In today's Sunday Telegraph:
The elusive sound of Britishness
As the BBC launches a television series on home-grown masterworks,
Daniel Johnson examines what it is that defines our musical nationality
BRITISH music is only 100 years old. In 1899, Elgar's Enigma Variations
burst into the world to resurrect the soul of English music that had
been laid to rest with Purcell two centuries before. In that century,
a corpus of compositions has accumulated that bears comparison with
that of any other nation.
Much of it remains unfamiliar; and what is not is over-familiar.
It helps to define our identity without our being fully aware of
it. Do we hear or play or sing or hum these tunes in a special way,
because they are British? I don't think we do, and yet we feel a kind
of recognition even when we hear one of these works for the first
time.
What is British about this music? We know, or think we know, when we
hear it: a favourite hymn, the Last Night of the Proms, a Beatles
song. But as soon as we try to define it, the sound of Britain
becomes elusive.
Starting today, BBC2 TV will try over the next six weeks to answer
this question. "Masterworks: Six Pieces of Britain" is a remarkable
series of programmes, in each of which a portrait of a composer is
combined with a performance of one of his most representative works.
Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis of 1910 is
played in the numinous surroundings of Gloucester Cathedral; Elgar's
Cello Concerto (1919) is filmed in the Abbey Road studios, where not
only the Beatles but also Elgar recorded; Walton's Belshazzar's Feast
is given, as it was for the first time in 1931, amid the municipal
magnificence of Leeds Town Hall. The remaining works are Britten's
Serenade for tenor, horn and string orchestra Op 31 (1943), Sir
Harrison Birtwistle's The Triumph of Time (1972) and Mark-Anthony
Turnage's saxophone concerto, Your Rockaby, which is performed in
the Brixton Academy.
British music has been defined since the 1930s by what the BBC
broadcasts. Belshazzar's Feast was one of the corporation's first
commissions, and Birtwistle and Turnage are only two of many composers
whose awareness of their musical heritage would be impossible without
Radio 3. It has formed their aural background, just as the choral
tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian era did for the young Walton
and Britten, both of whom came from families of singers.
Hence it was the BBC, in the person of Sir William Glock, Controller
of Music from 1959 to the early 1970s, who dragged a reluctant public
into the atonal era. If Glock was the prophet of New Music and the
critic Hans Keller its evangelist, Pierre Boulez was greeted as a
messiah when he arrived in 1971 to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
As Birtwistle's generation (including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett) took over from Britten's, the distinctively
British musical idiom was largely subsumed into a European or even
a global one.
This musical reformation was both cause and consequence of the eclipse
of choral music and folksong, and it led to the banishment from the
airwaves of the older English school. Such traditionalists as William
Lloyd Webber, the father of Andrew and Julian, abandoned composition
during this period, while even those writing advanced tonal music,
such as Edmund Rubbra or Berthold Goldschmidt, were frozen out.
Glock broadened British horizons, putting an end to the possessive
parochialism which pretended that only the British could play British
music. But, as music critic Michael Kennedy, who features in the
series, says: "Like all revolutions this one went too far."
In the past decade there has undoubtedly been a return to a
more accessible musical idiom, partly stimulated by the vogue for
authenticity, which has led to the rediscovery of so much early music.
Those who never abandoned tonality, such as David Matthews or Robin
Holloway, are taken more seriously, while younger composers such as
Turnage and Thomas Ades are unashamedly eclectic. They are certainly
gaining popularity. But what is British about them? What, in fact,
is British about any British composer?
The Six Pieces of Britain offers only tentative, oblique answers
that reflect the political incorrectness of the question. There is
no acknowledgement of the fact that all six composers are English.
If "British" means anything in a musical context, it suggests the
imperial rather than the national, the transient rather than the
timeless. We may call the tradition that begins with Elgar British,
or even trace it back to Handel. But it is the Englishness of British
music that endures, that has already survived the disintegration of
the Empire and will survive even the disintegration of Britain or
the absorption of its parts into a European federation.
If it is anything, Englishness is not "heritage", but the living
stream of national consciousness to which T S Eliot alluded in Little
Gidding: "So, while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a
secluded chapel/ History is now and England."
No more sublime intimation of that than the Tallis Fantasia in the
BBC programme. The vast Gloucester Cathedral is filled by the two
orchestras and quartet and, as the austere modal melody rises and
falls, returning in the final violin solo like a divine benediction,
the camera carries us away with it.
Strange to think that this quintessence of all that the English dream
of "in quires and places where they sing" was the work of an atheist
who had studied under Ravel, without whose nimble Gallic lightness
of texture he would never have achieved the ethereal quality of this
score.
In his lectures on national music given in America in 1932, Vaughan
Williams defined art as "the evocation of personal experience in
terms which will be intelligible to and command the sympathy of
others. These others must clearly be primarily those who by race,
tradition, and cultural experience are nearest to him." Yet the
conditions under which modern English music could emerge at the turn
of the century were those of unlimited exposure and devotion to
European - principally German - music.
That devotion was occasionally reciprocated. It was a great
Austro-Hungarian conductor, Hans Richter, who gave the premiere
of the Enigma Variations, the work with which the English musical
renaissance announced itself, and Richter had no hesitation in
mentioning Elgar and Wagner in the same breath, as the two composers
to whose works he had dedicated himself.
This Anglo-Germanic musical symbiosis, a casualty of the First World
War, was hugely beneficial to the new English school: it meant that
not only those who, like Gustav Holst, had continental roots, but
even those others - such as Vaughan Williams or Britten, who were
fascinated by English folksong - could still feel a part of the
European mainstream.
Britten returned to Britain from the US in 1942 after reading E M
Forster's essay on George Crabbe: "To think of Crabbe is to think
of England." The Serenade, the first important piece he composed
after returning, is a profoundly English work, with its cornucopia
of verses from Jonson to Blake and Keats, and it served to relaunch
the composer in wartime with a public that had been primed to see
him and his friend W H Auden as draft-dodgers, even traitors.
Yet Britten could not have rediscovered his Englishness without first
discovering the world beyond. As a schoolboy he already appreciated
the then neglected Mahler, was an early admirer of Shostakovich and
Bartok, and he also set poetry by Michelangelo, Holderlin, Rimbaud
and Pushkin. Britten owed his cosmopolitanism to Auden, just as
Walton owed his to the Sitwells.
Even Britten's supreme achievements, such as Peter Grimes and the
War Requiem, are at once steeped in the English choral and poetic
traditions, and yet pay homage to very un-English models, Berg's
Wozzeck and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Britten is not merely the
most English of post-war English composers; he is the most European
of post-war European composers, too.
With Birtwistle, and even more with Turnage, Englishness survives
only in the interstices. The Triumph of Time is based on a fantastic
scene by Breughel; Rockaby is reminiscent of the Heiliger Dankgesang
in Beethoven's quartet Op 132. And yet when Turnage goes into raptures
about New York, he echoes Vaughan Williams, who swooned with delight
at the view from the Empire State Building. Or when he suggests that
Miles Davis and Stravinsky are the two great composers of the century,
he is only echoing Walton, with whose brittle virtuosity he might
seem to have little in common, but whose debt to jazz was just as
great and who could never have written his masterpiece, Facade,
without Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. The saxophone was Walton's
instrument as much as Birtwistle's and Turnage's.
The Englishness of English music is not only elusive, but also
inimitable. That goes for Elgar's grief-stricken coda to the Cello
Concerto or Vaughan Williams's mystical trysts with the Tudor past,
but does it go for Birtwistle and Turnage? The seedy unseemliness of
contemporary Britain may be detectable in their music, but rarely
the prospect of transcendence. They are British composers, certainly,
but do they belong - do they want to belong - to the English tradition
of Elgar and Walton, Britten and Tippett? Six Pieces of Britain
asserts that they do, that there is a "melancholy" common to all six
Englishmen.
The anatomy of melancholy is not unique to England; indeed, we have
had less to anatomise than most. There is, though, a peculiarly
English mood that colours melancholy or, for that matter, any other
temperament expressed in music. What we hear in moments of rapturous
introspection, heightened by an awareness of belonging, is not a
distinctive language, but rather a tone of voice.
For more than half a century, composers found that tone without
difficulty. Since the death of Britten, more than 20 years ago, it
has been less audible. In recapturing it, our young composers may
also discover that they are reaching a wider public than they ever
believed possible.
Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom
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