Originally posted by vinteuil
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Butterworth sang in several performances of the Bach B minor mass, in Leeds, Cambridge and elsewhere. He first met Adrian Boult at a concert where Boult sang the solo bass part in the Bach Magnificat. George accompanied Ferdinand Speyer in a Beethoven violin sonata. -
Mention of R.O.Morris upthread reminds me of his two volumes of 'Figured Harmony at the Keyboard'. They were so well structured that you could whiz through them and end up being quite competent at what the title suggests. A slight criticism, in retrospect, is that they didn't prepare you for the often scantily figured basses of much Baroque music...but then experience quickly fills in the gaps.Comment
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Wonderful thread,many thanks Pabs
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Alexander and Julia Kaye Butterworth settled into a pattern that seems to have predominated their marriage. Julia made all the decisions about George’s education; Alexander paid for it. A niece of Julia’s recalled the pair not so long before Julia died (she was already showing signs of Hodgkin’s Disease – cancer of the lymphatic system – something you really don’t want to get). The date is not given, but it is probably in 1910, since the Butterworth’s have moved back to London from York. Julia was:
… a tall & handsome brunette; with fine features, but a leaden expression. Her dark, sultry eyes had a strange doped expression, & her lips a bitter droop when her face was in repose. Most people seem to be in some dread of her... She took small notice of anyone but Uncle Alec ... [at family gatherings someone] would implore her to sing to the company — she had a marvellous contralto,[1] & had given up a projected operatic career to marry Uncle Alec. She would refuse many times ungraciously, & then quite suddenly consent with a proud smile. Her features grew animated; she was a different person; and I noticed mixed sadness & admiration in my Uncle’s glance as he listened ... I have always been led to believe that the cantankerous couple were really devoted to each other; & that he may not have objected to her “wearing the trousers”, as she undoubtedly did ... There was something very forthright & honest about Aunt Ju. & I liked her, & was never embarrassed by her gaucheries. How much was caused by bad health, & far too many medicaments ... one never knew; or whether it was drug-taking that gave her that “dead-pan” expression — there was certainly frustration & a hint of tragedy: but possibly there existed a totally different side to the marriage, that I never saw.[2]
Anyway, right from the start she decided George’s future. They still lived in London, and Julia still taught from the family home at Westbourne Terrace, Paddington (where George had been born; but destroyed – as Caliban has confirmed – in the blitz of WW2). A succession of private tutors visited daily. George would not attend any sort of ‘school’ till he was 10.
Then in 1891, when George was six, Alexander was appointed Solicitor to the North East Railway (he would in time become General Manager, being knighted for his role in leading the employers’ negotiating team in the railway strike of 1911). The family moved to York, and new tutors were engaged. But Julia started George on (1) piano lessons with Gustav Padel, and (2) dance lessons at Arthur Cowper’s Private Academy of Dancing in Stonegate. (That was where he met Reggie (‘R. O.’) Morris, who would be literally a lifelong friend, being in the action that killed George in 1916.) As far as we know, this was the first time George had ever mixed with other children (he had some cousins, but they were all younger).
At some time during this period, Alexander offered a reward to George if he could learn one of his children’s piano pieces in all 12 possible keys. George claimed the reward next day.
George was photographed with his father at Scarborough when he was (probably) seven. But the dreaded day came when he was 10. He was packed off to Aysgarth Preparatory School in North Yorkshire. He had (1) hardly ever mixed with other children, (2) never been away from his parents. He did not settle in well at all. (I suspect he had Asperger’s Syndrome, which would have intensified any problems arising from such a drastic change of circumstances – but more of that another time.)
However, by his third year (that is, his final year) he was head boy, captain of the school cricket XI and playing the organ regularly in chapel. He was destined for Marlborough, his father’s and uncle’s school, but the headmaster of Aysgarth suggested he try for a scholarship at Eton. He was accepted, the 2nd-highest scholar of that intake. He thus became one of the 70 King’s Scholars (as opposed to the 1200-or-so others, known as the Oppidans). The King’s Scholars are kept in the same house – “The College” – and live together. They also provide the choir in chapel. Other ‘Collagers’ during Butterworth’s time were the older Julian Huxley and John Maynard Keynes. George’s close friend at Eton was another Collager from the same intake – Daniel (“Dan”) Macmillan, elder brother of Harold, and another boy, Francis (“Timmy”) Jekyll – but more of him later. And significantly, the Assistant Music Master was the newly-appointed Thomas F. Dunhill, friend of D. F. Tovey and Frank Bridge. They would all become powerful influences.
[Watch this space.]
[1] Sic — she was a soprano; it is possible her voice dropped with age, but surely not beyond mezzo.
[2] Handwritten notes made about 1967 by Jean Glanville Garrett, quoted in John Mitchell: Julia Butterworth: Singer, Song-writer and Mother of George, 2013, Modus Music News No. 48. Reproduced here with the permission of Emma Corke.Comment
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I was just about to add (another irrelevant comment!) that I kept finding it difficult to find this thread. It wasn't so much the alphabetic sorting as the fact that I expected posts to crop up in 'most recent' order. Now I've twigged.
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Miss Julia Wigan (Mrs. A. Kaye Butterworth)
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Mr. Alexander Kaye Butterworth and Master George on holiday at Scarborough.
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I have been thinking how to continue - straight biography seems to interest no-one ( there were no coomments after my last two posts). So here's a bit of trivia and speculation, lifted straight from the book.
The strange case of Firle Beacon
"He had been sitting with us one evening talking, smoking & playing (I like to think it was one of those rare occasions when we persuaded him to play us his beautiful little Pianoforte piece Firle Beacon)".
R. Vaughan Williams, 1917
The bracketed sentence above, from a letter Vaughan Williams wrote to Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth more than a year after his son’s death, is our only cause to believe that George wrote a piano piece called Firle Beacon, perhaps a musical memory of days with Timmy Jekyll on the Sussex Downs. But neither sign nor mention of it has ever been found elsewhere, so what was Vaughan Williams talking about?
The letter deals largely with the genesis of A London Symphony, credit for which the composer gives to Butterworth.] It seems he did not sketch any ideas for the symphony before late 1911 at the earliest, suggesting that the occasion he recounted in his letter was not too long before that. He was clearly recalling an intimate social gathering that included impromptu music-making. No doubt both composers played, possibly Adeline too. Of the three, the younger man was the most gifted pianist and perhaps contributed the lion’s share of the music-making.
What seems likely, though, is that the format of such gatherings was not planned; the very fact that Vaughan Williams might ‘persuade’ Butterworth to play Firle Beacon suggests this. But it also follows that the piece was probably not written down, for it is difficult to believe that the young man would arrive for the evening carrying a piece of his own music, just in case it were requested — that really does not sound like someone who might have to be persuaded to play it, nor does it easily fit our usual image of Butterworth as a taciturn, private, even shy, person.
So unless Vaughan Williams had his own copy of Firle Beacon — and if so, what happened to it? — George probably played from memory, perhaps improvising around fixed ideas; he was an experienced chamber player and accompanist, after all. And if that is the case, we might ask whether the “beautiful little Pianoforte piece” ever existed in anything like a final or usable ‘hard copy’. I think it is significant that RVW says nothing in his letter such as “it’s a pity it can’t be found now”.
Firle Beacon will always be the one ‘lost’ work of George’s that many would love to find, but perhaps it never existed outside his own head, so that it died with him in Picardy, at dawn on a Summer’s day.
[1] See p. 203 for a fuller text.Comment
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Sorry pabs I forgot to acknowledge your latest posts,please keep them comingComment
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Ditto from me. The reason I've not contributed to this wonderful thread of pabs's probably has more to do with the little actual knowledge I had of Butterworth, being more interested in his music than the man. Which is absurd, really, since I'm as fascinated by the influences in the music as its distinctiveness from Continental tendencies of the time, this also applying to Vaughan Williams, and the Delius and Frankfurt-raised schools; and to glean anything of that one needs of course to put Butterworth in the context of that era and know about his contacts and relationships with his contemporaries. I was interested, earlier, reading from one of pabs's entries, that Sibelius had been a visitor to this country in that pre-war era. We know of course about Sibelius's influence upon later English music, in particular Bax, Walton and Moeran, RVW - and, later still, Peter Maxwell Davies; but nothing seems to have been said or written of English composer's awareness, let alone apreciation, if any, of the great Finnish composer's music, though speaking for myself, I do hear echoes of "En Saga" and parts of the "Lemmingkainen Legends", not to mention the Intermezzo from "Karelia Suite", in, for example, Vaughan Williams's second "Norfolk Rhapsody" - the spacious opening/closing passage in its instrumentation; also in Holst's to me very Sibelian "Beni Mora", Tchaikovsky by way of Sibelian austereness beyond the surface "exoticism". And is not the opening to the "Shropshire Rhapsody" not very Sibelian???Originally posted by EdgeleyRob View Post
Sorry pabs I forgot to acknowledge your latest posts,please keep them comingComment
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This is encouraging, SA and ER – thank you. I’m not (most of the time) just lifting stuff from my book, but am usually expanding of the biographical aspects. It is subtitled ‘An unconventional biography’, and I’ve tried to avoid lists of people and dates. Much of the book (about 100 pages) is detailed analyses of the music, which I can’t use here since I can’t upload the musical examples; another 100 pages are Butterworth’s own writings – the Diary of Morris Hunting, and the War Diary – which I’m not going to use here (at least not in any sort of depth). That leaves abut 150 pages for ‘other matters’, only a fraction of which is strict biography.
SA makes a good point about Sibelius, and it gives me a chance to talk in-depth about some of the music. Now, I don’t think that Sibelius was a major influence on GSKB (Debussy and Grieg are far stronger influences) but I entirely agree that the opening of the Shropshire Lad Rhapsody sounds Sibelian – those strings of thirds against a static harmony. But what it really derives from, I think, is George’s predilection for opening pieces with static, modally-based added-sixth chords. He did it several times in 1911 alone, starting with the song Requiescat (written after his mother had died) where the opening few bars of melody describe an Fm triad with a flattened seventh (E♭) over gently rocking Fm-Cm chords. Then there’s On the idle hill of summer, the last Housman setting (also from 1911). From the first bar we are in a Debussian world, with the sustaining pedal held down and the vocal line tracing an arpeggio of A6. This unchanging harmony continues for nine bars, creating a clear musical counterpart of:
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.
And the opening of The Land of Lost Content, also begun in 1911 – and which we know better as the Shropshire Lad Rhapsody. It illustrates the value of incorporating modality within a classical approach. It opens with an extended A minor chord (14 bars this time, of which 11 are unchanging) but in just the second full bar, violas introduce an F♯. Commentators have remarked on this, and how very different it would have been with the F♮s that the key signature implies. But this rather misses the point; the passage is not in A minor with interjections by the foreign F♯: it is in dorian A. The F♯ is intrinsic to the tonality and sounds wholly natural — so natural, in fact, that the first thirteen bars are little more than a musing on an added-sixth chord in dorian A. All seven notes of the mode are used over the sustained chord (the G and B appearing in bars 11 and 12). It is only in the fourteenth bar that Butterworth introduces a G♯ — hardly a completely foreign note in the circumstances since it is intrinsic to A minor — producing, with its G-G♯shift, his favoured effect of a tierce de Picardie. It is a wonderful example of how the classical A minor can contain F♯, G and G♯, without ever suggesting a change of tonality.
There’s also the last song of Love Blows As The Wind Blows (1912) – Coming up from Richmond – where he uses a repeated five-note figure of triads moving by step.
(Quoting from the book): “But this is not about shifting tonalities as in Gerontius, quite the opposite in fact; the five-note figure that begins On the way to Kew establishes an almost minimalist atmosphere around dorian G for ten bars and myxolydian G — the ‘major’ version of the opening figure — for six bars; and it recurs three-and-a-half times. It is actually a version of the tierce de picardie semitone shift that we have seen before, since the B♭ of one figure becomes the B♮ of the other. The hypnotic effect that ensues is clearly meant to represent the ever-flowing Thames.”
An interesting point here is that RVW’s Pastoral Symphony opens with strings of triads moving by step in myxolydian G with interjections in dorian G. Coincidence? I doubt it, for at precisely the same time RVW was writing this, he was preparing Butterworth’s piece for publishing – in 1921 – and was making the piano version of it (it’s originally for voice and string quartet).
Now, there’s a taste of the ‘academic’ stuff. I’ll post some more biography soon.Comment
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Oh, Bravo, Pabs - bravo!
[FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]Comment
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Originally posted by ferneyhoughgeliebte View PostOh, Bravo, Pabs - bravo!
I used to smoke a pipe like that!Comment
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This is almost out. I had no direct connexion with it, except that Hugh Butterworth (remarkably, a 1st cousin!) sent me raw footage of interviews he did for the film, and sent a draft of my book to the film-maker.
And here's a trailer:
Last edited by Pabmusic; 10-12-18, 01:43.Comment
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