Dorothy Howell (1898-1982): 7-11/9/24

[Ein Heldenleben]

I can't. As For Miss Howell's laughter, isn't that the equivalent of laughing at the inmates of an asylum? It was certainly a shallow response to a fascinating and multi-faceted work which (whatever you think of it) broke the mould. Her own music is aural polyfilla of the most dispiriting kind. It prompts no response in me, not even laughter. Silly Auntie, for pretending it's some sort of lost treasure trove.

Refreshing to hear some one not afraid to express an opinion. It’s pretty thin stuff really isn’t it ? These songs on at the moment are perfectly pleasant salon music - but sound almost Victorian harmonically. Incredible that they were written ( I guess) after Pierrot.

Interestingly It appears that in the early days of the BBC she had quite a lot of plays (this is in the twenties) when the BBC played many women composers. It seems she was then dropped by the BBC for reasons that are not clear . I’m assuming not because of her gender but because music sounded old fashioned when set against the second Viennese school , Stravinsky , Bartok et al. Of course many male composers suffered the same fate.
I didn’t realise that she was such a big name.Musical Fashion is cruel - I’d barely heard of her and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a piece of hers live. I have stacks of inherited twenties piano music largely written for competent amateurs . The names have faded like the pages…

[Master Jacques]

Interestingly It appears that in the early days of the BBC she had quite a lot of plays (this is in the twenties) when the BBC played many women composers. It seems she was then dropped by the BBC for reasons that are not clear . I’m assuming not because of her gender but because music sounded old fashioned when set against the second Viennese school , Stravinsky , Bartok et al. Of course many male composers suffered the same fate.
I didn’t realise that she was such a big name.Musical Fashion is cruel - I’d barely heard of her and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a piece of hers live. I have stacks of inherited twenties piano music largely written for competent amateurs . The names have faded like the pages…

A very pertinent post. For all BBC's fighting chat around the subject, it is a fact that women composers have never, ever been simply "excluded" from the concert hall and airwaves. If you look at early Proms lists, from around 1900, you'll find loads more women's names than you would find today. Now, they may have been represented by just a single song or piano morceau, but they were represented in quantity - while the criterion was their quality.

And that, of course, is how it should be. Especially on Composer of the Week. The women composers known to me (admittedly, from older generations) are apt to sneer at BBC's condescending, rather infantile hype. They want to be lauded for their quality, not their sex.

[Ein Heldenleben]

A very pertinent post. For all BBC's fighting chat around the subject, it is a fact that women composers have never, ever been simply "excluded" from the concert hall and airwaves. If you look at early Proms lists, from around 1900, you'll find loads more women's names than you would find today. Now, they may have been represented by just a single song or piano morceau, but they were represented in quantity - while the criterion was their quality.

And that, of course, is how it should be. Especially on Composer of the Week. The women composers known to me (admittedly, from older generations) are apt to sneer at BBC's condescending, rather infantile hype. They want to be lauded for their quality, not their sex.

well I’d better credit COTW’s interviewee Leah Broad whose thoughts I hope I’ve adequately summarised.
I wouldn’t have known unless she’d just told me !

The contrast in thsee two pieces from todays programme replicating a programme given in the twenties

Ethel Smyth “The Cliffs Of Cornwall”
and Dorothy Howells Piano Concerto in D minor

is instructive. The former a lovely and evocative piece of tone painting . Wonderful use of contrasting brass and woodwind timbres - some beautiful harmonic touches and inventive modulation. . Ah it’s a wind arrangement …nice one.

The latter is just not in the same league. But it’s no worse than many a twentieth century neo - romantic concerto and deserves the odd outing. I think if you are writing self consciously in the Tschaikovsky / Rachmaninov vein you need to produce a few extended 16 bar good tunes - not just two to four bar fragments over suspiciously similar harmonic sequences.

[french frank]

They want to be lauded for their quality, not their sex.

A good entry point for a post I was just going to make. I think that when it comes to quality = degrees of excellence, I'm probably more ready to accept things for what they are, rather than constructing a hierarchy based on - whatever it's based on. This is different from quality = of what kind (qualitas = nature, distingishing characteristic, property). So I'd be more likely to pontificate about Sam Smith or Florence and the Machine at the Proms because the Proms are a classical music festival. There has to be a musical reason to start including indie rock or pop music (not 'of that kind').

So in one sense 'quality' is a category' and more easily defined. Qualty as a degree of excellence is harder to pin down, and opinions may differ. Just because something is deemed less good, it isn't necessarily worthless. CoTW explores the musical landscape.

[gradus]

No doubting the influence of atonal music but surely more as an interesting development for composers right across Western music in most of its forms, who don't predominantly employ the method but want to experiment with it to a greater or lesser extent. Hence the rarity of purely atonal pieces from core repertoire - IMV!

[Serial_Apologist]

No doubting the influence of atonal music but surely more as an interesting development for composers right across Western music in most of its forms, who don't predominantly employ the method but want to experiment with it to a greater or lesser extent. Hence the rarity of purely atonal pieces from core repertoire - IMV!

Atonality essentially came out of the late 19th/early 20th century Austrian and German romantic quest for higher emotional states, leading eventually in the direction of not just the psychotic and proto-psychedelic, but responses to crisis and terror. Outside the Schoenberg circle, and those late romantic epigones both inside and outside the Austro-German tradition like Szymanowsky, Scriabin, Schmidt, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, Bartok and a temporary handful of Russians pre-1937 whose own music, while not going as far beyond tonal frontiers tacitly acknowledged in their own music the both formal and expressive implications and impact of atonality, there was Ives in the States. But Ives and those within the experimental tradition he sired took atonality as one among many areas worth rugged investigation, often in conjunction with a fascination with non-temperate tunings and "noise". "Second generation" composers outwith the Second Viennese school ambit adopted twelve-tone or at any rate quasi-serial procedures as ways of avoiding habitual musical patterns of thought as much as for what these offered in terms of new structures to replace 19th century forms grounded in tonality. And not all atonal composers would "go for" serialism: Varese, and later Xenakis and Ligeti, being two avoiders.

It's a big step to take atonal expression on board, our ears being conditioned to tension release through harmonic resolution even today; and some composers have held to a view that music without tonal resolution is in some way lacking an essential ingredient, HIndemith was one - some arguing all musics regardless of culture and tradition being essentially tonally grounded.

[smittims]

I fear we are at cross purposes here, frankie,re your #12. I don't quite follow what you're saying; maybe we just disagree as to what 'the entire point' is. Perhaps it might help if I put it more bluntly (at the risk of being censored again). The BBC ignores music by many male composers because it isn't distinctive or outstanding enough. And nobody minds that (unless there's a Nicholas Gatty fan club who maintain he was as good as Holst or VW) . But they deliberately showcase music of a similar level of quality simply because it was written by a woman. I think that's bordering on sexism.

A google search revealed no entries for Louisa Beetfarm. I'm afraid I don't do hidden meanings or subtle hints.

[french frank]

I fear we are at cross purposes here, frankie,re your #12. I don't quite follow what you're saying; maybe we just disagree as to what 'the entire point' is. Perhaps it might help if I put it more bluntly (at the risk of being censored again). The BBC ignores music by many male composers because it isn't distinctive or outstanding enough. And nobody minds that (unless there's a Nicholas Gatty fan club who maintain he was as good as Holst or VW) . But they deliberately showcase music of a similar level of quality simply because it was written by a woman. I think that's bordering on sexism.

A google search revealed no entries for Louisa Beetfarm. I'm afraid I don't do hidden meanings or subtle hints.

Then to be equally blunt: in many fields there had not been a level playing field between men and women for aeons (women should know their place) but in recent times there have been thought to be good reasons to try to redress the balance - if for no other reason than that disadvantaged people, from all groups, represent lost potential. That is the thinking. To feel that this disadvantages men in some way merely makes the point about the unfairness of social disadvantage; and that would be how I would justify a transition period even if it does annoy those are concerned only with the music.

If nothing comes of it, the old system will probably obtain again - unless women become dominant in the field of musical criticism and appreciate the work of women more than men do! It must be obvious that even though women composers have not been paid such considerable attention in the past, Nicholas Gatty (d 1946) had more or less sunk without trace. He is a man though, so presumably worth campaigning for? I see this in terms of an intellectual argument, rather than a matter of musical 'quality'. In that sense we may indeed be at 'cross-purposes'.

Louisa Beetfarm was a reference to lost potential = female version of Ludwig van Beethoven.

[Sir Velo]

I fear we are at cross purposes here, frankie,re your #12. I don't quite follow what you're saying; maybe we just disagree as to what 'the entire point' is. Perhaps it might help if I put it more bluntly (at the risk of being censored again).

I think the point being made was that given we have had decades of mediocre male music it was about time we had similar amounts of mediocre music composed by women. Unfortunately, if that is the policy being pursued, I fear it is doomed to failure as I don't believe there is a huge audience for mediocre music by composers of either sex. In fact, I think R3 is writing its own funeral if that is going to be the approach.

[smittims]

Thanks, frankie. I now think we were talking about two different things. It's often been said that on the internet we have only words on a screen, no emphases or body language, so meanings are sometimes unclear.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I think the point being made was that given we have had decades of mediocre male music it was about time we had similar amounts of mediocre music composed by women. Unfortunately, if that is the policy being pursued, I fear it is doomed to failure as I don't believe there is a huge audience for mediocre music by composers of either sex. In fact, I think R3 is writing its own funeral if that is going to be the approach.

There aren’t enough “masterpieces “ to fill more than a month of Radio 3 so it’s always the case that mediocre music will get played, I think the problem is that Radio 3 is more and more into the third rate let alone second . Of course not everyone will agree. I struggle to find a page of mediocre Bach whereas Vivaldi seems to turn it out by the yard. I’m not sure Dorothy Howell , though worth the odd performance , makes the grade for COTW . It was telling yesterday that the two pieces by other women composers Clarke and especially Smyth were musically more interesting.
incidentally one of the things that emerged yesterday on COTW was that this notion that women composers have been neglected in the past was not , according to the female expert , true in the twenties when the BBC broadcast many women composers.

[Master Jacques]

There aren’t enough “masterpieces “ to fill more than a month of Radio 3 so it’s always the case that mediocre music will get played, I think the problem is that Radio 3 is more and more into the third rate let alone second . Of course not everyone will agree. I struggle to find a page of mediocre Bach whereas Vivaldi seems to turn it out by the yard. I’m not sure Dorothy Howell , though worth the odd performance , makes the grade for COTW . It was telling yesterday that the two pieces by other women composers Clarke and especially Smyth were musically more interesting.
incidentally one of the things that emerged yesterday on COTW was that this notion that women composers have been neglected in the past was not , according to the female expert , true in the twenties when the BBC broadcast many women composers.

Indeed so - nor (as I've said) was it true in the Edwardian and pre-war Georgian era. Rebecca Clarke and Ethel Smyth are fully capable of holding their own in any company, as you've wisely said, and it's only the lugubrious sound of barrel-scraping which irritates listeners with more of an ear for quality than for "positive discrimination". If the Gatty Society could only show that their hero identified as Nichola, oh what a conch-shell of Radio 3 performances they could open for her!

[Sir Velo]

There aren’t enough “masterpieces “ to fill more than a month of Radio 3 so it’s always the case that mediocre music will get played, .

The complete works of Bach alone would occupy a month of the Radio 3 schedules so I think there's no excuse for mediocre music to ever be played on Radio 3. Moreover, there is a vast array of works of quality which fall between the masterpiece and the mediocre designation (eg 400 or so Scarlatti sonatas (I'm deliberately excluding the 155 out and out masterpieces) and 500 or so Vivaldi concertos. I

[Ein Heldenleben]

The complete works of Bach alone would occupy a month of the Radio 3 schedules so I think there's no excuse for mediocre music to ever be played on Radio 3. Moreover, there is a vast array of works of quality which fall between the masterpiece and the mediocre designation (eg 400 or so Scarlatti sonatas (I'm deliberately excluding the 155 out and out masterpieces) and 500 or so Vivaldi concertos. I

In fact it would take 7 to 8 days to play all of Bach - less if you take out parodies and reversioning . Telemann would take about 10 days but I think he falls into the inconsistent category . Beethoven is about 90 hours and there are some weaker works there. Haydn 340 hours but quite a lot of filler. Mozart 240 and ditto Ok lets say six weeks…

[mopsus]

When the Beeb did 'A Bach Christmas' they played all his works over 10 days. Obviously there were news bulletins, some 'documentary' programmes, the spoken parts of other programmes such as Choral Evensong, and some repetition.

The interviewee this week is I believe Leah Broad, who writes about Howell in her recent book 'Quartet'.