Music in England

The Renaissance - 1) the music for the State

• Occasional music, ceremonial music for brass from the times of James I (1603-1625)

• Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

Composed Anthems, the one presented is to memorize the Queen Mary's death in 1694, played by the Chorus of Guilford Cathedral;

***********************music played: anthem sung

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears unto our pray'rs;
but spare us, Lord most holy,
O God most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Saviour,
Thou most worthy Judge eternal,
Suffer us not at our last hour,
for any pains of death to fall away from Thee.

a chorister in the Chapel Royal until his voice broke in 1673; then made assistant to John Hingeston, whom he succeeded as organ maker and keeper of the king's instruments in 1683. In 1677 he was appointed composer-in-ordinary for the king's violins and in 1679 succeeded his teacher, as organist of Westminster Abbey; married. From that time he began writing music for the theatre; 1682 an organist of the Chapel Royal. His court appointments were renewed by James II in 1685 and by William III in 1689, and on each occasion he had the duty of providing a second organ for the coronation. The last royal occasion for which he provided music was Queen Mary's funeral in 1695; he was buried in Westminster Abbey on 26 November 1695.

Purcell was one of the greatest composers of the Baroque period and one of the greatest of all English composers. His earliest surviving works date from 1680 but already show a complete command of the craft of composition. They include the fantasias for viols, masterpieces of contrapuntal writing in the old style, and some at least of the more modern sonatas for violins, which reveal some acquaintance with Italian models. His theatre music in particular made his name familiar to many who knew nothing of his church music or the odes and welcome songs he wrote for the court. Much of the theatre music consists of songs and instrumental pieces for spoken plays, but during the last five years of his life Purcell collaborated on five 'semi-operas' in which the music has a large share, with 'divertissements', songs, choral numbers and dances. His only true opera (i.e. with music throughout) was Dido and Aeneas, written for a girls' school at Chelsea; despite the limitations of Nahum Tate's libretto it is among the finest of 17th-century operas.

• Sir William Turner Walton, 1902-1983) was a British composer and conductor.

His style was influenced by the works of Stravinsky, Sibelius and jazz, and is characterized by rhythmic vitality, bittersweet harmony, sweeping Romantic melody and brilliant orchestration His output includes orchestral and choral works, chamber music and ceremonial music, as well as notable film scores. His earliest works, especially Edith Sitwell's Façade brought him notoriety as a modernist, but it was with orchestral symphonic works and the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast that he gained international recognition. He was knighted in 1951, and was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1967. He died in Ischia, Italy, where he had settled in 1949.

*************Music played: in Westminster Abbey - The Coronation March

2) The music for the Church

Associated with cathedrals, professional singers= men;

• 16^th cent music by anonymous composer; here from the Magdalene [modlin] College Chorus, Oxford University

*********** music played: 450^th anniversary of Cambridge, M. Tippet's music, part of his Magnificat: “My soul doth magnify the Lord/ And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour”, sung by St.John's College Choir, Cambridge.

Michel Tippet:

Tippett was born in London of English and Cornish stock. His mother was a charity worker and a suffragette.^[1] Studied in Edinburgh, but he soon moved to Stamford School after some extremely unhappy personal experience. This, combined with his discovering his homosexuality, contributed to making Tippett's teenage years lonely and rather stressful. Although he was open about his sexual orientation, it seems that he started to feel emotional strain from a rather early age, and this later became a major motivation to his composition. He recalled that it was in Stamford, where he had piano lessons and saw Malcolm Sargent conducting, that he decided to become a composer, although he did not know what it meant nor how to start.

He registered as a student in the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Charles Wood and C.H.Kitson, and the former's teaching on counterpoint had profound influence on Tippett's future compositional style, and many of his works, despite of the complicated sonority, are essentially contrapuntal. Tippett also studied conducting with Adrian Boult and Malcolm Sargent. In the 1920s, living simply in Surrey, he plunged himself into musical life, conducting amateur choirs and local operas.

Unlike his contemporaries William Walton and Benjamin Britten, Tippett was a late developer as a composer and was severely critical of his early compositions. At the age of 30, he studied counterpoint and fugue with Reginald Owen Morris. His first mature compositions show a fascination with these aspects.

From the mid-1960s until the early 1970s, Tippett had a close relationship with the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra (LSSO), conducting them regularly in the UK and on tour in Europe and generally supporting the state-funded musical education programme that had produced an orchestra of such high standards. He conducted the LSSO almost exclusively in twentieth-century music, including Gustav Holst's The Planets, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and many new works by English composers. Under Tippett, the LSSO, an orchestra of ordinary secondary school children aged 14 to 18, regularly performed on BBC radio and TV, made commercial gramophone records and established new standards for music-making in an educational context. Tippett was knighted in 1966, and awarded the Order of Merit in 1983. He remained very active composing and conducting. His opera, New Year, received its premiere in 1989. Then came Byzantium, a piece for soprano and orchestra premiered in 1991. His autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues also appeared in 1991. A string quartet followed in 1992. In 1995 his ninetieth birthday was celebrated with special events in Britain, Canada and the US. In that year a collection of his essays, Tippett on Music, also appeared. In 1996, Tippett moved from Wiltshire to London. In 1997, in Stockholm for a retrospective of his concert music, he developed pneumonia. He was brought home where he died early in 1998.

Tippet's Music

Tippett was regarded by many as an outsider in British music, a view that may have been related to his conscientious objector status during World War II .His pacifist beliefs led to a prison sentence in World War II, and for many years his music was considered ungratefully written for voices and instruments, and therefore difficult to perform. An intense intellectual, he maintained a much wider knowledge and interest in the literature and philosophy of other countries (Africa, Europe). His works, completed slowly, comprised five string quartets, four concerti, four symphonies, five operas and a number of vocal and choral works. His music is typically seen as falling into four distinct periods. The first period (1935-1947) includes the first three quartets, the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, the oratorio A Child of Our Time (written to his own libretto at the encouragement of T. S. Eliot and first performed by Morley College Choir) and the First Symphony. The second period, from then until the late 1950s, includes the opera The Midsummer Marriage, the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, the Piano Concerto, and the Second Symphony; this period features rich textures and effervescent melody. The third period, the 1960s and '70s, is in stark contrast, and is characterised by abrupt statements and simplicity of texture, as in the opera King Priam, the Concerto for Orchestra and the Second Piano Sonata.

• The Midsummer Marriage (opera, 1946-52)

• King Priam (opera, 1958-61)

• The Knot Garden (opera, 1965-70)

• The Ice Break (opera, 1975-76)

• New Year (opera, 1985-88)

Sir Edward Elgar (1857 - 1934)

Sir Edward Elgar was born in Worcester in 1857. Until the outstanding success of the 'Enigma' Variations in 1899, he was considered a 'provincial' composer - and a largely self taught one at that.

In the earlier part of Elgar's career as a composer, he wrote several short pieces which became very popular indeed. Chanson de Matin is one such, the second of a pair (the other being Chanson de nuit), which carried his name far and wide before his larger orchestra works appeared. It was published in several versions at once: for string orchestra, for small orchestra, for violin and piano and so on - so it is almost impossible to say, with any degree of certainty, which was the original version. But Elgar himself was a good violinist, and it may well be that he would have played this tune through to himself on the violin, before adding a piano part and sending it off to his publishers for their consideration. By the outbreak of World War 1 he was arguably the most celebrated living British composer, whose reputation had been cemented by a succession of large scale choral and orchestral works. In a curious way, the War changed Elgar - as it touched all Europeans - as his public and private utterances became more sharply defined.

During the War Elgar produced, on the one hand, a series of great patriotic works, and on the other, as the War came to its end, a series of three great chamber compositions.

Early in 1917, Elgar and his wife felt they needed a change from living in London; they found an ideal spot, a small cottage in rural Sussex, where the three chamber works were written. Those who knew Elgar at this time have written that he was much taken with the surroundings, and would walk in the woods every day; they also suggest that the woodlands influenced his music, and in the Sonata's central Romance (Andante) it is not at all fanciful to sense an echo of those tranquil surroundings. The music is full of a quiet rapture, tinged with nostalgia, and is as typically English as are other of Elgar's more famous orchestral works. Here is an idyll, a gentle musing as a sitting by a stream, or idly playing with a straw in high summer, or examining a wild flower.

3) The keyboard music, Scarlatti; music of authenticity

• The recorder (flet prosty ) music ; winds instruments: oboe, clarinet; also parts of music, sung by boy's voices=male alto or countertenor (H.Purcell was himself a countertenor singer);

**********Music played: “Sound the trumpet till around”…… by Purcell

Sound the trumpet, till around
You make the list'ning shores rebound.
On the sprightly hautboy play;
All the instruments of joy,
That skilful numbers can employ,
To celebrate the glories of this day.

4) 18^th and 19^th centuries

a) G.F. Haendel (1685-1759), F. Mendelssohn (composer and pianist, composed symphonies, piano and violin concertos, Lieder ohne Worte piano music) -German composers, naturalized in England; Tudor composers (we have had them before); flavor of Englishness, Sir E. Elgar- his Concerto for Cello, his symphonies render the Englishness of English music (see: page 4)

***************music played: Frederick Delius (1862- 1936) - played: part from “A song before Sunrise”

Fritz Theodor Albert Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, on January 29, 1862. Young Fritz played piano and violin quite well. Travelled, visiting Sweden, Germany and France. His travelling around, and his frequent straying to romantic places like Norway and the French Riviera, resulted in a cosmopolitanism that was to stay with Delius for the rest of his life.

Delius' interest in music continued to consume his thoughts, to the neglect of his wool-business (inherited from his father). His frustrated father allowed Fritz to move to Florida,
USA, to manage his orange plantation (Solano Grove, south of Jacksonville). The young romantic Delius was to absorb the unique natural beauty along the St. Johns River, as well as the rich harmonic vocal improvisations of the local black slaves. He obtained a piano, met local music teacher Thomas Ward, and immersed himself in music, again to the neglect of his father's business. Delius was to later write: "In Florida, through sitting and gazing at Nature, I gradually learnt the way in which I should eventually find myself....(and) hearing (the Afro-Americans') singing in such romantic surroundings, it was then and there that I first felt the urge to express myself in music."

After leaving Florida in 1885, Delius taught music lessons in Danville, Virginia for a year. But Fritz was ready for more serious musical pursuits, and his friendship with the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg was instrumental in finally convincing his father to allow him to leave Florida and pursue music studies at the Leipzig Conservatorium from 1886-88. For the next 10 years or so, Delius lived in Paris, befriending many artists, writers, and musicians - indeed, this was another pivotal period in his life, in that so much of his output was to be influenced greatly by the literature and art to which he was exposed at this time.

Thus began an extraordinary life of constant composing, hiking through his beloved Norwegian mountains, marriage to the artist Jelka Rosen, settling in the French town of Grez-sur-Loing, and an ever-increasing group of friends and admirers. (It was in 1902 that he anglicized his name to "Frederick").

The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was to embrace the work of Delius, championing it whenever he could, culminating in a 6-concert Festival of Delius' music held in England in1929, which Delius attended with great pride and satisfaction. He was to tell Eric: "I have only one wish as far as my best music is concerned - I want Thomas to record it all". Delius died in1934.

Gustavus Theodore Holst (1874 - 1934)

******************Music played: The Planetss suite, extract from Urinus, the magician

Gustav Holst is recognized today as the composer of "The Planets," which remains wildly popular, but for little else except perhaps his "St. Paul Suite." However, Holst was the creator of operas, chamber, vocal, and orchestral music of many different styles, based on subjects as varied as folk songs, Tudor music, Sanskrit literature, astrology, and contemporary poetry. His great interest in Eastern mysticism can be heard in his settings of Choral Hymns.

Gustavus Theodore von Holst (he dropped the "von" in 1918) was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1874. His grandfather, Gustavus von Holst of Riga, Latvia, a composer of elegant music for the harp, moved to England and became a fashionable harp teacher. Holst's father Adolph, a pianist, organist and choirmaster, taught piano lessons and gave recitals; his mother, who died when Gustav was only eight, was a singer. A frail child whose first recollections were musical, Holst was taught to play the piano and violin, and began to compose when he was about twelve.

Holst met Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1895 while they were students at the Royal College of Music, and the two remained lifelong friends, depending on one another for support and assistance although there is little similarity in their music. The two young men and their fellow students carried on long discussions of self-criticism, philosophy, and, wrote Vaughan Williams, "every subject under the sun from the lowest note of the double bassoon to ... Thomas Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure'."

Around 1904 he was appointed Musical Director at St. Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, his biggest teaching post and one which he kept until his death. Holst visited the United States twice, once to lecture at the University of Michigan, and again for a six-month period as a lecturer at Harvard. He died in 1934, after a backward fall from the conductor's podium, from which he never fully recovered.

Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953), British composer with great interest in Irish culture and music; ***************played music: a fragment from the symphonic poem Tintagel ( King Arthur's Castle in Cornwall)

Ralph Vaughan Williams [Ralf Vo:n Uiliams] (1872-1958)

British composer, disciple of Bruch (Berlin) and Ravel (Paris); influenced by English folk music; composed Sinfonia Antarctica, others: Sea Symphony, London Symphony, Pastoral Symphony, ballet Job, many choral works, Serenade to Music for 16 solo voices and orchestra; Fantasia on the Theme of Tallis; Latin Mass; he was also a conductor.

Composed long after his 85 years of age.

****************Music played: from Fantasia on the Theme of Tallis

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976);

His companion Peter Pears;

Chief creator of the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk and Engl. Opera Group, many operas, eg. Peter Grimes (to the poetry of George Crabbe), 1945; the opera The Turn of the Screw to the narration of H. James, A Midsummer Night's Dream,; his music much influenced by Purcell, for children Noye's Flood, word settings, song cycles, serenades,

*****************Music played: The World Requiem, “Dies Irae”, the opening of the requiem - for the Cathedral in Coventry

*****************Music played in the finale: from William Shakespeare's play/comedy Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love….” sung by Cleo O'Lain

DUKE ORSINO:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

************************************

Music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (!809-1847) from his ouverture A Midsummer Night's Dream, to Shakespeare's word (Act II, sc.2) “You spotted snakes”

You spotted snakes, with double tongue,
      Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
      Newts and blind-worms do no wrong;
      Come not near our fairy queen:

C h o r u s
      Philomel, with melody;
      Sing in our sweet lullaby:
      Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby:
      Never harm, nor spell, nor charm,
      Come our lovely lady nigh;
      So, good-night, with lullaby:

Weaving spiders, come not here;
     Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence,
     Beetles black, approach not near;
     Worm nor snail do no offence.

              C h o r u s
      Philomel, with melody, etc.

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