Prom 22: A London Symphony – 31.07.18

[LMcD]

On the subject of "between all the stools", if tending more towards the serial, mahy I put in a word for Matyas Seiber?

Is a cowpat not a form of stool?

[Serial_Apologist]

Very stimulating thread....
(and another nod to Pabmusic for some remarkably new & revealing comments re. VW - thanks)...

Off-piste a little but whenever the balance of rep or comparative musical neglect comes up, I can't help thinking of those 20th Century composers who really do seem to fall between all the stools - Roussel, Honegger, Martinu, Gerhard, Skalkottas, Petrassi, Ghedini... so much fascinating, attractive, compelling music but if played at all, usually the same pieces (Roussel 3 & Bacchus, Pacific 231 etc., Honegger 2 as a filler, you might get a Liturgique if you're lucky).

Yes, it's a subjective, even "selfish" view, as the mid-20th-Century is my adopted "musical homeland" to some degree (it's where I always seem to return to), but I feel so many more people could enjoy this wide-ranging repertoire if only they knew it, and it really could open doors...

I've already mentioned a half-generation of fine C20 French composers who fall into the "neglecteds" folder to the extent of never, ever receiving performances - at the proms or on Radio 3 - at all!

When I've got the moment I've been promising, I shall take this up again.

[Serial_Apologist]

On the subject of "between all the stools", if tending more towards the serial, may I put in a word for Matyas Seiber?

[LMcD]

To be serious for a moment (no, really.....)
I'd be interested in people's views on why the symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Elgar have never been out of fashion, while those by composers such as, say, Robert Simpson. Robert Lloyd and Edmund Rubbra rarely seem to be programmed or broadcast.
I myself have the symphonies of Robert Alwyn and Alan Rawsthorne on CD. I also have Rubbra's 6th and 8th, but despite listening with an open mind to his others I feel that they don't add to my overall listening experience.

[edashtav]

Given that RVW was never intended to be referenced in the term "Cowpat School of Composers", could somebody name any composer who was so intended who is featured in this year's Proms? And a "Dodecaphonic School" is equally slovenly - as are the usual "excessive" charges levelled against Glock (who seems to have become related to the Prime Minister in ed's latest).

That Schoenberg's Music should feature as frequently as Brahms' or Haydn's is of course a given. That it doesn't is not the fault of a couple of RVW's fine symphonies - any more than it is Tchaikovsky's "fault" that Act One of the Nutcracker is taking up time that could be devoted to the Brahms First Serenade. If we want to apportion "blame", then it lies with the Beeb creating barriers to access to Classical Musics by appointing David Pickard to head the Proms - it's events like the Jacob Collier Prom that's taking up the time and space that could be better used.

Ferney... you seen keen to Remove RVW from the Cowpat school!

“Cowpat music’. Derogatory term coined by Elisabeth Lutyens to describe Eng. pastoral school of composers—e.g. Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, and Bax. First used (as ‘the cowpat school’) in a lecture she gave at Dartington summer sch. of mus. in 1950s, referring to ‘folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais’.
Source : The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. 1996

[edashtav]

Steve Smith in NY Times 13 July 1908

“A WELL-PLACED barb can affect an artist’s reputation forever, even when credit for the insult is uncertain. Philip Heseltine, an English critic who composed under the name Peter Warlock, is said to have likened “A Pastoral Symphony” (Symphony No. 3) by his countryman, Ralph Vaughan Williams, to a cow staring over a fence.

Google Vaughan Williams and that epithet, and you will also find it attributed to Constant Lambert, a composer acquainted with both men. The bovine imagery appears in other variations: Aaron Copland is supposed to have said that listening to Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5 was like staring at a cow for 45 minutes. Elisabeth Lutyens, an English modernist composer, dismissed the British pastoral school, of which Vaughan Williams was the most prominent figure, with the withering term “cow-pat music.”

[HighlandDougie]

I want to return to Bryn and Ferney’s responses in posts #119 and #120 dismissing Lutyens’s cowpat comment.

I feel that you’ve forgotten the trenchant reactions of many, including Elisabeth, to the policy statement drawn up by RVW for the Arts Council in 1946. RVW was in combative mood when he asked the question “Nationalism or Internationalism?”
He caused offence when he wrote ,’the snobs and prigs who think that foreign culture is the only thing worth having,’ [...] ‘their aim’, he said, was to,’establish a little Europe in England’.

Strong stuff, eh?

It had some good, short-term outcomes, e.g. Covent Garden started to commission more works in English...leading,
quickly, to Britten’s Peter Grimes.

Apologies for the pedantic aside but the Arts Council of Great Britain was established in 1946; 'Peter Grimes', which was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, was first performed in 1945 at Sadler's Wells. It was first performed at Covent Garden in 1947. Not to deny that Covent Garden didn't commission/give first performances to operas in English by Britten (Billy Budd; Gloriana), Tippett (Midsummer Marriage), Vaughan Williams (Pilgrim's Progress) and Walton (Troilus and Cressida) in that period between 1947 and 1955.

This thread has had me scurrying to my bookshelves for the biography of Elisabeth Lutyens ("Betty", it seems) and for "Music Ho". It's understandable why Constant Lambert and Philip Heseltine's respective comments about, inter alia, faux-folksy "English" music and RVW might have become intertwined in myth but, as FHG pointed out above, Heseltine admired RVW. He (Heseltine) was recalled by his friend Robert Nichols, the poet and fellow-student at Oxford, as saying (about the Pastoral Symphony): "A truly splendid work. You know I've only one thing to say about this composer's music: it is all just a little too much like a cow looking over a gate. None the less he is a very great composer and the more I hear the more I admire him" (from Cecil Gray's 1934 'Memoir of Philip Heseltine'). Lambert's target seems to be less RVW than, say, Bax and possibly John Ireland. The Lutyens dismissal is sweeping and indeed silly but I have some sympathy for her when she adds to the cowpat comparison, the description of the music as, "folky-wolky modal melodies on the cor anglais". Quite.

[LMcD]

Unfortunately I've lost my copy of Schnitzelburger's 'Vaughan Williams und das Kuhfladenmusikphänomen', a reprint of the article originally published as a supplement to the September 1915 issue of the Niedersächsische Musikrundschau.
I see that the cowpat school now extends into the early 1960s with the inclusion of Bax and Ireland. John Tavener will presumably also be included before too long.
Mind where you put your feet!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

To be serious for a moment (no, really.....)
I'd be interested in people's views on why the symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Elgar have never been out of fashion, while those by composers such as, say, Robert Simpson. Robert Lloyd and Edmund Rubbra rarely seem to be programmed or broadcast.
I myself have the symphonies of Robert Alwyn and Alan Rawsthorne on CD. I also have Rubbra's 6th and 8th, but despite listening with an open mind to his others I feel that they don't add to my overall listening experience.

LmcD - not every "neglected" Brit who wrote a Symphony is called "Robert". "Lloyd" was "George, and "Alwyn" was "William".

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ferney... you seen keen to Remove RVW from the Cowpat school!

“Cowpat music’. Derogatory term coined by Elisabeth Lutyens to describe Eng. pastoral school of composers—e.g. Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, and Bax. First used (as ‘the cowpat school’) in a lecture she gave at Dartington summer sch. of mus. in 1950s, referring to ‘folky-wolky melodies on the cor anglais’.
Source : The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. 1996

ed - you seem determined to include RVW amongst Lutyens' intended targets in her coinage of "The Cowpat School". Where, in her Dartington Lecture - as opposed to the Oxford Concise Dictionary's summary of it - does she include RVW, as opposed to his lesser followers?

[edashtav]

Apologies for the pedantic aside but the Arts Council of Great Britain was established in 1946; 'Peter Grimes', which was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, was first performed in 1945 at Sadler's Wells. It was first performed at Covent Garden in 1947. Not to deny that Covent Garden didn't commission/give first performances to operas in English by Britten (Billy Budd; Gloriana), Tippett (Midsummer Marriage), Vaughan Williams (Pilgrim's Progress) and Walton (Troilus and Cressida) in that period between 1947 and 1955.

This thread has had me scurrying to my bookshelves for the biography of Elisabeth Lutyens ("Betty", it seems) and for "Music Ho". It's understandable why Constant Lambert and Philip Heseltine's respective comments about, inter alia, faux-folksy "English" music and RVW might have become intertwined in myth but, as FHG pointed out above, Heseltine admired RVW. He (Heseltine) was recalled by his friend Robert Nichols, the poet and fellow-student at Oxford, as saying (about the Pastoral Symphony): "A truly splendid work. You know I've only one thing to say about this composer's music: it is all just a little too much like a cow looking over a gate. None the less he is a very great composer and the more I hear the more I admire him" (from Cecil Gray's 1934 'Memoir of Philip Heseltine'). Lambert's target seems to be less RVW than, say, Bax and possibly John Ireland. The Lutyens dismissal is sweeping and indeed silly but I have some sympathy for her when she adds to the cowpat comparison, the description of the music as, "folky-wolky modal melodies on the cor anglais". Quite.

Thank you for correcting me on dates around Peter Grimes, Highland Dougie.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Steve Smith in NY Times 13 July 1908

“A WELL-PLACED barb can affect an artist’s reputation forever, even when credit for the insult is uncertain. Philip Heseltine, an English critic who composed under the name Peter Warlock, is said to have likened “A Pastoral Symphony” (Symphony No. 3) by his countryman, Ralph Vaughan Williams, to a cow staring over a fence.

Google Vaughan Williams and that epithet, and you will also find it attributed to Constant Lambert, a composer acquainted with both men. The bovine imagery appears in other variations: Aaron Copland is supposed to have said that listening to Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5 was like staring at a cow for 45 minutes. Elisabeth Lutyens, an English modernist composer, dismissed the British pastoral school, of which Vaughan Williams was the most prominent figure, with the withering term “cow-pat music.”

???

Steve Smith in 1908 is inviting her/his readers to "Google Vaughan Williams"? And discussing a work that wasn't written for another twelve years?

[LMcD]

LmcD - not every "neglected" Brit who wrote a Symphony is called "Robert". "Lloyd" was "George, and "Alwyn" was "William".

I obviously don't play those particular CDs often enough....
I didn't know Lloyd George was a composer
One 'friend' suggested the Pastoral was 'V.W. rolling over and over in a ploughed field on a wet day'. (Quoted by Andrew Burn in the liner notes to Vernon Handley's recording with the RLPO).
According to the same author, Heseltine "disparagingly dismissed it as 'like a cow looking over a gate' ".
RVW said: 'It's really war-time music......it's not really lambs frisking around at all as most people take for granted'.
Just out of interest, was it known as the 'Pastoral' from the outset?

[Nevilevelis]

I’m pleased to hear your report, Nevilevelis. Whatever its prolixity and lack of structure in its slow movement, RVW’s London Symphony is accessible. My comments were engendered by the excessive coughing during the performance of the more taxing Pastoral Symphony.

No, it isn't prolix and it doesn't lack structure.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I didn't know Lloyd George was a composer

A better one than George Lloyd, anyway.