From Student to Composer: The Chamber Works

Abstract

In the files of the Royal College of Music is a report on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's studies under Walter Parratt during the young man's first eighteen months at the school. This had witnessed slide from fair at the end of the Easter semester, 1891, through in July to irregular by the end of December 1891. Sir George Grove, who had presided over college affairs for ten years, commented, Why this irregularity at the Music Class? Please let me never have to complain again. The rest is very gratifying (quoted in Royal College of Music Annual Reports 1891). For the Easter term ending on April 2, 1892, the composer received the comment bad, and he dropped the class from that point on. The young student must have been bored; he needed no such instruction. Coleridge-Taylor's harmony class proved the antithesis of this experience, with tutor Charles Wood commenting that his work has been in every respect excellent (quoted in Royal College of Music Annual Reports 1892). Yet Coleridge relinquished this class too, confirming that he did not need much training in harmony either. Coleridge-Taylor had entered the college in the fall of 1890 as a student of the violin, but after two years, and just weeks after seventeenth birthday, he started studying composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and replaced violin studies with the piano. Six months later, in March 1893, he was awarded an open scholarship to study composition. By the standards of both time and place, this shift was remarkable, especially seen in the experience of Coleridge-Taylor's college colleague, Ralph Vaughan Williams, born in 1872 and a student at the college after studying history at Cambridge University. Vaughan Williams' compositions were eventually to attract an international reputation, yet Stanford insisted that Vaughan Williams study the harmony course until he passed Grade 5 (that period lasted two terms) before he would take him for composition (Vaughan Williams 1963, 181). In comparison, Coleridge-Taylor's musical abilities were in evidence from the first months at Grove's institution. The young Coleridge-Taylor developed rapidly as a composer, showing remarkable assurance and craftmanship. His student works form a well-defined chapter of output. During the four years that he studied under Stanford, he produced at least eleven chamber works for various combinations of instruments. From 1897 when he left Prince Consort Road to death in 1912, he produced four more works in this genre. This sharp decrease is no doubt due to the absence of a commercial market for chamber music in Britain at this time. Of four professional works, three were written for violin and piano (Four African Dances, op. 58, 1904; Romance, op. 59, no. 2, 1904; and the Ballade in C minor, op. 73, 1907), and the fourth was for cello and piano (Variations in B minor, 1907). Stanford actively advocated the educative and formative reasons for writing chamber music, a genre that had been recently enriched by the appearance of chamber works by Brahms and Dvorak, such as the latter's Piano Quintet in A, op. 81 (1887), and the former's Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115 (1891), and Clarinet Sonata, op. 120 (1894). Stanford's own compositions included a piano quintet (1886) and two string quintets. He believed in the vital concepts of Brahmsian intellectualism and which exists by virtue of its own sound alone, which we term 'absolute music' (quoted in Stanford and Forsyth 1916, 232). Chamber music employs slender means, but having fewer forces with which to work does not necessarily mean that it is easier to write. The two students who passed Stanford's ultimate test were Coleridge-Taylor and William Hurlstone, who were seen as the professor's favorites. Hurlstone, Coleridge-Taylor's friend and fellow student, was awarded the first Cobbett Prize in 1906 for Phantasy Quartet in A minor, in 1906 (Hurlstone 1947, 24). …