ARNOLD BAX - deja vu? A
Composer's Musings
by Arthur Butterworth
THE SIR ARNOLD BAX WEB SITE
Last Modified May 18, 1997
Note: Composer Arthur
Butterworth is well known to lovers of British music. His symphonies
have been performed by such great conductors as Barbirolli and Boult
and he has served both as an orchestral player and conductor. In the
article below, Butterworth provides some fascinating and somtimes
critical views of Arnold Bax, a composer whom he says has greatly
influenced his own music. I greatly appreciate Arthur Butterworth
for allowing me to post it here.
PROLOGUE
As a small boy at Junior school, the highlight of the week was the
last lesson on Friday afternoons, when we would have stories read to
us by our young lady teacher, whom we all loved and idolised, for
she was very attractive, even to a young boy of nine or ten. These
romantic tales of Vikings, ancient legends of the northlands, of
heroic deeds in the far west, of the Celtic twilight, tales of King
Arthur, Tintagel, galleons under full sail dipping into a deep red
sunset, tantalised and captivated my imagination. Trudging home from
school on November afternoons, watching the clouds gather in the
late afternoon dusk, and the vivid impression of the tales we had
been told, stirred something deep and unfathomable within me.
Some little time ago, a cousin of mine, clearing out a drawer of old
family papers, came across a childish hand-painted Christmas card of
the early 1930s. "Do you remember this, Arthur?" she said.
It was something that I had made myself all those years ago. It
depicted an ancient sailing ship sinking away into a rosy sunset and
had the caption: "My thoughts are always far away." We
smiled at this, indulgently remembering the innocence of childhood
imagination.
The summer of 1939 was memorable; anxious too, though perhaps as a
sixteen year-old one did not realise it fully at the time. My mother
had died some few years before, but my father took me on holiday to
Devon. It was a devastating awakening: for I fell in love with a
girl who was a year younger; that holiday remained one of the most
vivid memories of a lifetime; a real Romeo and Juliet situation in
its pure innocence. But within a few weeks the war had come and we
were only ever to meet briefly once again. It left me with vague but
tempestuously recurrent dreams of sea-scapes, and ecstatic meetings
with my unattainable beloved in the far west.
Although as a youth I had occasionally seen in Radio Times the name
of Arnold Bax; I could never remember ever having heard any of his
music until one day after the war was long over and I had returned
from the army to civilian life. It happened this way: I was a music
student in Manchester and had entered the first of the then
Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra's conducting scholarships. The
sight-reading test for which we were allowed about
quarter-of-an-hour to glance through the score - was Bax's Tintagel.
I did not win the scholarship, but the experience of conducting
"Tintagel at sight was a revelation. It was comparable to a
similar experience I had had a year or so before whilst in a barrack
room, one quiet, lazy afternoon whilst still in Germany, when
through a crackly radio, I first heard "Tapiola", a work
which first brought me under the overwhelmingly powerful spell of
Sibelius, and which, along with that of Bax, has influenced almost
the whole course of my own music ever since; no matter how
unfashionable that might have seemed in some musical circles during
the past quarter-century or more. The sudden and unexpected
acquaintance with Tintagel inevitably brought to mind the yearning
dreams about the west country in the high summer of 1939, and my own
awakening eroticism. I sought to find out more about Bax, so that it
was hardly surprising when read of his boyhood experience one
September sunset at Arundel, of being overwhelmed by the
transitoriness of all lovely things.
My professional life began as an orchestral player in the then
Scottish Orchestra (now the Royal Scottlsh National Orchestra) in
Glasgow. The geographical situation was important because it meant
coming to live on the fringe of the Celtic domain so to speak. Much
of my free time was spent exploring the far west and north west of
& Scotland, and although at that time I had never been to
Ireland, I was soon to do so. Reading some years later of Bax's own
youthful experience, especially the impulsive "cherchez la
femme" incident in Russia, I felt a sense of "d ja
vu", or at least a feeling that I too had had a somewhat
parallel experience. It came about this way: in the Scottish
Orchestra of that season, 1949-50, were lots of young people
straight out of college; I was one of them, another was a young
girl, a viola player from Ireland with whom I had a passionate, but
tempestuous affair. We talked endlessly about Ireland, she bought me
books about the far west, Galway, Achill Island and other places,
and generally infused in me a romantic notion about going to live
there. When the winter season was over (the orchestra was not then a
full-time, all year engagement as it now is) she cajoled me to visit
her family home near Dublin. It was an ecstatic time, but ended, as
did Bax's visit to Russia a generation before, most unhappily and I
returned home miserable and wretched. I began to see parallels, for
we had even toyed with the idea of a visit to Morar! Inevitably the
incidents of 1949-50 passed and I got on with being a professional
orchestral player.
A few years later I left Scotland to join Barbirolli's Halle
Orchestra, then at the height of its fame. It was at the Cheltenham
Festival of 1957 that Barbirolli conducted and championed my own
First Symphony. By this time I had been married to my Scots wife,
Diana, to whom this First Symphony is dedicated. Its long genesis,
although not completed until we were living in Manchester, had been
the outcome of the years spent in Scotland. It was bemusing, yet
undoubtedly gratifying, to read the review of its first performance,
when writing in The Times , the distinguished critic, Desmond
Shaw-Taylor commented: "... a certain affinity with Sibelius
comes as no surprise; parts of this symphony also suggest a kind of
latter-day Bax ......"
Practical acquaintance with performing Bax, has, unfortunately, been
limited, and this is one of the regrets of my professional life. By
the late 1940s and early 1950s Bax's music was not in vogue;
post-war taste (like that of the very early 1920s) did not favour
this kind of romanticism; the new Second Viennese School (detested
by Bax) was quickly finding adherents among intellectuals, and with
the sea-change of BBC music policy after 1959, "our" kind
of music - the long tradition of English music - was held in some
contempt by those in power. Apart from Tintagel and The Garden of
Fand, I never took part as an orchestral player in any performance
of Bax.
At the Edinburgh Festival of 1954, an American ballet company, for
which the Scottish National Orchestra provided the accompaniment,
performed a ballet they had entitled Picnic at Tintagel", but
oddly enough, the music used for this was actually The Garden of
Fand. It was a most romantic Edwardian scene on stage with a most
romantic, idyllic, sensuous aura; love-making among the sand dunes,
jealousies, rivalries between elegant Edwardian gentlemen and
swooning love-lorn ladies in gorgeous costumes, parasols, buckets
and spades, hampers, bottles of champagne, and that wonderful
whooping horns theme, orgasmic in the extreme.
My knowledge of Bax 's music has grown steadily over the years in
spite of opportunities either to take part in or just listen to live
performances. One keen conductor, was George Weldon, who did
Tintagel splendidly. Barbirolli of course championed Bax too, but by
the late 1950s it seemed to be Weldon who, at least with the Halle,
did more Bax performances. I always regretted never having played
Bax under Basil Cameron, whom I got to know very well, and who was
reputed to have been a keen interpreter of Bax. It was also my
regret never to have known Arnold Bax personally; I came onto the
Halle scene a little too late ever to have known him, but I do
recall seeing, fleetingly at a Cheltenham Festival, the
by-now-mature, but effusive, and elegant figure of Harriet Cohen, as
she was pointed out to me by one of the older Halle players. I do
quite clearly recall my youth again in this respect: having
frequently seen ravishing photographs of her in Radio Times - and,
at a distance - having fallen in love with her picture. Later on I
began to be jealous of Bax in retrospect so to speak, when I began
to realise what a relationship he had had with her!.
I cannot say by any means that present-day conductors play his music
too slowly, A parallel might lie with Elgar in this respect: Elgar's
own recordings (crude by contemporary standards of recording
techniques) always seem fast, and even a bit matter-of-fact, I think
the explanation being that, first of all, in those days when they
had to cram into a short four or four-and-a-half minutes as much as
they could on a wax disc was apt to make performers anxious to get
on with it, not to make self-indulgent rubatos. Secondly, composers,
especially no-nonsense English composers of Elgar's stamp, would not
exploit their players by making too much fuss over purple passages
(unlike some continentals who these days drool over the more banal
passages in Mahler). There is a feeling, conducting one's own works,
of being almost apologetic for having taken up the players time by
being unduly self-indulgent; we feel a shade embarrassed at hearing
our own effusions and want to get on with it. Maybe this is a good
reason for letting someone else be the interpreter; a professional
conductor who is not the composer, stands no nonsense from sometimes
uncooperative or prosaic minded players, and makes them rehearse and
makes them get things as carefully and minutely correct as possible,
even if it does try their patience and take a minute or two longer,
or require yet another recording take. So I do not think present day
conductors play his music to slowly. Players as far as I can see
like performing his music; it is always grateful to handle
technically (unlike a lot of avant garde music which has its
technical perversities from time to time, with not much to show for
it, as an emotional experience, in the end. Of course individual
taste cannot be accounted for, there must be some players who do not
like it at all, just as there are some who detest Elgar (quite a lot
did in the 1950s), or Brahms, or Mahler. Weldon certainly liked Bax,
and said so; curiously I never heard Barbirolli say one thing or the
other. He must have done so at one time since we know how often he
had performed things in the more distant past. Although I knew Boult
well - he did the premiere of my own Second Symphony - I never
recall a single occasion when we had cause to mention Bax. Maurice
Miles most certainly loved Bax; it was he who, as conductor of the
now-defunct Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra, chose Tintagel as the
sight-reading test for the would-be apprentice conductors. I never
met Leppard. Bryden Thomson, who did a lot of things of mine
obviously felt great attraction towards Bax. One of the most vivid
of all recollections however, is of an occasion when I was invited
to a studio broadcast by the BBC Scottish Orchestra under their
long-standing conductor, Ian Whyte, a Scot of decidedly Celtic
temperament who had little love for Sassenachs. This was the first
time I had heard a Bax symphony most meticulously rehearsed and then
broadcast live. Whyte was a good musician, but dour; inclined to
pedantry and devoid of even the slightest whiff of the jet-setting
showmanship of many of today's conductors. This was a memorable
performance indeed; totally convincing, probably on account of the
dark, sullen atmosphere he created in the first two movements. This
was the spark that ignited my own enthusiasm, and so the
recollection of it has remained over more than forty years.
Bax 's brass writing is excellent and most rewarding to play; the
puzzle was why he never composed anything for brass band; but the
reason is probably a sociological one: Bax's upper class circle
would never have deigned even to think of the brass band of those
days as worthy of consideration. Had he been alive now, the
situation might have been quite different. For my own part, I don't
think his music inspired respect in the way that Elgar's does,
although some of the high-sounding liturgical passages have a
nobilmente quality at times, but sheer indulgent affection for the
colour and the erotically arousing hedonism. Nor I do not feel in
the least irritated if others find parallels or influences from
other composers. Wagner is often mentioned in this respect, the
Tristan influence being uppermost in most people's estimation,
although I have been left almost utterly unmoved by Wagner and
cannot see what others claim to be the most erotic music ever
written in such as Tristan. I have never found it even mildly
sensuous; merely slow, tedious and boring, heavily Teutonic, all
that opera stuff!). I think the parallels with Sibelius only feint.
Sibelius's harmony and structure is far more taut; whereas Bax
luxuriates to the point of extravagance and a complexity, which, for
all that its colour and sensuousness is alluring, is not nearly so
coldly clear-cut as the often stark sounds of Sibelius. Sibelius,
even in the Kalevala inspired tone poems, seems to convey a real
life musical experience (such as Shostakovich was later to do with
regard to Soviet Russian life, whereas Bax transports the listener
to a land of make-believe. This latter consideration is probably one
cogent reason for its comparative decline in wide popular taste,
notwithstanding the enthusiasms of devotees such as ourselves, and
the signs of a revival of general interest. So, while Bax's music is
of enormous personal interest to me - because I too felt some of the
same youthful sensuous longings - I began in 1983, on listening to
the many BBC programmes which celebrated his centenary, to
understand why it had been neglected for so long, and why for most
people it did not seem able to win the high acclaim enjoyed by Elgar,
Vaughan Williams, or Walton. Bax's music is still important to me
because I know what it has meant in the past in my own development
as a composer.
It is worth recounting something that Vaughan Williams once said to
me when I went to him for a lesson: In that ardent, gushing,
enthusiastic way that young men often have I had said to VW how
deeply I felt about his music. He looked a bit non-plussed, and then
calmly said to me. "Well, I m glad my music means a lot to you,
but in another thirty years or so, when you are older and more
experienced, you must not think, that if you begin to find my music
does not mean as much to you as it does now, that you are being
disloyal to me; taste changes with time, and what we might once have
found so wonderful, might not, after the passage of time, be all
that marvellous after all"..... He was so right! - for this is
precisely what I have found about my present reactions to his music.
And so it has become with Bax.
So has Bax influenced my own music? Certainly not to the extent that
Sibelius has, for he still remains the most potent influence of all
for me. Still, much ofBax's colour, orchestration especially, has
ever been for me a potent model. I don'tt thinkhis structures and
form has yielded a great deal to my own way of designing large
musical structures. It may seem churlish to go on to quote something
else that Desmond Shawe-Taylor remarked on in that critique of 1957;
he continued: " though Butterworth rarely allows his music to
sprawl as Bax sometimes did." I must say this has always
brought about a slight feeling of embarrassment at being compared to
Bax, as it were, in this instance more in my favour than his!
One supposes there are several parallels with other composers both
his contemporaries and those of an earlier time. Wagner has often
been mentioned, so has Elgar, and some nineteenth-century Russians;
but none of these, at least to my ears, can be heard in Bax. His
music, if it sounds like any other at all, is more akin to Delius,
Warlock, and above all Moeran, that other, even more neglected
Anglo-Irish composer. Also there are passages in Bliss notably A
Colour Symphony of 1922, the same year as Bax's First Symphony, so
this is hardly surprising. His orchestration while being
tantalisingly colourful (for example the unique dark purple sound of
the sarrusophone in the First Symphony, which I was fortunate enough
to be provided with a player for - instead of the more usual
substitute, the contra-bassoon - when I had the opportunity to do
this splendid work three or four years ago. For this I shall always
be grateful to the enterprise of Adrian Smith and the Slaithwaite
Philharmonic Orchestra, and the support they had from the Arnold Bax
Trust in promoting the performance. I cannot honestly say that I
find Bax's symphonic structures as compelling as his sense of
orchestral colour.
This, in a sense, might seem to place him in a category similar to
Debussy, or other impressionists, who have often been admired for
their sense of sheer colour at the expense of solid, clear-cut
structure.Whatever other works of Bax I have come to know, the First
Symphony is still my own favourite. Preparing this for a performance
with a good amateur orchestra was a particular pleasure; it was as
if I were privileged to lead them on a journey of exploration into a
musical realm few, if any of them, had ever known before.
Tintagel never posed any difficulties; it was familiar to players
through having heard it before, and technically it did not seem
particularly demanding; exhilarating certainly, but never daunting.
I must confess that the opening of Tintagel" provided me with a
passage in one of my own works, Trains in the Distance, in which I
used a poem which nostalgically describes a train journey to South
Devon; the sea wall by Teignmouth, and other scenes in the halcyon
days of summer holidays between the wars.
For all the present revival of interest in Bax, the 1950s lack of
interest in his music was worse than that suffered by Elgar because
of the very prosaic post-war attitudes that prevailed; Bax's music
was just too imaginative to be believed in, whereas Elgar, and
certainly Vaughan Williams, had always had a universal real-life
appeal.
Of the music that deserves to be revived, three of the symphonies
particularly appeal to me: l, 3 and 6, in that order. November
Woods, The Garden of Fand, Spring Fire, the Cello Concerto. Tintagel
needs no assistance, and the Overture to a Picaresque Comedy seems a
trifle out of character. However, this leads to considerations of
other composers who have some emotional and spiritual connection
with Bax. Most notable to me is Moeran, another composer who I never
met, although he was a close personal friend of one of my Halle
colleagues. In 1951, Festival of Britain year, all British
orchestras were bidden to appear at the then newly-opened Royal
Festival Hall. I don t know who allotted the programmes, but the
newly-established Scottish National Orchestra from the remnants of
the old Scottish Orchestra referred to above was given the task of
performing the Moeran Symphony in G minor which had made such an
impression in 1938 when it first came out. We rehearsed this most
thoroughly, on and off, for several weeks before the Festival Hall
concert, under Walter Susskind; but for some reason this was the
sole performance, we never did it again, yet I thought at the time
how appropriate it would have been to Scottish audiences. I have
always liked this work and place it side by side with Bax's First
Symphony.
While tonal music, fortunately, seems to be enjoying something of a
revival, I feel a lot of listeners could still be perplexed by Bax's
individual, but highly intricate and often elusive harmonic language
which is tantalising and alluring, yet really quite difficult to pin
down when listening to it. In this it is unlike the hard, yet
crystal clear harmonies of Sibelius, or Vaughan Williams, even
Moeran. This is hard to explain, since audiences have long come to
terms with the Second Viennese, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and the
later French composers, Messiaen in particular, or other
continentals; such as Szymanowski, Lutoslawski, or, coming right up
to date, Schnittke. I suppose the answer might be that all these
others are, or were, mainland voices, expressing the culture of the
huge communities they lived in, whereas Bax inhabited something of a
remoter back-water on the fringe of Europe, Ireland itself and of
course Inverness-shire. Some of us like to visit there in spirit,
and some of us have actually been there and even toyed with the idea
of living there, but that does not go for the majority. Another - by
now even remoter figure - is that of Bantock, whose interest is kept
alive in certain quarters. (For example the Leeds Symphony Orchestra
did the Hebridean Symphony about three years ago - it was a splendid
performance - and within a few weeks from now are to do the Pagan
Symphony). I took part in a performance of the Hebridean Symphony in
Scotland in the early 1950s and thought it marvellously evocative.
His brass band music is kept up to some extent in the rather closed
atmosphere of the brass band. Prometheus Unbound and The Frogs are
still played. Prometheus Unbound was one of the first - and
influential - brass band scores I ever saw. In the late winter of
1940 I was introduced to Bantock at a massed band concert; the
occasion was important for me because it marked the first public
performance of anything of mine; a concert overture, long since
lost, which Bantock congratulated me on, and hoped that one day I
might become a good composer!
This text is the copyright of
Arthur Butterworth
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