as if a person is setting out
on a journey to the nearby fields. The
vamp goes on so long that I wonder if the composer wishes audience members to
whistle their own tune in their heads. When
something resembling a tune appears, it seems in hock to the accompaniment
rather than imperiously commanding it – in any case it is broken up by nervous
fanfares. We might say that the real
tune has disappeared into a fascination with diversions and byways. Progress is halting, and soon it is as if the
original vamp has run out of steam.
There must be a nearby stile to rest one's limbs. As with I Give You the End of a Golden String, there
is a feeling that the instrumentalists are reading the same tune but giving it
their own interpretation. Then off we go
again in a recapitulation of the opening.
After a few jagged gestures, the final movement begins and is in the
manner of a moto perpetuo. Once more melodic fragments and snatches are
generally subsumed into the idea of movement for its own sake. The composer doesn't seek to emulate the
hell-for-leather rides of Schubert's Death
and the Maiden quartet or his G major quartet – hers is a gentle ride
through compound rhythm. A word about
endings. My wife grew up in China without
classical music. Whenever we get to the
end of symphonies or quartets that are almost endlessly playing on our kitchen CD
player, she is always very amused by the short stabbing chords, followed by a
long unison, that culminate these dialectical dramas. Why do they always end like that? she
asks. It had never really occurred to me
to ask this question. Such affirmations
in what became a rhetorical lingua franca, are alien to Judith Weir. She does not emphatically slam the door on
her compositions in the way Beethoven often does. Many pieces, having worked out their initial
gambit, simply stop. Others drift away as
if she has composed into them the idea of the audience walking out of the room.
John White used to do similar things in
his piano sonatas, and he called them his ‘daft bugger’ endings. There are many composers living today who are
still plugging mighty rhetorics, some with barely restrained hysteria, so it is
refreshing to find a composer that just closes the page and says, ‘that's it’. The string quartet may be not one of the most
essential of Judith Weir works, but as well as being enjoyable to listen to, it
gives various clues to what goes on in her musical workshop.
Is it true to say that Weir’s piano concerto
has become something of a classic? I
heard it admirably played earlier this year by a young student accompanied by
Project Ensemble 40. Unbeknownst to the
soloist, the composer had crept in unobtrusively for the performance, causing
the soloist to go very red in the face – but she didn't drop a note. I first heard this piece on the radio and
then subsequently in the excellent recording with William Howard a
soloist. It is one of the composer’s
most Holstian works, with a fascination for ostinatos broken up by unusual rhythmic
groupings. Her propensity for harmonies
consisting of unrelated triads is also much to the fore – some of them might
have dropped out of The Hymn of Jesus. The slow movement, subtitled ‘The Sweet Primroses’,
a fragmentary folk song that Weir seeks to flesh out, is an example of a fully
realised conjugation of harmony and melody.
There are two strands going on, firstly the chain of limpid chords
played by the soloist – almost Copland-like in their open-air span and
something of a signature for Judith Weir, since similar chords begin her
charming The Bagpipers String Trio
and are extrapolated into the joyous dance patterns of her solo piano piece, Ardnamurchan Point – and secondly, a
gradual gathering together of its melodic self by the small group of lower
string players. There is a question and
answer element for which the models might be the slow movements of Beethoven's
4th piano concerto and Bartók’s 2nd. The
overlap of piano and strings feels like an exchange of intimate letters. Weir being Weir, what we actually hear are
interruptions – neither melodic stream is allowed to bloom without nudges and
adjustments from the other. Or do they
screen out the missing parts from each other's lyric voice, as if a gapped
template were lowered onto the sheet music obscuring the bits we can't hear, or
like a pair of sieves that only allow materials of a certain size to pass
through? The violins played tremolando add a glittering sheen to the
piano's message, but the violas, cellos and double basses are not to be
deterred. The quiet drama of the piece
lies in its essential incompleteness, even its loneliness – one day a letter
will go unanswered – indeed the music trails off like an incomplete
missive. The antiphonal structure of
this very beautiful movement also puts this listener in mind of Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by
Vaughan Williams. One could imagine
Weir’s concerto performed with the piano and string group at opposite ends of a
large space, with the audience in the middle providing the silent connective
tissue between two messages never quite joined together – the go-between. The finale has Judith Weir being very weir(d)
– stomach-churning glissandi arise from
the depths as the piano soloist sketches out a helter-skelter of rushing scales. The unmistakable rhythms of the strathspey
soon assert themselves but the pianist seems angry at their attempt at communal
music making, providing rough chording in the manner of an obliteration. As usual there is a disconnect between the
various parts of the musical texture.
The pianist keeps stopping and starting, changing speed and register, as
if looking for the correct accompaniment to the strathspey going on above. It is as if Robert Burns, in trying to
improve his comportment by taking dancing lessons, has yet to find the right
steps. There is a suspicion of whiskey
on his breath. The string orchestra
swoons deliriously through the proceedings.
At the midpoint there is one of Weir’s beautiful almost-unisons. Finally the dancers and the musicians have
pulled themselves together, although in a true democratic spirit they will never
entirely be of one mind. Whereas Malcolm
Arnold might have whipped up a storm as he did in his overture Tam o’Shanter and his Scottish Dances, in a typically understated
way, Weir ends the proceedings with a series of peaceful gestures that reflect
back to the harmonies of ‘The Sweet Primroses’.
If Weir’s concerto is not yet a classic, it ought to be. Analysis can't do it justice although
analysts will justify their existence by doing so, as here.
Judith Weir hasn't disappeared. There is no falling off, regardless of Royal
attentions. The only disappearance is
when her music ends, even though the audience doesn't want it to – in any case,
it will linger by internal resonance. The
door closes and a social gathering tapers off into the diminishing light of
evening. Out in the chill air – let us
imagine West Linton in the Pentland Hills where I went to visit the Stevensons, and where the haar
is known – there are melodies everywhere: in the trees, nestling between
stones, on the rim of hills. Judith Weir has captured many of them, lest they
disappear.
A footnote to finish. Returning to The Vanished Bridegroom, I couldn't help being somewhat startled by
Weir’s fascinating comments on the idea of betrothal and marriage by
declaration alone. This means that the
woman in the doctor’s story, in being forced to marry a more suitable
candidate, is in her own mind engaging in bigamy. This puts into context the true life
situation of Madeleine Smith, and her secret lover and self-declared husband,
Emile L'Angelier, who is ultimately rejected in favour of the well-to-do
William Minnoch. The tug of love does
not turn out favourably for L'Angelier, since allegedly he was poisoned by Madeleine.
I only know about this in so much detail
because I wrote an opera about it to a libretto by Jonathan Butcher, commission
for the 50th anniversary of Surrey Opera.
A key scene of this true story is the moment when the two star-crossed lovers
declare that they are already married, no ceremony is required. The resulting disaster involving blackmail
and the murder (allegedly) is predicated upon the social tensions of class and
expectation laid upon a beautiful and eligible young woman. After her trial – the verdict was ‘not
proven’ – Madeleine Smith disappeared into a certain obscurity, as did William
Minnock who refused to marry her. The main story and the core of the opera, is the burning love between Madeleine and
Emile, innocent until proven guilty, and then disappeared in a series of low
crimes. Madeleine, allegedly….not too
many years ago researchers discovered the original gathering of evidence from
the crime in 1857, and found that the tea cups from Madeleine's bedroom that
Emile was known to have drunk from, did indeed contain microscopic traces of
arsenic. Some things never quite
disappear it would seem.
©David Hackbridge Johnson