Coleridge-Taylor and the Orchestra

Abstract

If he had not achieved such an overwhelming success with The Song of Hiawatha, it is possible that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's creativity would have taken another path. The most likely one would have been that established in his years as a student at Royal College of Music, where he made a considerable reputation as a composer of instrumental and orchestral music. The Longfellow cantata created an almost insatiable demand for more choral works. Coleridge-Taylor's orchestral skills would be exercised in these, but in a secondary role. Nevertheless, even here orchestra was arguably his prime concern. It was essential to his musical thinking, as can be seen in tenacity with which he negotiated his minimum orchestral requirements with Andrew Hilyer and other Washingtonians and thus delayed his first visit to United States. Inadequate players caused his resignation as conductor of Croydon Orchestral Society (Sayers 1927, 178-179). We must remember that Coleridge-Taylor was primarily a violinist--like Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius. And like these contemporaries, he had some keyboard skills, although with all three composers, violin came more naturally. This affected way in which they composed. Pianist-composers such as Ravel and Rachmaninoff wrote superbly for orchestra; a keyboard instrument offers a section through vertical, harmonic, aspect of a composer's work. But it can be a snare for unwary if effect of sustaining pedal is ignored. A transcription of a work written for piano would probably be unsatisfactory if this aspect is neglected. Certainly Charles Villiers Stanford, Coleridge-Taylor's professor at college, insisted that his students be proficient keyboard players, but in fact, composers with a good ear will hear work in their head and do not need a piano. Coleridge-Taylor had such an ear. Additionally, his ability as a violinist enabled him to write idiomatically for strings of orchestra, from violin down to double bass. After leaving college, Coleridge-Taylor was very much a hands-on musician, plunging into amateur orchestral world of southern England. This practical experience colored his whole approach to orchestral writing. He was aware of effect of gaps in orchestral fabric when instrumentalists were absent (or perhaps had not been recruited in first place). He knew which keys would make for less-than-perfect intonation in strings; how a nervous oboist might ruin a too-prominent solo; how out-of-tune brass might erupt and cause chaos. Eventually, inadequacies of his amateur brass and wind players became intolerable. Nevertheless, this amateur orchestral experience--and his own spells in string section of college orchestras--left a discernible legacy. This was heard in his orchestration: never less than effective, always solid, it made its points even when scaled down in arrangements (and played only moderately well). Coleridge-Taylor graduated from amateur to professional orchestras as he and his music traveled. He gained approbation of hard-bitten professional instrumentalists. They also welcomed him as a conductor who directed his own works and music of others. This was an era of variable qualities in British orchestras, encouraged by restricted rehearsal time to extent that in choral concerts, singers often met at first performance (Jacobs 1994, 39-40). Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) recalled that in 1902, on a two-month tour with his first opera company, the orchestra [was] quite most incompetent I have ever known, and he commented that outside Covent Garden, Queen's Hall (both in London), and Halle in Manchester, the average player was hardly equipped to tackle any music except that of a simple and straightforward kind (Beecham 1979, 65, 66). Henry Wood, conductor at Queen's Hall from its early days, employed instrumentalists from France, Germany, and Netherlands to reduce these problems (Pound 1969, 58). …