Which Bax symphony, if any?

[Hornspieler]

You are more likely to hear a symphony by Malcolm Arnold on Radio 3 than one by Sir Arnold Bax.

But Bax ranked alongside Sir Arthur Bliss, RVW and Sir Edward Elgar in their lifetimes.

So why the neglect? Can you compare the symphonies of Edmund Rubbra and Robert Simpson?

John Ireland, Peter Warlock, Frederick Delius, Eric Coates - all wrote attractive music which might be described as " ... music for easy listening". There isn't even a programme such as "Housewives Choice" to encourage people to try some more serious music. Only Classic FM does that - and yet we all pour scorn upon its presenters and their selections.

Who decides what is suitable for the ears of the listening public and what may be mentioned occasionally but never included in a broadcast?

HS

[ahinton]

The 6th is for me the finest of the set, then a close run thing between 2 & 3. On the matter of structure/form, Bax is actually a much better symphonist than he is given credit for. The symphonies are very coherently argued, with skillful and sometimes ingenious thematic transformations and developments. The orchestration is masterly, Bax was so sure of his 'ear' for orchestral colour his orchestral works were often published before they were performed. I prefer the superb Handley set, he grasps the symphonic structure more coherently than with other recordings.

Bax was also a kind of torch-bearer for the English symphony from around the end of WWI until the 1930s; Elgar wrote none during this period, Vaughan Williams only one and no other major English composer seems to have contributed to the symphonic repertoire except Brian, who early symphonies had not been heard during that time anyway, so Bax seems to have kept the flame alive and, yes, he is indeed "a much better symphonist than he is [usually] given credit for". It seems as though Rubbra, Lloyd and others - then later Arnold, Simpson et al - got going in the writing of symphonies at around the time that Elgar ventured into his third.

[vinteuil]

One of those Composers that just never clicked for me and I've tried through the years

... the same here. But it seems I just don't 'get' this British music thing at all. Nor Russian neither. Doubtless my loss. Fortunately there is always Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain...

[Beef Oven!]

... the same here. But it seems I just don't 'get' this British music thing at all. Nor Russian neither. Doubtless my loss. Fortunately there is always Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain...

Relax and don't read too much into the 'British' thing. It's just a discussion aid that isn't meant for close examination.

[Serial_Apologist]

... the same here. But it seems I just don't 'get' this British music thing at all. Nor Russian neither. Doubtless my loss. Fortunately there is always Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain...

Do you think that is because a lot of British and Russian music is about landscape, and portraiture (albeit so also is a lot of French and italian music ), whereas the Austro-German tradition is more about developing a musical vocabulary that has to do with the mind, and creating ideas-based structures independent of circumstance other than state of mind, and on the other side, thinking through parallel narratives of inner consistency to those one imposes on life to make sense of it? For me the music of the Bachs, of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn (even!), Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern (even, dispite his oft-mentioned love of nature and his native landscapes), Hindemith, Weill etc, does not evoke the outside, but rather my mood in particular and my outlook on life in gerneral, whereras in the case of, say Elgar, I feel I need to know those characters as referenced in "The Enigma Variations", to see those military parades and silly uniforms in "Land of Hope and Glory", to sense the air breathed by the composer as he cycled over the Malverns in the uplifting energy of the "Introduction and Allegro"... and one could carry this over into composers expressing themselves in different idioms in the "English tradition" without having to list them.

[ahinton]

Do you think that is because a lot of British and Russian music is about landscape, and portraiture (albeit so also is a lot of French and italian music ), whereas the Austro-German tradition is more about developing a musical vocabulary that has to do with the mind, and creating ideas-based structures independent of circumstance other than state of mind? For me the music of the Bachs, of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn (even!), Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern (even, dispite his oft-mentioned love of nature and his native landscapes), Hindemith, Weill etc, does not evoke the outside, but rather my mood in particular and my outlook on life in gerneral, whereras in the case of, say Elgar, I feel I need to know those characters as referenced in "The Enigma Variations", to see those military parades and silly uniforms in "Land of Hope and Glory", to sense the air breathed by the composer as he cycled over the Malverns in the uplifting energy of the "Introduction and Allegro"... and one could carry this over into composers expressing themselves in different idioms in the "English tradition" without having to list them.

I've often wondered what this "English music" thing is, beyond merely music written by English composers, largely because what I suspect to be a myth promoited by certain people who for some reason want to assert what they feel is its perceived superiority, especial relevance to English audiences and inherent indigenous qualities (whatever they might be).

You mention Elgar; how "English" is most of his music really? He believed that music could be found in the air all around you, but does that make his best work recognisably "English" just because he found a fair amount of his when in the Malvern Hills area that you mention? The symphonies, violin concerto, Alassio and even Falstaff seem to me to inhabit something far more Austro-German, in respose to influences of Schumann, Wagner, Brahms and Strauss in particular (and I say so without wishing to undermine his individuality). I don't need to know those characters in the Enigma variations if I'm to appreciate them purely as a set of orchestral variations, which indeed they are just as much as are Schönberg's, Webern's, Carter's &c., although I'm not suggesting that what the composer said and wrote of whom he sought to portray in them is not also on interest.

When Elgar was once taken to task for eschewing folk music in his work he retorted that he was a musician and one of the folk, ergo he wrote folk music - yet is Vaugham Williams' best work identifiably "English" just because he happened to respond to certain of his country's folk traditions and legacies in some of it?

The second and third quarters of the last century witness to composition of many symphonies by English composers such as Brian, Rubbra, Lloyd, Tippett, Simpson, Searle, Arnold et al, just as the same period saw the burgeoning of the American symphony with composers such as Sessions, Harris, Piston, Diamond, Schuman, Copland, Mennin &c., but are the former all somehow identifiably "English" and the latter "American"? If so, how come? And are the symphonies of Hoddinott and Jones identifably "Welsh" and distinguishable as such from all those English composers' symphonies?

No - I think that a lot of this is little more than plain English snobbery at best and pseudo-jingoism at worst!

[vinteuil]

Serial : thank you for your thoughtful piece. You may be on to something here.

And yet : British landscape - either in the 'real' world or in the painted - from Thomas Jones, Girtin, Cozens, Paul Sandby, John Sell Cotman, thro' to Philip Wilson Steer, Paul Nash etc - is something that is very important to me - it is the music that for me doesn't work.

And we're not going to talk of cowpats, are we?

[ahinton]

And we're not going to talk of cowpats, are we?

I hope not - not least because, once again, distinguishing between English ones, Welsh ones, American ones or those evacuated by any other country's bovines is no easier than it is in the case of their symphonies...

[Dave2002]

Who decides what is suitable for the ears of the listening public and what may be mentioned occasionally but never included in a broadcast?
HS

Not only that but

Who decides what is suitable for the ears of the listening public and what may be mentioned occasionally but never included in a concert?I

I love Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, and many other somewhat established composers, but even amongst their works there are some which hardly ever get performed in live concerts. As for works by other "worthy" composers, they just don't get onto concert programmes at all, even if there are CDs or other commerical or radio performances made available.

[Serial_Apologist]

I've often wondered what this "English music" thing is, beyond merely music written by English composers, largely because what I suspect to be a myth promoited by certain people who for some reason want to assert what they feel is its perceived superiority, especial relevance to English audiences and inherent indigenous qualities (whatever they might be).

For me the "Englishness" consists not so much in the elements to be found in composers who consciously made it their business to invent an English style (or styles) of early twentieth century music as in the way they selectively blended the influences they took from eg sacred Renaissance and the 16th/early 17th century madrigalists and lutenists, rural folksong and folklore, Purcell, Elgar and Parry, Borodin and Rachmaninov, Faure, Debussy, Ravel and, slightly later, the Stravinsky of "Petruschka". It is this blend that gives the music what we then describe and map onto temperamental characteristics peculiar to the social, political and environmental characteristics that make, I would assume, for a certain distinctive kind of English person. And I think that it is possible to dissect the orchestral techniques and, especially, emergent harmonic procedures of Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst, to trace their sources, before they were fully absorbed into the individuality that each came to give to the music.

Personally I hear a sort of parallel between that generation of composers who adapted an enriched modal harmonic framework derived from French Impressionism to trying to recreate the spiritual and material presence of pre-Industrial English ruralism to the aesthetic and political stance of William Morris and especially post-Arts & Crafts domestic-scaled architecture, eg Charles Voysey and his influence on interwar architecture. Indeed in RVW's case one could cite family connections to the Pre-Raphaelites, and in Holst's political, initially via the Hammersmith Socialist Society. In common with our suburbia, there is nothing quite like it in Continental thought and aesthetics, either then or now, and so I suppose one has to speak of its characteristics as English ones.

This is not in any way to proclaim the VW/Holst generation's music as in any way superior or for that matter intrinsically inferior to anything - there is clearly much that is ideologically wrong in their model of a return to a pre-Industrial Revolution past symbolised by the means adopted and promulgated, not least because it sees a privileged section of the middle class as constituting the vanguard of change, though its ideas (and some of its musical language) would be taken up again in the 1960s by the then-advocates of an alternative society to mass-consumerism, and this would connect to a broader environmental philosophy that is internationalist.

You mention Elgar; how "English" is most of his music really? He believed that music could be found in the air all around you, but does that make his best work recognisably "English" just because he found a fair amount of his when in the Malvern Hills area that you mention? The symphonies, violin concerto, Alassio and even Falstaff seem to me to inhabit something far more Austro-German, in respose to influences of Schumann, Wagner, Brahms and Strauss in particular (and I say so without wishing to undermine his individuality). I don't need to know those characters in the Enigma variations if I'm to appreciate them purely as a set of orchestral variations, which indeed they are just as much as are Schönberg's, Webern's, Carter's &c., although I'm not suggesting that what the composer said and wrote of whom he sought to portray in them is not also on interest.

Yes but that is rather like saying a frying pan is a frying pan in any culture - a sledgehammer approach to what calls for a paring knife, and which ends up not really saying anything at all.

When Elgar was once taken to task for eschewing folk music in his work he retorted that he was a musician and one of the folk, ergo he wrote folk music - yet is Vaugham Williams' best work identifiably "English" just because he happened to respond to certain of his country's folk traditions and legacies in some of it?

He may have been selective in the way you suggest, (examination of the nation's working class folk traditions was not really on his and Holst's agendas for reasons I've already outlined.

The second and third quarters of the last century witness to composition of many symphonies by English composers such as Brian, Rubbra, Lloyd, Tippett, Simpson, Searle, Arnold et al, just as the same period saw the burgeoning of the American symphony with composers such as Sessions, Harris, Piston, Diamond, Schuman, Copland, Mennin &c., but are the former all somehow identifiably "English" and the latter "American"? If so, how come? And are the symphonies of Hoddinott and Jones identifably "Welsh" and distinguishable as such from all those English composers' symphonies?

Well I would say yes in the cases of Brian (to some extent, though the world view expressed in his later music reflected his isolation) Rubbra, Lloyd and Arnold I would say an unequivocal yes, but not to Simpson and Searle as I think they represented a changed attitude, one that sought to break with what they would have seen as insularity. Tippett (and Britten, I would argue) represent a transitional stage from the former to the latter, which is why I find so many contraditions in their music.

No - I think that a lot of this is little more than plain English snobbery at best and pseudo-jingoism at worst!

Well not in my case - obviously, I would hope! Others have sought critically to reassess the validity of the "English pastoral school" - which was one very partial and possibly deliberate way of describing them.

[ahinton]

For me the "Englishness" consists not so much in the elements to be found in composers who consciously made it their business to invent an English style (or styles) of early twentieth century music as in the way they selectively blended the influences they took from eg sacred Renaissance and the 16th/early 17th century madrigalists and lutenists, rural folksong and folklore, Purcell, Elgar and Parry, Borodin and Rachmaninov, Faure, Debussy, Ravel and, slightly later, the Stravinsky of "Petruschka". It is this blend that gives the music what we then describe and map onto temperamental characteristics peculiar to the social, political and environmental characteristics that make, I would assume, for a certain distinctive kind of English person. And I think that it is possible to dissect the orchestral techniques and, especially, emergent harmonic procedures of Delius, Vaughan Williams, Holst, to trace their sources, before they were fully absorbed into the individuality that each came to give to the music.

Personally I hear a sort of parallel between that generation of composers who adapted an enriched modal harmonic framework derived from French Impressionism to trying to recreate the spiritual and material presence of pre-Industrial English ruralism to the aesthetic and political stance of William Morris and especially post-Arts & Crafts domestic-scaled architecture, eg Charles Voysey and his influence on interwar architecture. Indeed in RVW's case one could cite family connections to the Pre-Raphaelites, and in Holst's political, initially via the Hammersmith Socialist Society. In common with our suburbia, there is nothing quite like it in Continental thought and aesthetics, either then or now, and so I suppose one has to speak of its characteristics as English ones.

This is not in any way to proclaim the VW/Holst generation's music as in any way superior or for that matter intrinsically inferior to anything - there is clearly much that is ideologically wrong in their model of a return to a pre-Industrial Revolution past symbolised by the means adopted and promulgated, not least because it sees a privileged section of the middle class as constituting the vanguard of change, though its ideas (and some of its musical language) would be taken up again in the 1960s by the then-advocates of an alternative society to mass-consumerism, and this would connect to a broader environmental philosophy that is internationalist.



Yes but that is rather like saying a frying pan is a frying pan in any culture - a sledgehammer approach to what calls for a paring knife, and which ends up not really saying anything at all.



He may have been selective in the way you suggest, (examination of the nation's working class folk traditions was not really on his and Holst's agendas for reasons I've already outlined.



Well I would say yes in the cases of Brian (to some extent, though the world view expressed in his later music reflected his isolation) Rubbra, Lloyd and Arnold I would say an unequivocal yes, but not to Simpson and Searle as I think they represented a changed attitude, one that sought to break with what they would have seen as insularity. Tippett (and Britten, I would argue) represent a transitional stage from the former to the latter, which is why I find so many contraditions in their music.

Well not in my case - obviously, I would hope! Others have sought critically to reassess the validity of the "English pastoral school" - which was one very partial and possibly deliberate way of describing them.

A fascinating and very well considered response with much from which to learn and to think about and for which many thanks - and before anything else, no, I wasn't accusing YOU of such snobbery - perish the thought, indeed!

"Composers who consciously made it their business to invent an English style (or styles) of early twentieth century music" is an interesting phenomenon but possibly also an overrated one, to the extent that several English composers might unfairly be misunderstood as having wilfully aimed to do such a thing whereas I think it fair to say that the most important English composers of the time you mention largely didn't. Even VW and Holst's absorption of English folkloristic elements in their work was largely, I think, a means whereby to enhance and expand their respective expressive vocabularies rather than infuse their work with "local colour".

I don't think that my remarks about Elgar in general and his Enigma variations in particular are "rather like saying a frying pan is a frying pan in any culture" or "a sledgehammer approach to what calls for a paring knife, and which ends up not really saying anything at all"; after all, that work may be listened to profitably (no, not in the "capitalist" sense!) simply as a set of orchestral varations without having necessarily to know about the composer's "friends pictured within"!

I'm uncertain as to why you would regard Simpson and Searle differently to the other English symphonists that I mention in that context, especially given Simpson being so heavily steeped in Bruckner, Sibelius, Nielsen and, perhaps above all, Haydn and Beethoven; in Searle's case, even the "changed attitude" that some might ascribe to his writing of dodecaphonic symphonies still emerged from a composer steeped in the music of Liszt and he didn;t regard himself as having sought to cast traditions to one side (we had conversations about that).

The term "English pastoral school" was really asking for the terms "cowpat" and "five barred gate" to be attached thereto; its very meaninglessness is curiously endorsed by Lutyens' barbed description about "modal melodies played on the cor anglé" (or "cor anglais" in this context, I suppose!), to the extent of giving some impression that she might have been referring derisively to music of little real intrinsic value and that merited scant attention beyond the demi-monde of accompaniments for nostalgio-sentimentalist natural history broadcasts; as David Matthews has observed (and I paraphrase here, as I cannot recall his exact words), "English pastoralist composers" doesn't all mean green and pleasant land, peaceful countryside and yearnings for a rural yesteryear that exists only in the minds of some".

[BBMmk2]

I think that Bax's Spring fire, should fall into this category.

[Serial_Apologist]

A fascinating and very well considered response with much from which to learn and to think about and for which many thanks - and before anything else, no, I wasn't accusing YOU of such snobbery - perish the thought, indeed!

"Composers who consciously made it their business to invent an English style (or styles) of early twentieth century music" is an interesting phenomenon but possibly also an overrated one, to the extent that several English composers might unfairly be misunderstood as having wilfully aimed to do such a thing whereas I think it fair to say that the most important English composers of the time you mention largely didn't. Even VW and Holst's absorption of English folkloristic elements in their work was largely, I think, a means whereby to enhance and expand their respective expressive vocabularies rather than infuse their work with "local colour".

In the cases of Holst and especially RVW it could have been both, couldn't one say? I have Tippett on tape somewhere stating quite clearly his later admiration for VW, in so many words, "Creating music in the English language when to do so was not considered proper in this land". Finzi was definitely one who set out to distinuish himself as part of a school of composers attempting to create a national style. And Herbert Howells, in a letter to VW, I think it was, expressed a sense of mutual identification between the two of them as belonging more to the age of the Tudors than to the present day. I think that, as in the case of Bartok in Hungary, by the middle stages in their respective creative lives the absorption of those elements from folk music and Tudor church music and part song had become so deep-rooted that the character of their fully mature music would have been quite other without those initial inputs. In discovering the internationally inextricable links between Magyar and other neighbouring and not so neighbouring folk tradions Bartok ineluctably ceased being a nationalist composer and became one of the first music ethnologists. Bridge later renounced his early nationalism - yet there's no denying the lingering kinship with his contemporaires like ireland in the later works, notwithstanding the Bergian and Schoenbergian aspects to the harmonic thinking they contain.

I don't think that my remarks about Elgar in general and his Enigma variations in particular are "rather like saying a frying pan is a frying pan in any culture" or "a sledgehammer approach to what calls for a paring knife, and which ends up not really saying anything at all"; after all, that work may be listened to profitably (no, not in the "capitalist" sense!) simply as a set of orchestral varations without having necessarily to know about the composer's "friends pictured within"!

OK fair enough - I think our differences there arise from a different way of appreciating music - biography seems to play a more important part in some composers' music than in others, Elgar (for me) being one of them. In listfening to any one of Bach's cantata's, I wouldn't be asking myself if he had been on the booze the night prior to composing it because the musical language rationalises all such considerations away in its sweep.

I'm uncertain as to why you would regard Simpson and Searle differently to the other English symphonists that I mention in that context, especially given Simpson being so heavily steeped in Bruckner, Sibelius, Nielsen and, perhaps above all, Haydn and Beethoven; in Searle's case, even the "changed attitude" that some might ascribe to his writing of dodecaphonic symphonies still emerged from a composer steeped in the music of Liszt and he didn;t regard himself as having sought to cast traditions to one side (we had conversations about that).

Then I laid myself open to misunderstanding if you drew that conclusion from what I wrote!

The term "English pastoral school" was really asking for the terms "cowpat" and "five barred gate" to be attached thereto; its very meaninglessness is curiously endorsed by Lutyens' barbed description about "modal melodies played on the cor anglé" (or "cor anglais" in this context, I suppose!), to the extent of giving some impression that she might have been referring derisively to music of little real intrinsic value and that merited scant attention beyond the demi-monde of accompaniments for nostalgio-sentimentalist natural history broadcasts; as David Matthews has observed (and I paraphrase here, as I cannot recall his exact words), "English pastoralist composers" doesn't all mean green and pleasant land, peaceful countryside and yearnings for a rural yesteryear that exists only in the minds of some".

But there you see we probably find an example of someone making a defensive statement to rationalise their adoption of means at variance with those she criticises. Aside from which, all now seem agreed that Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony was an elegy for friends and others who had died in the trenches, expressed through a subtly distorted "pastoral idiom" rather in the way of Paul Nash's ravaged landscapes, but more subtly. The misuses to which music is forever being put are legion, as I well remember from the 1990s, when jazz was being used as an accessory in drinks and confectionary ads!

[Beef Oven!]

What a brilliant discussion aid this phoney concept of British music is

Fascinating stuff, btw

[Suffolkcoastal]

The final bars of No 2 will leave you deep in thought I think (Bax even nicked RVW's term 'niente' here),my favourite together with no 6.
I wonder if one of our experts could provide the technical name for the final chord,note or interval of this symphony,always sounds ambiguous to me.

The final bars of Bax 2, are basically chords of F & C major together. The F major chord is in 2nd inversion C F A and is sustained by the lower strings, Bax's gradual peeling away of the upper voices, momentarily creates a 2nd inversion F major 7th, the 2nd inversion F chord remains in the lower strings whilst the bassoons hold C & E. The symphony is described (unusually) as being both E flat & C, but the last chord being the mixture of F & C, with the C pedal in the basses, creates a sense of uneasy rest, rather than finality, saying more is to follow.