The Passions of Vaughan Williams

[salymap]

There was I thinking ones patience improved the, er, older one got.

Oh no S-A and elderly men are twice as impatient and bad tempered as women. You, I am sure will be an exception to the rule when you get err. middle aged.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I suppose ... every central figure, is replaced eventually, but I find it very difficult to see who that central figure is today.

[Serial_Apologist]

Oh no S-A and elderly men are twice as impatient and bad tempered as women. You, I am sure will be an exception to the rule when you get err. middle aged.

I am already past it, saly - "it" being the operative word

My mother used to recite this Victorian ditty whenever I would say, "I want..." this or that:

Patience is a virtue
Keep it if you can
Seldom found in woman
Never in a man

Or, she would say, "I want never gets!"

[ardcarp]

I suppose every cheeky youngster, and every central figure, is replaced eventually, but I find it very difficult to see who that central figure is today.

I find it difficult too. On a recent thread (can't remember which....sign of age) Ferney reeled off a whole list of contemporary composers whom we ought to revere, but sadly we do not live among giants right now. Maybe in 50 years or so hindsight will see things differently. But we didn't have to wait for hindsight.

[Serial_Apologist]

I find it difficult too. On a recent thread (can't remember which....sign of age) Ferney reeled off a whole list of contemporary composers whom we ought to revere, but sadly we do not live among giants right now. Maybe in 50 years or so hindsight will see things differently. But we didn't have to wait for hindsight.

There are still a few around, I think. Hans Werner Henze, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle are still living. I rate Jonathan Harvey very highly. Brian Ferneyhough might be considered too specialised to be of lasting influence, I don't know. We mustn't forget Boulez of course. And we CERTAINLY mustn't forget about the amazing Eliott Carter, who I think will come to be regarded as an innovatory giant, on a par with Bartok, at least?

[Ferretfancy]

Mary,

I do hope that you feel that I dislike the cheeky iconoclast, quite the reverse! One of my happiest memories is hearing Denis Quilley ( remember him? ) who was an old boy of my school, singing the tenor role in a performance of Rejoice in the Lamb. That was more than sixty years ago, and I love that music still.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But we didn't have to wait for hindsight.

No: you had decent media coverage constantly reminding you what was going on, even if that press didn't understand what it was! (Remember the newspaper stories "covering" the premier of Tippett's Midsummer Marriage?) And a Radio channel intent on giving new Music the prominence it deserved, not sticking it in a late-night ghetto. And television programmes that kept new ideas within a mainstream cultural life.

I ask you, ardy, how can you possibly know whether or not "living among giants right now" when even a concert by Colin Davis doesn't reach the non-specialist media in the UK?!

[salymap]

No: you had decent media coverage constantly reminding you what was going on, even if that press didn't understand what it was! (Remember the newspaper stories "covering" the premier of Tippett's Midsummer Marriage?) And a Radio channel intent on giving new Music the prominence it deserved, not sticking it in a late-night ghetto. And television programmes that kept new ideas within a mainstream cultural life.

I ask you, ardy, how can you possibly know whether or not "living among giants right now" when even a concert by Colin Davis doesn't reach the non-specialist media in the UK?!

The Telegraph alone had about four really good music critics writing every day and we had 'The Listener'
and other things. It was a different world but I'm glad I lived through it.

[Mary Chambers]

Mary,

I do hope that you feel that I dislike the cheeky iconoclast, quite the reverse! One of my happiest memories is hearing Denis Quilley ( remember him? ) who was an old boy of my school, singing the tenor role in a performance of Rejoice in the Lamb. That was more than sixty years ago, and I love that music still.

Oh, so do I! "For the flowers are great blessings."

I think you may have missed out a word in the first sentence. No, I didn't feel you disliked him, and to some degree a cheeky iconoclast is what he was. I have to be grateful to RVW, among others, for awarding an open scholarship to the RCM to Britten when he was sixteen.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The Telegraph alone had about four really good music critics writing every day and we had 'The Listener'

Yes; I'd forgotten the wonderful Listener!
But even a recently as the '80s, popular media would include the Arts in ways that would be sneered at nowadays: chat shows would include Itzak Perlman, Anthony Burgess, Ravi Shankar and Menuhin. If today such figures are shoved onto the rear schedules of BBC4, how on earth can newer Artists and ideas get a look in on the mainstream media?

[ardcarp]

Mary and others. I've been worrying a bit about the 'cheeky iconoclast'. My definition of such a composer would be one who tore up all known music, threw the bits into the air and didn't care where they landed. Britten was hardly that; and IMO there were aspects of his personality and his music that were deeply rooted in tradition. Even his choice of texts (and certainly librettists) was not 'cutting edge' . Iconoclastic tendencies may have informed his choice of subjects (challenging social norms, the bigotry of the clan, the outcast, etc, etc) but cheeky? I don't see it. But please elaborate, someone.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Britten's early career can (just!) be described as "cheeky": the Hindemithian Sinfonia, Our Hunting Fathers - the sort of thing that got the RCM prof to remark "What is an English public schoolboy doing writing Music like this?!" (which, incidentally, may not have been meant as Colonel Blimpishly as it's been taken subsequently).

After his parting from Auden and his return to England, the more "traditional" aspects of culture became more prominent in his work: as a known conscientious objector and a gay man (at a time when this was illegal) he perhaps wanted not to draw upon overtly iconoclastic, overtly anti-establishment means of expression. Or, more likely, he found a truer expression of his aesthetic beliefs in these post-war works: I certainly find them more convincing, more fully integrated than the earlier works, astonishingly enjoyable as these are.

It's not so easy to partition the work, anyway: the Violin Concerto is much closer in spirit to the post-war works than is the Prokofievesque Piano Concerto, and Owen Wingrave confronts Pacifism (and its conflict with The Establishment) head-on.

Some similarities here, perhaps, with Walton's career: the youthful, Schoenberg-influenced "English progressivist" (as Berg called him) becoming the composer of Crown Imperial?

[JohnSkelton]

Mary and others. I've been worrying a bit about the 'cheeky iconoclast'. My definition of such a composer would be one who tore up all known music, threw the bits into the air and didn't care where they landed. Britten was hardly that; and IMO there were aspects of his personality and his music that were deeply rooted in tradition. Even his choice of texts (and certainly librettists) was not 'cutting edge' . Iconoclastic tendencies may have informed his choice of subjects (challenging social norms, the bigotry of the clan, the outcast, etc, etc) but cheeky? I don't see it. But please elaborate, someone.

A few thoughts about this conversation (apologies for taking the topic away from Vaughan Williams).

I'd guess Britten might have been seen as iconoclastic against the background of a very conservative British musical scene. I'd say that against the background of a wider musical scene his music is unadventurous: there's nothing that I've heard in Britten that challenges certain (historically specific) notions of what is musical or is good music in the way that the 3rd Viennese School composers do, or Stravinsky, or Bartók, or innovators throughout Britten's life in jazz and popular music ... or, later, Messiaen and then the composers who emerge in Europe post-Second World War. This is hard to put well - I'm trying not to let it become my value judgement about Britten's music, but strictly as an observation: I'd say part of the success of Britten was that it was easy to include / incorporate it into a mainstream of classical music, and that remains the case today - given the general conservatism of mainstream classical music, performers, critics, audience. (I think the point about Britten's texts is an interesting one. I'd say much of the above applies to Auden's poetry, and of the contemporary mainstream in poetry now).

I'd suggest much of the above has to do with the exposure a composer like Thomas Adès gets - he's a modern composer who writes music that fits recognisably within the world of chamber recital / symphony concert. So there's widespread mainstream critical approval, and at least reasonably general mainstream performer / audience toleration. The search for the new giant of music I'd say has a lot to do with a search for composers who repeat the past with a difference - but are still recognisably the same. You see something of that at a less important level with the angry reaction to some performers who propose different (or historically informed) approaches to music of the past. There are notions of musicality which are presented as natural and doubtless experienced as natural.

It's my hunch that the audience problem with contemporary music is that the wider audience for it often doesn't know about it. In other words not the audience for the classical concert, who simply lacks information / the chance to hear it (pace ferney's remarks); rather another audience or audiences. I can think of enthusiasts for music which isn't catalogued as classical finding far more in Luigi Nono or Lachenmann or Anthony Braxton than Benjamin Britten. The comment might reflect my indifference to Britten's music, but I'm not trying to show that Britten's music is inferior to Nono's. A general sense of what is musical might still persist in the fairly narrow audiences for classical music in classical music contexts, but that doesn't reflect what has hapened musically over the past 50 years or is happening now. It's the need to perpetuate that settled sense which I'd say drives the where are the great composers narrative.

This break up, rapid dissolution of the settled is hardly unprecedented in classical music. Think what Biber would have sounded like a hundred years later, with the later Baroque of Vivaldi, Bach, Telemann given way to the Galant and early Classical styles. Or conversely Wagner to contemporary listeners to Handel's late works. Over a 50 year span in popular music there's nothing in 1926 to suggest the possibility of Punk in 1976. Politically, economically and socially the past two hundred years have been times of rapid acceleration/s, often out of synch with one another.

I haven't time to revise or clarify this properly so let it stand and apologise for its many inadequacies. One further point: I'm not making a relativist argument (everything is equally valid). I'm making an argument against the idea that certain standards or qualities or characteristics inherently constitute great music (or even music). I'd happily make a case for more than subjective assent to the proposition that Kagel's music is greater than Britten's, Ablinger's more fascinating in its discourse and implications, but I'm not sure about the universal assent bit . I'd strongly challenge the idea that we are living in a musically thin or limited time. It's a question of looking for something else, outside certain familiar perspectives.

[Mary Chambers]

Britten's early career can (just!) be described as "cheeky": the Hindemithian Sinfonia, Our Hunting Fathers - the sort of thing that got the RCM prof to remark "What is an English public schoolboy doing writing Music like this?!" (which, incidentally, may not have been meant as Colonel Blimpishly as it's been taken subsequently).

I agree with this. His attitudes in his early career were certainly iconoclastic - his diaries and letters reveal a good deal of scorn for established English composers (except for Bridge, of course!). In public, the scorn was probably hidden by conventional good manners. I think he became rather less judgemental as time went on, as most people do, and although his music was rooted in tradition it was not, on the whole, English tradition. I do feel that all the way through his career there was a subversive element, not obvious to everyone, but, as has been said, perhaps largely in the subjects he chose.