British Composers Research Articles

SAVING FAITH: STOCKHAUSEN AND SPIRITUALITY

ABSTRACTInvited in 2011 by Robert Sholl and Sander van Maas to contribute to a proposed symposium on the spiritual in late twentieth-century music, I accepted, not because I agreed with the project and its aims, but to defend Stockhausen's character and reputation from convenient misrepresentation. Sin and virtue, spirituality and the spiritual life ask to be addressed in terms of actual works and personal witness – in my own case, not least given the composer's complaint late in life: ‘You have to watch out for Maconie's nihilism’. The test of spirituality inevitably entails scrutinizing the motives of former Stockhausen disciples who changed their minds, among them two English composers of my own generation, Jonathan Harvey and John Tavener, who have since passed away. In 2014 the opening sentence of the present paper provided theologian and Stockhausen-forum editor Thomas Ulrich with an amusing starting-point (‘Suffering? How very Protestant!’) for just the second of a trickle of online discussions of largely pathetic inconsequence.

Delian Modes: Listening for Delia Derbyshire in Histories of Electronic Dance Music

This paper examines the work of English composer and sound designer Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) in the context of histories of EDM and historical accounts of women in electronic music. Examining the media discourse around Derbyshire, whose reputation has grown significantly since her death, I consider how Derbyshire has come to be regarded posthumously as both a pioneering electronic composer and a forerunner of dance music and electronica in the UK. I consider how these identities are related to her gender, and how gender is constructed and expressed in the discourse around her life and work, with reference to the musical-critical phenomenon of hauntology.

TAPE LEADERS: EXCAVATING EARLY BRITISH ELECTRONIC MUSIC

AbstractThis article questions the narrow representation of the history of much early British electronic music, and challenges the way historians and writers have tended to cherry-pick and lionize certain individuals, while ignoring all the others that fall outside of the limited and regularly repeated version of events. It is an extension of the research presented in my compendium Tape Leaders, conceived during 2010 with the aspiration to catalogue all the early British electronic music composers who became active before 1970, presenting a biographical entry for as many experimenters as I could trace and documenting more than 100 individuals, including hobbyist tape activists, who have never before received recognition. Tape Leaders presents a completely different picture to the consensus that positions the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and a handful of others, at the centre of electronic activity in Britain, with allegedly very little else happening until universities caught on at the end of the 1960s and began to offer courses and studio facilities.

Modern singing sons of the Pharaohs

In 2009, the U.S. Library of Congress officially launched the Ragheb Moftah Collection, an online exhibit that presented the largest music archive of Coptic liturgical recordings and music transcriptions outside of Egypt. Moftah, an amateur Egyptian collector, had commissioned an English composer, Ernest Newlandsmith, to notate and record the entire Orthodox hymnody. They both believed that, as the last connection to a Pharaonic and pre-Islamic past, the ancient melodies lay unchanged, “buried under a debris of Arabic and other ornamentation.” Drawing on Wendy Cheng’s notion of strategic orientalism (2013) and Timothy Mitchell’s staging modernity (2000), I explore contemporary discursive politics of sound archives in the Coptic community. Specifically, I investigate the role of Coptic music archives in articulations of community legitimacy, indigeneity, and agency as a religious and political minority in a Muslim majority nation. How have today’s cantors and activists rendered western transcriptions as sound objects which to negotiate authenticity as Egypt’s last remaining “modern sons of the pharaohs,” even without being able to read them? As the principal curator of the site, I explore how Western scholarly encounters have not only entangled Coptic music discourses in a western-centered teleology of modernity and progress, but in emulating the West, also infused them with orientalist critiques that equated heterophony and embellishments to “Arab debris” that marked signs of backwardness.

Maurice Greene's Vocal Chamber Music on Italian Texts

Maurice Greene (1696–1755), best known for his sacred and secular vocal music on English texts, left a substantial corpus of vocal chamber music set to Italian texts that remained unpublished during his lifetime and has not been studied in detail until now. It comprises ten cantatas for soprano and continuo, one cantata and seven chamber arias for voice, violin and continuo, four chamber duets and a cycle, scored variously for soprano and bass voice with continuo, of 15 settings of Anacreontic odes translated into Italian by Paolo Rolli. Greene was the only major English composer contemporary with Handel to produce such a quantity and variety of ‘Italian’ vocal music, and these compositions, which evidence a very good knowledge of the Italian language and Italian musical style, are of a quality to match their Handelian counterparts. They are subtle, responsive to the text and in certain respects very distinctive and original.

Nationalisms, Modernisms and Masculinities: Strategies of Displacement in Vaughan Williams’s Reading of Walt Whitman

At the time of his death in 1892, the paradigmatic American poet Walt Whitman was more widely celebrated in Britain than in his own country, having received the vocal support of the likes of Tennyson, William Michael Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, Swinburne (for a time) and Edward Carpenter. For these writers, Whitman’s political egalitarianism – expressed through notions of ‘manly love’ and comradeship – presented a powerful alternative to prevailing Victorian forms of political and social relations. Whitman also provided significant inspiration for British composers at the turn of the twentieth century, with settings by Holst, Delius, Grainger, Scott, Gurney, Bridge, Stanford, Wood, Vaughan Williams and others. Yet while Whitman’s transatlantic literary reception has come to be seen as a moment of crystallization in the formation of contemporary notions of homosexuality, his reception among British composers is viewed as having been highly circumscribed, focusing more on the democratic and mystical implications of Whitman’s poetry.This article suggests a different account of Vaughan Williams’s reading of Whitman, and explores the implications of this reading for our broader understanding of the relationship between several notions of nationalism, masculinity and modernism. This examination aims to complicate, inter alia, the narrative of rupture associated with the transition to modernism, by demonstrating how the continuity of intellectual concerns across aesthetic, national, and sexual spheres has been obscured by strategies of displacement.

Music for the London stage

The English composer John Eccles (c.1668–1735) obtained his first major composing job as a result of a 17th-century industrial relations dispute. In the early 1690s, the United Company was the only theatre company in London licensed to perform plays. Following a dispute over salaries and conditions, the theatre manager and actor Thomas Betterton broke free of the company in 1695 and—taking many of its most experienced actors and singers with him—formed a breakaway company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. For some reason his principal composer, Henry Purcell, stayed with the remnants of the old company. This left the field open for John Eccles, who had composed a few songs for the United Company, to join Betterton as his chief composer. Within a few months, Purcell was dead, and over the next decade Eccles became one of the leading composers for the London stage, supplying music for operas and masques, as well as incidental music for more than 60 plays.

Through the Silver Screen: The Collaborative Creation of Works for Piano and Video

This article examines my collaboration with British composer, Adam de la Cour, on his work for piano, video and electronics, Transplant the Movie! (2016). I use auto-ethnographic techniques to examine our collaborative relationship as the work was conceived, created and prepared for performance. Transplant the Movie! (2016) takes as its inspiration the subgenre of early horror films that focus on pianists receiving hand transplants from the corpses of deceased criminals, including The Hands of Orlac (1924), Mad Love (1935), The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), and Hands of a Stranger (1962). I worked with Adam de la Cour to film re-enactments of selected scenes, imitating the style of the original films which he then intercut to form the film used in this work. The pianist, at first plays the role of a silent movie pianist accompanying the film, before finding himself transported into it, imitating the action on screen in a process that is both horrific and comedic. The score for the pianist is itself a collage of excerpts from across the canonical piano repertoire creating another layer of intertextual complexity that both enhances and resists the narrative of cut-up horror films on screen, before this relationship unravels in a wild climax where the film becomes a hallucinatory graphic score. In a collaboration where the pianist is a co-creator, a character on screen, and the performer of the finished work, the roles of all the creative participants must remain constantly fluid throughout the process, with the cinematic and musical elements improvised, negotiated and discussed in tandem over many stages. The case-study demonstrates how working across art forms both facilitates and necessitates the need for a unique approach to collaboration, where both composer and performer play a variety of creative roles in the composition and filmmaking processes.

‘Story of a friendship’: Alan Bush, Grigorii Shneerson and cultural diplomacy before and during the Cold War

ABSTRACTThis article explores efforts by the British composer Alan Bush to facilitate cultural exchange from the late 1930s and across the Iron Curtain. I will argue that his unwavering support and championing of Soviet music deserves greater acknowledgement. Through the correspondence between Bush and the Russian musicologist Grigorii Shneerson it has been possible to compile a list of materials exchanged between the two unofficially. It is my intention to draw attention to a small, but not insignificant world of private exchange voluntarily undertaken by individuals such as Bush and to show that such exchanges played an important part in cultural diplomacy between the two countries. From a broader perspective, we will see how their communication was viewed by the British authorities as politically significant, but that for the two men it was predominantly a relationship about music.

Anna Clyne The Seamstress, Barbican Hall, London; Anna Clyne This Lunar Beauty, Wigmore Hall, London

‘Old mythologies’ have been important for some time to Anna Clyne, and they come into play again in two of her most recent works: the violin concerto The Seamstress and her brief Auden setting, This Lunar Beauty, for soprano and ensemble. The young British composer (b. 1980) has for many years been a resident of New York; she studied with Julia Wolfe in Manhattan and since 2010 has been the composer in association with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

COMPLEXITY, CLARITY AND CONTEMPORARY BRITISH ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

AbstractThis article discusses how normative perceptions of British contemporary orchestral music can be underpinned by a residual binary of ‘clarity’ versus ‘complexity’ as positive and negative value judgements respectively, informing public discourse around the orchestra by reviewers, audiences and performers alike. A post-war valorisation of ‘clarity’ is traceable to the transparent neo-tonal harmony, melodic invention and approaches to orchestration characteristic of the post-Britten tradition. The adoption of such a valorisation by ‘mainstream’ contemporary British composers, exemplified by Faber Music, has generalised an aesthetically specific compositional approach. Using the examples of Thomas Adès and George Benjamin, the article shows how certain residual normative approaches to material and notation are defined against the tendencies of ‘complexism’ as exemplified by Brian Ferneyhough. This binary has engendered conservatism towards traditions of radical new orchestral music that do not conform to normative expectations of ‘clarity’, as the immediately perceptible separation and identification of musical elements.

Encounters with British Composers by Andrew Palmer. The Boydell Press, 2015. £25.00 (hardback)

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“A canvas of endless extent”: Granville Bantock, Robert Southey and The Curse of Kehama Project

ABSTRACTThis article focuses upon the little-known musical refiguring of Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama by the British composer Granville Bantock (1868–1946). After noting parallels between the poet and composer's creative difficulties associated with their respective projects, and issues highlighted in the reception of both “texts,” two aspects of Bantock's project (a significant document in the reception of Southey's poetry) are discussed in more detail: his attempts to unify an extended musico-poetic structure, and his response to the sense of “other” in Southey's poem. In terms of the latter, and in the context of Bantock's complex relationship with the East, two specific ideas from Southey scholarship – the concept of layers of otherness in Southey's poetry and the panoramic mode – are identified as having a real potential in helping us to understand Bantock's refiguring. The application of these ideas in a musical context offers further parallels and contrasts between poet and composer, leading to a richer understanding of the complexities involved in creative responses to oriental material in literary and musical forms.

English Keyboard Music c. 1600–1625 ed. by Alan Brown (review)

English Keyboard Music c. 1600-1625. Edited by Alan Brown. (Musica Britannica, 96.) London: Stainer & Bell, 2014. [Contents, p. xv-xviii; pref. in Eng., Fre., Ger., p. xix-xxi; introd. in Eng., p. xxiii-xxix; editorial notes, p. xxx-xxxi; instruments and performance, p. xxxii-xxxiv; acknowledgments, p. xxxv; plates, p. xxxvii-xli; score, p. 1-143; appendices, p. 144-69; list of sources and bibliography, p. 170-80; notes on the textual commentary, p. 181; textual commentary, p. 182-97. Cloth. ISMN 979-0-2202-2385-3, ISBN 978-0-85249-937-5. 93. [pounds sterling]] Anyone working in British music studies, particularly earlier repertories, approaches the series Musica Britannica with high expectations: beautifully engraved thorough textual commentaries, and well considered scholarly commentary--simply elegant books. Alan Brown's newly published English Keyboard Music c. 1600-1625, volume 96 of the series, meets these expectations and more. One of the chief issues facing Brown with this edition was the selection of pieces to be included. Keyboard music has always been a part of this national collection of music, a fact made apparent with its inaugural volume, Denis Stevens's edition of The Mulliner Book (London: Stainer & Bell, 1951), now available in a new, sixtieth-anniversary revision (The Mulliner Book, newly transcribed and edited by John Caldwell, Musica Britannica, 1 [London: Stainer & Bell, 2011]). Few of the volumes published by Musica Britannica are devoted to a single source, although the forthcoming Keyboard Music from Manuscripts contains music from the Fitzwilliam and Tisdale virginal books (both part of the collection in Cambridge). Brown mentions that Christ Church, Oxford, Mus. 89, has not been considered for this edition (it contains anonymous liturgical organ possibly by an English composer, p. xxiv), and it is hoped that in the future, Musica Britannica will see its way to a volume dedicated to this important source. More typical of Musica Britannica are the volumes that focus on the works of a single composer (Thomas Tomkins in vol. 5, John Bull in vols. 14 and 19, Orlando Gibbons in vol. 20, Giles and Richard Farnaby in vol. 24, William Byrd in vols. 27 and 28, Peter Philips in vol. 75, and later music by John Blow and Thomas Roseingrave in other volumes). A bit trickier to put together are those editions that cull pieces from several sources for a specific time period, such as Elizabethan Keyboard Music (vol. 55) and Tudor Keyboard Music (vol. 66). English Keyboard Music c. 1600-1625 (vol. 96) follows these collections in that it presents compositions not included in previous volumes (especially those devoted to a single composer whose works fall within the periods indicated) thereby filling in gaps in the published repertory. Brown clearly lays out in the preface his criteria for inclusion (p. xix). In conjunction with the forthcoming volume, English Keyboard Music c. 1600-1625 completes the task of making available all of the music from English composers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries--the virginalists. (Brown is careful with that term, employing scare quotes in his rare usage.) Thus, once Keyboard Music from Manuscripts (edited by the late Christopher Hogwood) becomes available, we should have access to scholarly editions of the entire output of English composers up to 1625. Brown notes that several pieces from the period have appeared in worthy editions elsewhere, and he explains that their quality and availability justifies excluding the same works here (pp. xxiii-xxiv). Also, a few pieces still in manuscript were omitted. His reasons for doing so are clear and practical. The definition of keyboard source necessarily plays into Brown's choice of repertory. He delineates those works intended for ensemble that have sometimes been construed as works, such as Parthenia In-Violata, but chooses to include others that appear to be versions of consort works. …

BBC Proms 2015: Gary Carpenter, Anders Hillborg, Ørjan Matre, Alissa Firsova, B Tommy Andersson

Sibelius' and Nielsen's 150th anniversary year has prompted a proliferation of events to celebrate the music of the Nordic composers, from conferences to concert series. The Proms has been no exception, with an unusually high number of Nordic composers represented throughout the festival (although Glazunov, also in his 150th anniversary year, has been forgotten). British composer Gary Carpenter's Dadaville was premiered on the first night, which opened to the sounds of Nielsen's Maskarade and Sibelius's Belshazzar's Feast, while later concerts covered here presented premieres by the Swedish composers Anders Hillborg and B Tommy Andersson, the Norwegian composer Ørjan Matre, and Moscow-born (though UK-based) composer Alissa Firsova.

Transforming *Jane Eyre*: Its Australian Stage Adaptations

The history of Australian stage adaptations of Jane Eyre illustrates the shifting fortunes and reach of melodrama and its conventions, as they become psychologised over the course of the twentieth century. The earliest adaptation of Jane Eyre written for the Australian stage was Rose Evans’s Quite Alone (1872). Working within highly melodramatic codes, Quite Alone portrayed ‘hate, sympathy, love, and finally marriage’ (‘Miss Rose Evans’s “Quite Alone”’). Two creative engagements by Australian writers have reached wide international audiences: Helen Jerome’s 1936 stage adaptation, published in 1937, was the most performed and successful adaptation of the twentieth century; the chamber opera with music by British composer Michael Berkeley and libretto by Australian writer David Malouf premiered in 2000, and has been performed in Britain, Australia and the U.S. In adapting a three-volume novel within the demands of contemporary staging, both Jerome and Malouf explore the nuances of a particular affect in the relationship between Jane and Rochester. In Jerome’s 1936 stage adaptation the affect is passion, signalled in the published play’s subtitle A Drama of Passion; in Malouf’s libretto, the predominant affect is sympathy. Jerome’s adaptation struggles to mesh melodrama, realism and more modernist elements in her rereading of the novel for the stage, whilst Malouf and Berkeley’s chamber opera is late modernist. I place the adaptations in a broader history of creative engagements with Jane Eyre, drawing out intermedial influences on the staging of Jerome’s and Malouf’s adaptations in particular.

셰익스피어 시대의 엘리자베스 마드리갈

Dealing with the English madrigal of the late Renaissance, the current paper focuses on illuminating the difference that separates it from the Italian vocal music of the same name. The most significant distinction is found in the text set to music. The Italian composers sought the poems of the most distinguished poets of the contemporary as well as the past such as Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Battista Guarini, and Torquato Tasso. Their primary goal was to deliver the poetic meaning and feeling through musical notes. In contrast, the English composers were more free to selecting the poems, resulting in the neglect of their distinguished men of letters even like William Shakespeare. It was due to their tendency to focus more on music itself full of lightness and wit. The present work also surveys the historical background of the English madrigal during the reign of the Queen Elizabeth, by whose name it is dubbed. One thing of note underlying its birth is the optimism that prevailed the Queen’s reign and reached highest with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in August 8, 1588. The Italian composer named Alfonso Ferrabosco played the most significant role in initially importing the madrigal from Italy in England, while Thomas Morley was the most important native composer and publisher in cultivating and distributing the madrigal with English text.

Revolutionary music or music for revolution? Thirteen paragraphs on Cornelius Cardew: the composer and his communism

Paragraphs on the English composer: his life and work through different phases, and his musics' political contexts and implications. Many regret Cardew's adoption of maoism from the early 1970s, not least because it led to his bitter renunciation of his earlier avant garde work. A suggestion: Cardew's political and artistic choices came from dilemmas which anyone concerned with the left and culture can usefully revisit.

Josquin in England: an unexpected sighting

A group portrait of four unidentified Elizabethan children making music, attributed to the English painter known as the Master of the Countess of Warwick (fl. later 1560s), features a realistically depicted musical partbook. This can be identified as the bass part of Josquin’s motet Domine ne in furore / Turbatus est (New Josquin Edition 16.7), in an exact reproduction from a printed source, Johannes Petreius’s Tomus primus psalmorum selectorum (RISM 1538/6). Domine ne in furore is a complete polyphonic setting of Psalm 6 without doxology: exactly the sort of ‘psalm-motet’ cultivated by numerous English composers during the 1560s. Though sources of Josquin’s music were not entirely unknown in 16th-century England, this painting offers a new and unusual glimpse into the world of international musical exchange and the mid-century transformation of the motet in England.

The Maturation of The Secular Organ Recital In America's Gilded Age

While organs had been built in the United States since the eighteenth century, until the middle of the nineteenth century what passed as an ‘organ concert’ consisted of a mélange of transcriptions from choral music and simple improvisations, interspersed with choral music and vocal solos. As larger organs began to appear by the middle of the nineteenth century, solo organ recitals by players such as George W. Morgan were occasionally performed. In the 1850s Americans such as Dudley Buck and John K. Paine travelled to Germany to study organ performance and composition, and others followed. The opening of a large organ in Boston's Music Hall in 1863 and the building of large churches in the post-war period gave impetus to public organ recitals, which along with compositions by Bach, Mendelssohn, Rinck and Batiste etc. usually included transcriptions from operas and orchestral works, and compositions by the performers. At first, the emphasis was on Germanic music, but as the second half of the century progressed and more organists were studying abroad, works by British and French composers began to appear. By the end of the century the emphasis had become strongly French, particularly after the concert tours of Parisian virtuoso Alexandre Guilmant, and America's first true concert organist, Clarence Eddy, began making tours to European countries. By this time many large organs had been built for concert halls, cathedrals, colleges, and urban churches, providing excellent venues for solo organ recitals as the twentieth century opened.