Anthony Payne

Delius's Stylistic Development

Looking at Deliuss music in chronological order, we discover a pattern of development more continuous than an almost life-long reliance on the same technique might suggest. An increasing richness of chord structure, bearing with it its own subtle means of contrast and development, slowly but surely ousted more conventional methods; slowly, that is, apart from the startling jump with which his music suddenly acquired full stature, only to resume its steady progress. As a young man he was far from being the dreamer we might think; in fact, he was very much an adventurer, always on the move, and thoroughly cosmopolitan. We can well imagine that he had little time for contemplation, so that his attitude to beauty would be, at first, conventionally picturesque, and devoid of personal involvement. Bearing in mind that his avowed intention as a composer was to express his emotions, we need not be surprised that with as yet little opportunity for the tranquil recollection needed to crystallize personal emotion, his early music is content to lean on Grieg and early Wagner. As time passed, and his poetic vision deepened, his models served him less satisfactorily until he finally dropped them. This process, probably unconscious, might well have been speeded up if he had been less absorbed in self-expression, and more interested in abstract formal problems. It could possibly be argued, in comparing the early Florida Suite (1888–1890) with Appalachia (1902)—both seemingly inspired by the same events—that the later work is superior because Delius had found the right means of expression; I think not. The emphasis lies the other way in that he had at last realized to the full the awful transience of love and nature, and there are few composers in whom we feel less inclined to divorce matter from style.

DAVID DREW: TRIBUTES & MEMORIES (I)

In 1953 or thereabouts a London concert was announced containing the British premiere of Pierrot Lunaire , an epoch-making work as appeared to be the case from every book on music history I had been able to lay my hands on. So I got the score from the Pendlebury Library in the Cambridge Music School and duly became fascinated and perplexed. I then had a visit from David Drew, an undergraduate one year ahead of me. He had also wanted to see the score and had asked Charles Cudworth, the Pendelbury Librarian, how he could get in touch with the person who had taken it out. This was how I got to know David.

Britten and the String Quartet

THAT BENJAMIN BRITTEN already possessed in his early twenties a most astonishing technical assurance has never been in doubt; nor that he commanded a range of feeling and a stylistic integrity which proclaimed a uniquely precocious maturity. So much was evident from early published scores like the Sinfonietta, Phantasy for oboe quartet, Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge , and Our Hunting Fathers . The route by which he had reached this early maturity, however, was not generally known until comparatively recently, and the book which was for decades to remain the most reliable and perceptive guide to his music—the symposium of 1952 edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller—said little about the pre-opus 1 works, or about influences.

The Music of Frank Bridge: 2) The Last Years

The development of Bridges language after the Cello Sonata of 1913–17 is so sudden as to suggest some kind of inner upheaval. Perhaps it was associated with his revulsion against the war—Benjamin Britten has spoken of his teachers passionately-held pacifist convictions—and there may too have been a feeling that his own cultural background had disappeared in the holocaust, along with so many lives and hopes. On the other hand, his developing language at the time of the Cello Sonata and the Second Quartet may have unlocked some door to his subconscious. Whatever the case, he appears to have experienced a crisis of style and perhaps of personality immediately after the War. It is significant, for instance, that with one exception no major work seems to have been conceived after the completion of the Cello Sonata until the crucially important Piano Sonata, begun in 1922 but not finished until 1925. The period between these two sonatas was almost exclusively devoted to collections of small piano pieces and a handful of songs, some of which indicate the beginnings of Bridges new style. The single exception is the little opera in three scenes, The Christmas Rose , which was sketched in 1919 and scored ten years later. Moments of dramatic pressure elicited a rich harmonic response from Bridge in splashes of whole- and bi-tonal colouring; but over the work as a whole there lies an idyllic serenity in which the composer seems for the moment to be by-passing the problems which were soon to force themselves upon him.

‘Billy Budd’ on BBC 2

Susanne Langers codification of the process whereby the most strongly defined of two or more simultaneously presented art forms will swallow the others is peculiarly applicable to the problem of filming opera, an art form which itself illustrates her thesis in its transformation of words and drama into musical entities. In a filmed opera the cinematic side of the enterprise should not be a mere substitute for the operas dramatic as opposed to musical elements, although it becomes so if a stage performance is filmed with entirely fixed cameras. It must in fact treat the opera as an entity and not fall into the trap of expanding or dwelling on the dramatic angle alone. The result of such indulgence would be a distortion which several operatic films in the past have produced. The drama balloons far beyond the composers balanced creative integration, and swallows the music which then becomes no more than a background score. In the BBC Television film of Billy Budd , the producer Basil Coleman avoided this pitfall with conspicuous success. At the same time, he did not make the mistake of a timid use of the camera which while preserving operas peculiar relationship between drama and music produces a dull film, but allowed it to be true to its own medium as well as to the music-drama. The setting on board HMS Indomitable would present the obvious attraction of pretty camera work around and about one of the most photogenic subjects in existence. Shots like this however were cut to a minimum, even at such a heaven-sent opportunity as the arrival of the pressed men, when a panoramic view of their approach over the sea would certainly have been justified. However the music renders all this sort of thing unnecessary. The sea, for instance, is never glimpsed in the film because in a sense it is always there in the music, or all that is needed of it. A shot of the boat load arriving from the Rights of Man would have usurped the function of the music at one of its most magical moments—Billys bright fanfares on the wind, salt and clear as the sea air above, over an uneasy fade-out of the hauling song.

The Music of Nicholas Maw

NICHOLAS MAW by Anthony Payne Ten years ago when Europe had already experienced thirty years of experiment and achievement in the field of serial composition, there was emerging in Britain the first generation of young composers to have shown awareness of the revolution from the start. This time-lag, combined with a characteristically wary view of the latest continental developments, and naturally eclectic gifts, has borne fruit in a sensible but vital series of new styles and techniques-less liable, perhaps, in their innate conservatism, to achieve a visionary leap in the dark, but at the same time not prone to the excesses of some avant-garde experiments. Several of the young composers involved, Nicholas Maw among them, have shown facility in free atonal as well as twelve-note idioms and have tended recently towards a less rigorous application of serial methods. In fact in Britain at least the stage may well be set for a fulfilment of Kreneks prophecy-that the future development of atonal music will not depend on strict twelve-note regulation so much as on an instinctive preservation of the essence of the method. Born in 193 5, Maw was able to benefit from the new awareness of atonal trends and learned early on to think in the idiom without strain. Even when as in the passacaglia in Scenes and Arias there is a series of triadic harmonies (see Ex. I6c) they are to be seen as points of reference within an atonal world rather than as an inability to sever old ties. Being at one with atonality, he can divorce tonal items from context and use them without embarrassment. But if there was no problem for him, as there had been to previous generations of British composers, in reconciling growing dissonance with traditional methods of balance and movement, there were other problems of language which were just as acute. He had to discover the relevance to his own vision of Schoenbergs and Weberns methods, the one largely tied to a forward moving concept of time, the other to a timeless absorption in the petrified moment. More important still, the true relationship between free middle-period Schoenberg and the later twelve-note works had to be unravelled, a problem intimately connected with Maws own eclecticism, which led him among other things to the use of conjunct lines and a Brittenish cast of theme alongside more radical features. Until quite recently the critic must have been a little nonplussed by the production of works so different as the Nocturne (1958) and the Six Chinese Songs (i959), both performed for the first time at the 1960 Cheltenham Festival-especially as the composer seemed as assured in the expressionism of the earlier work as in the post-Webern serialism of the songs. The temptation was to attempt a strained thesis in finding them both typical. However in the light of more recent works these two pieces now appear to be the products of a trial period, and the Chinese Songs, to outward appearances a success at the time, a blind alley. The relevance of serial techniques to atonal thinking has occupied the composer from the first, and his earliest work of consequence, Eight Chinese Lyrics for unaccompanied mezzo soprano, written in Autumn 195 g6 while he was at the Royal Academy, throws interesting light on his attitude to twelve-note

Dramatic use of Tonality in Peter Grimes

Much has been made of the importance of the tritone in the War Requiem. Not only does this interval colour many of the harmonies and melodic contours of the work, it is also an important agent in maintaining its characteristic tonal instability. Interestingly the composers first large-scale masterpiece for voices and orchestra, Peter Grimes , is if anything even more dependent on tritone relationships, although unlike the Requiem it has few passages which are not either firmly in a key or else moving purposefully towards one. It could be said that whereas this interval provokes uncertainty in the later work, in Grimes it embodies incompatibility, for the operas dramatic movement is generated by tonal progressions which swing back and forth between two great poles of A and E flat, keys at opposite ends of the tonal spectrum, to symbolise the impossibility of coexistence for Grimes and the Borough.