ROBERT
SIMPSON LECTURE by Malcolm MacDonald
WIGMORE
HALL, 15 MARCH 2000
It’s
a bit difficult to know at what level
to pitch this lecture. No doubt some
of you are members of the Robert Simpson
Society, and know all there is to know
about him anyway, while probably some
others of you aren’t very familiar with
his music and have simply come along
out of curiosity, to learn a few basic
facts about a composer whose name and
work are, sadly, even now, not as well
known as they deserve. I’m proud of
the fact that I knew Bob (as anyone
who knew him must call him), and I counted
him as a friend, though we didn’t meet
all that frequently. He was enormously
helpful to me as I was starting out
as a writer on music: in fact, directly
or indirectly he got me my first writing
jobs, and my first commissions to write
books, and I’ll never cease to be grateful
to him for thinking me worth that sort
of encouragement. I sometimes suspect
he later thought that, as an editor
of a contemporary music magazine, I
devoted too much of my time to music
he considered second-rate, or worse.
Though perhaps I’m wrong: his own tastes
and sympathies and tolerances were a
lot wider than he himself would sometimes
paint them.
So
let me say right away that my own attitude
to Simpson’s music is unequivocal –
he was one of the most important composers
anywhere in the world in the second
half of the 20th century,
and his works – most notably his symphonies
and string quartets – represent a vital
stage in the ongoing history of those
great forms. To some extent he could
be said to have reinforced the classical
principles of tonality and musical momentum,
but though his gods were Haydn and Beethoven,
Bruckner and Nielsen, he wasn’t really
a conservative or backward-looking composer.
He was carrying things forward, attempting
to continue the complex and meaningful
discourse which typifies those composers
at a similar level of seriousness, profundity
and absolute respect for the fundamentals
of musical art. It’s always appropriate
to review what we know about such a
composer, even at the most basic biographical
and informational levels, to be sure
we know what we think we know. So I’ll
start by giving a biographical outline,
then I’ll move on to say a bit about
his symphonic music, which I imagine
is the best-known and perhaps the most
important part of his output, and finally
I’ll look in some more detail at his
chamber music, especially his string
quartets, as is appropriate in the context
of this Wigmore Hall series. But first,
some music:
[Slow
movt of Quartet No.5 – to about 3’15"]
That
wasn’t something you’ll be hearing during
this series – it’s part of the slow
movement of Robert Simpson’s Fifth String
Quartet, of 1974, and I play it just
now – well, because, it’s good to hear
music instead of talk, and because it
may concentrate our minds on the truth,
which it makes self-evident, that here
was a composer who – whatever history’s
ultimate verdict on his music may be
– who spoke in music with the
kind of utter certainty and emotional
truth as the great masters.
Robert
Simpson was born in 1921, in Leamington
Spa. If that makes him sound quintessentially
English, we should note that his descent
on his father’s side was Scottish, and
on his mother’s, Dutch. I’m really no
friend of theories of racial influence
in music and personality, but there
were aspects of his humour, and of his
uncompromising dedication to matters
of principle, that sometimes seemed
very ‘un-English’ and more Nordic
or Central European. Unusually for a
composer, he didn’t really play the
piano, or a string instrument – all
the more astonishing considering his
output of string quartets. He did, in
his youth, play the trumpet, and the
experience probably left its mark: everybody’s
noted the boldness of his brass writing,
and he composed several weighty and
virtuosic pieces for brass band. A forebear
on his father’s side was Sir James Simpson,
the Scottish pioneer of anaesthetics,
and his parents intended him for a medical
career. He did, in fact, study medicine
in London for two years before the war,
before the lure of music proved too
strong. He wrote four symphonies, the
first of them while he was still at
school, before his official First in
1951.
Simpson
was always a pugnacious pacifist. During
World War II he was a conscientious
objector, and throughout the Blitz he
served with an ARP mobile surgical unit,
no doubt because of his medical training.
It was during a bombing raid that he
met his first wife, sitting in a graveyard.
She’d just lost her home and family.
He took her home with him, and they
were inseparable ever afterwards. At
the same time, he was taking lessons
in composition from Herbert Howells.
After the war Simpson
lectured extensively and founded the
Exploratory Concerts Society. He was
one of a rising generation of musical
commentators that also included Donald
Mitchell and Hans Keller, whose magazine
Music Survey he contributed to,
although his principal musical sympathies
lay in a different direction to theirs.
The first major expression of Simpson’s
distinctive musical approach and opinions
was his pioneering book on Carl Nielsen
(1952), which virtually introduced the
Danish master to English-speaking audiences
and remains, even today, the standard
guide to his symphonies.
Meanwhile Howells had
persuaded Simpson to take the Durham
Bachelor of music degree and, in 1951,
a doctorate. He submitted as his thesis
his First Symphony, which was
later recorded under the auspices of
the British Council. From the very first
bars there’s a sense of an original
voice making a decisive, indeed a trenchant
statement, starting with a piercing
blast on the high D trumpets:
[Example: Symphony
No.1, opening (just over 2’00")]
That
year Simpson joined the BBC music staff.
He became one of its best-known and
most respected music producers, working
closely with the BBC Symphony Orchestra
under Sir Adrian Boult. He was also
a master practitioner of the art of
the broadcast talk, with a rare ability
to communicate to listeners both the
human power and technical processes
of great music.
He was convinced that
respect was often lazily accorded to
music on the strength of received reputations,
so he devised the long-running programme
series The Innocent Ear,
where the composer's identity was only
revealed after the works had
been played. He championed unfashionable
figures, notably Havergal Brian, of
whose genius he was convinced and whose
entire 32 symphonies he eventually succeeded
in broadcasting.
Simpson often said,
however (he certainly said it to me)
that ultimately each century produced
only a few composers worth bothering
about, and he felt he learned far more
from his personal favourites - above
all, Beethoven and Haydn - than from
any contemporary. This conviction infused
his writing, which included short monographs
on the Beethoven symphonies and on Sibelius
and Nielsen, and his classic study The
Essence of Bruckner. And his own
music - while sometimes highly dissonant
in its vocabulary - sought to renew
the classical tradition of a dynamic
architecture built on the gravitational
power of tonality, and to recapture
the Beethovenian sense of purposeful
human momentum.
Steeped in such precepts,
perhaps encouraged by contemplation
of the motion of the spheres - he was
a keen amateur astronomer who rose,
unusually for any amateur, to become
a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Simpson naturally thought in large
spans, which build organically by the
growth of tiny basic cells, as a hundred-foot
Giant redwood grows from a tiny seedling.
Several works are cast in a single movement
whose slow and fast tempi are contrasted
expressions of a single underlying pulse.
The progress of the music can seem glacially
slow, like the ineluctable patient wheeling
of the night sky as the Earth revolves
on its axis – or it can have a tremendous
rhythmic vigour, with a torrential momentum
seldom heard in music since the time
of Beethoven himself. Here’s an example
of that from the Fifth Symphony, of
1972: let me warn you this example is
quite long, and gets very loud.
[Example: Symphony
No.5 (track 17 from about 9’00"
– could go 4’00"!]
I didn’t have access
to a cassette-recorder that would allow
me to fade out my examples when I was
preparing for this lecture, and it really
brought home to me how difficult it
is to cut Simpson’s music at
any but the most major structural divisions.
It’s the reverse of bitty or episodic
– it’s seamless, continuous, without
breaks, conceived in huge spans. It’s
violent, or at least very angry, in
mood, but the anger isn’t destructive,
it’s channelled into a tremendous driving
force, and the paradoxical result is
that it begets an amazing sense of exhilaration.
For all its grimness and dissonance
I have to say that, for me, that is
one of the glorious passages in late
20th-century music. And you
have to balance that against the fact
that less than two years later, the
same composer wrote the extremely beautiful,
serene adagio of the Fifth Quartet which
I played a little earlier. They stand
almost as expressive opposites, but
Simpson’s musical personality encompassed
them both.
I think it’s true to
say that he was radically uninterested
in trends or fashions. He composed principally
in the great classical forms: 11 symphonies,
15 string quartets, as well as concertos
and sonatas. He was also a master of
variation: his Ninth Quartet
encompasses 32 (palindromic) variations
on a theme of Haydn, while quartets
4-6 are personal variations upon the
background of Beethoven's three Rasumovsky
Quartets. He wrote no opera, and
indeed hardly any vocal music, but there’s
a handful of significant works for piano
and organ, and as I’ve already mentioned
there’s a notable group of virtuoso
pieces for brass band. He characterized
himself not so much as an optimist as
a "ferocious anti-pessimist"; and, whether
contemplative or muscularly energetic,
his work is always fundamentally positive
in its effect. He used to say a composer
ought to spread some sanity around him.
He also maintained that children should
be taught scepticism at school.
Popular with musicians,
endlessly helpful to ordinary music-lovers,
Simpson was no respecter of authority
and was a man of unaccommodating principle.
In the later part of his BBC career
he frequently clashed with management:
in the 1970s, for instance, he was one
of the leaders of a famous producers’
revolt over the proposed axing of five
of the eleven BBC house orchestras.
During the 1980 musicians' strike -
which caused the cancellation of that
year's Proms - he resigned from the
Corporation, publicly alleging, in a
letter to the Times, a
"degeneration of traditional BBC values
in the scramble for ratings". He was
bare retiral age anyway, but it was
typical of the man that he resigned
on an issue of deeply-held principle,
even though if he’d hung on for just
a few more months he’d have qualified
for a full BBC pension. Subsequently
he published a very lively little book,
The Proms and Natural Justice,
in which he deplored the system by which
over-mighty music controllers could
determine the repertoire to be played
at the Proms for over-extended periods.
Simpson was deeply unhappy about the
way his BBC career ended but, as years
went on, he felt eminently justified
by the continuing slide into mediocrity
of what he once called "a very Kremlinesque
organization".
After his first wife's
death, he married Angela Musgrave, his
faithful indispensable assistant in
his BBC years, and was cheered by the
growing public reception of his work.
But as an instinctive socialist, he
abominated the ethos of Thatcher's Britain
and in 1986 he could stand it no longer:
he moved to Ireland, settling in a beautiful
location on Tralee Bay in County Kerry
– where he wrote his last works, and
seeming to get more and more productive
with each year that passed.
Only five years later,
however, while on a lecture tour in
England, Simpson suffered a severe stroke.
By very bad luck, it caused irreparable
damage to the pain-centre of the brain,
which left him in more or less constant,
debilitating pain, impervious to therapy
or painkillers. He never recovered the
use of his affected limbs. Although
he remained mentally alert, further
composition proved a physical impossibility,
though with great effort he managed
to dictate the bleak ending of his String
Quintet No. 2 in 1994 (That’s the
work that’s being performed on March
29th). He died in November 1997 – and
those of us who felt in any way close
to him, either in reality or in our
vicarious imaginations, miss his presence
very much indeed.
Simpson
is best known as a writer of
symphonies. There’s good reason for
this. His symphonic works are strikingly
original, inventive and powerful in
expression – they immediately impress
audiences in the large, public environment
of the concert hall and they have a
highly distinctive personality: I think
the examples I played from Nos. 1 and
5 show that well enough. He wrote 11
symphonies in all: It’s an imposing
oeuvre that makes a definite, downright
statement about the continuing validity
and meaning of a great traditional musical
form.
But
his approach to form wasn’t in any sense
conservative. One of the great qualities
about Simpson’s music, it seems to me,
is his continual concern with how musical
structures and designs should grow out
of their basic materials of tones and
intervals, and the new and different
shapes they can assume. This is, if
I may make a cruel and sweeping distinction,
what separates the serious composer
from the dilettante: Respect for the
Material, allowing the work to grow
from the inside, and respect also for
the hard work necessary to facilitate
that growth. Redlichkeit im Handwerk,
as I think it was Schoenberg used to
say. Nothing is imposed from the outside;
above all there’s no programme or political
or parodic or ironic interpretation
that can be easily evoked to shore up
a bit of jerry-built note-spinning.
Of course Simpson was passionately interested
in the world outside him, held very
strong political convictions, and wasn’t
above guiding a symphony’s development
according to a programmatic idea – IF
it was an idea that suggested a fruitful
line of musical development that was
congenial to his concern with growth,
continuity, energy.
His
first brass-band piece is called
Energy. Subsequent ones have
titles like Vortex and Volcano,
so as you can see he was deeply interested
in powerful processes in the natural
world. But he was just as interested
in people and human character. Another
brass piece is a suite, The Four
Temperaments, which emulates, though
entirely in Simpson’s own language,
the idea of character-portraits of contrasting
human types which his hero, Carl Nielsen,
had previously essayed in one of his
symphonies. And one of Simpson’s most
fascinating and challenging symphonies,
No.6 of 1977, which is dedicated to
a distinguished gynaecologist, emulates
in its processes the idea of conception,
the growth of the embryo up to the moment
of birth – ‘contractions and all’ said
the composer – and then the further
growth of the young human being to full
vigour. Though I don’t think he was
thinking of this, the work is a kind
of opposite to Richard Strauss’s Death
and Transfiguration – Birth and
Individuation, so to speak. And
the musical result is that you get a
work in a single movement in two more
or less equal halves, the first part
preludial and of gradual growth, the
second part a typically determined,
constructive Allegro, and between them
a tremendous central climax – the ‘moment
of birth’ – which sets the Allegro off
into motion. He probably didn’t think
of this analogy either, but in a way
it’s like the first movement of Sibelius’s
Fifth Symphony, though on a much larger
scale, the first half gradually accumulating
substance and building up to that grand
central moment out of which the fleet,
scherzo-like development takes wing.
So
Simpson had no set notions about what
constituted symphonic form. (He had
strong ideas about what made Symphony
a Symphony, but that’s another matter.)
Of his eleven symphonies, only three
are in the ‘conventional’ four movements:
and two of those, Nos. 8 and 10, are
among his toughest pieces to understand.
He liked works in contrasting halves,
negative and positive, slow and fast,
mysterious and energetic: I’m sure the
example of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony,
perhaps the first great symphonic masterpiece
planned in only two movements, was one
he took infinite inspiration from. He
liked three-part designs, partly I think
from the aspect of symmetry, and partly
because if the first and third part
of a piece are closely related in mood
or material, while the second
part is highly contrasting, the contrast
is set within a wider context of motion
and expression, you get more of the
sense of a foreground and background,
of differing points of view, differences
in consciousness – and these were issues
he thought about and cared about.
But
the two parts or three parts needn’t
be three separate movements, though
Symphony No.2 has indeed three movements,
and Symphony No.3 and Symphony No.11
have two movements each. Simpson was
especially prolific in writing pieces
in one movement, and that movement
subsuming into itself two or three or
more parts. The Sixth Symphony, which
I’ve just described to you, is a two-in-one
kind of design, the First Symphony is
three-in-one, the Fifth Symphony, from
which I played that big extract, is
a kind of symmetrical arch, five main
parts, mirrored from a central point.
And the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies
are also big single movements that prove
to have a natural three-part shape to
them – though the Ninth, which lasts
for 50 minutes without a break, can
be read in more than one way, and some
may prefer to see it as a work of two
vast halves, hinged upon a shorter scherzo.
We like to call things with big single
movements ‘monolithic’, like a great
block of stone, all the same substance
or element, as you find in ancient standing-stones
or that enigmatic block of material
in the film 2001. But I feel
maybe we should be referring to three-in-one
designs as ‘trilithons’, like those
great structures at Stonehenge, one
huge menhir laid horizontally across
two vertical ones, like a gateway –
perhaps, in view of the astronomical
use of such ancient sites, and I hope
it’s an image Simpson would have approved
– a gateway for the sun and stars.
I’m
going to play a part, not of the Ninth
but of the Seventh Symphony. This is
a genuine three-in-one design, with
fast outer portions and a central slow
movement; and here’s part of the slow
movement. In contrast to that fiery
Allegro from the Fifth Symphony I played
you earlier, it’s very intimate music
despite its symphonic scale, a landscape
with a solitary, contemplative figure.
Note, by the way, the extraordinary
economy of it all, the way everything
is spun out of a figure of three notes.
This is another longish passage, and
here it may seem that nothing very much
is happening, but then it’s music that
seems to have all the time in the world,
and your ears need to adjust to its
chiaroscuro of colour, just as your
eyes need time to adjust to twilight.
Symphony
No.7 – track 18 (4’10") and perhaps
a little beyond.]
Although
Simpson was by any measure a major symphonist,
his first love was chamber music – especially
the string quartet. He often said if
he was compelled to write only one kind
of music he would choose the string
quartet. His quartets are more numerous
than his symphonies – 15 in all - and
they’re no less precious a creative
legacy. Indeed the Quartets have perhaps
even greater claim to contain
his most distinctive musical thought:
here, more than anywhere else, we find
the essential Robert Simpson.
He acknowledged fifteen
quartets – the same number as Shostakovich,
and only one less than Beethoven. If
we add to that total, as we should,
his two String Quintets and his String
Trio, that’s eighteen works of string
chamber music. And there’s one other
work of Simpson’s maturity that we can
fairly describe as a major feat of string-quartet
writing, namely his transcription for
String Quartet of J.S. Bach’s Art
of Fugue, with the completion by
Donald Tovey.
Fifteen may be a smaller
number than the eighty-odd quartets
by Haydn, but it’s still hard to hold
such a lengthy sequence of works in
the mind as individual creations. With
Beethoven, of course, we tend
to divide his output into three stages,
‘early, middle, and late’, but that
scheme doesn’t really work with Simpson.
It’s sometimes said that his quartets
span his whole composing life, but that
isn’t entirely true. He may have thought
about quartets all the time. But in
fact he wrote Quartets 1 to 3 very rapidly,
in his early thirties, in 1951 to 1954,
and then there was a gap of 20 years
until Quartets 4 to 6 emerged, again
very quickly, in his early fifties,
in 1973-4. His early symphonies, written
at progressively longer intervals, spanned
that gap more effectively. However after
Quartet No.6, a new quartet emerged
every two or three years, with a definite
quickening of activity, in this as in
all compositional fields, after Simpson
resigned from the BBC in 1981 and could
devote as much time as he needed to
producing his own music. The last three
quartets, Nos.13 to 15, again appeared
in a short time, in three successive
years. We can regard Quartets 1-3 as
his ‘early period’, if we wish; and
certainly Nos.4-6 initiate a much later
‘middle period’ just as Beethoven’s
Rasumovskys did. But there’s
no obvious further division, and no
sense that the last quartets are in
any way valedictory: the ‘middle period’
is still extending, and growing into
the wisdom of age, when the creative
flow is cut off.
But it may at least
help us chart that flow more clearly
if we think of Simpson’s fifteen quartets
in five groups of three: that seems
to be their internal rhythm, so to speak.
Certainly the first six quartets form
two very clearly defined groups. Dr
Simpson himself said of Numbers 1 to
3 that though they ‘were not consciously
designed as a group, they nevertheless
seem to fall into a natural sequence’.
Numbers 4 to 6, on the other hand, were
consciously designed as a triptych,
since they were conceived as extended
variations upon the three Beethoven
Rasumovsky Quartets –
so they’re "Simpson’s Rasumovskys"
in more senses than one.
After that there were
no further intentional groupings,
but it seems to me that in Quartets
7 to 9, and again in Numbers 10 to 12,
you have an initial, highly contrasting
pair of quartets – 7 and 8, 10
and 11- almost conceived as opposites,
or as thesis and antithesis. And in
each case the result is a larger
third quartet – 9 and 12 – which subsumes
aspects of the other two and transcends
them, creating something new and unexpected
from common elements. Admittedly Quartet
No.9 is unique in Simpson’s output,
in its vast size and its formal design
as 32 Variations and Fugue on a Theme
of Haydn: yet it does seem a necessary
outcome of the contrasting aspects of
Quartets 7 and 8 – the cosmic contemplation
of No.7 and the near-classicism of No.8;
just as No.12 is more obviously the
synthesis of the divergent impulses
of Nos.10 and 11 – No.10 entitled For
Peace and No.11 a tough, sinewy,
argumentative work.
And finally Quartets
13 to 15 form a new kind of ‘classical’
group, almost like another Razumovsky
sequence, but on a smaller scale
and without any obvious reference to
Beethoven originals. The two one-movement
quartets, 13 and 15, flank No.14 which
is in the classical four-movement form;
but they themselves are so clearly defined
in their subsections (four in No.13,
three in No.15) that they suggest a
classicality of design that’s taken
up into the onward flow of musical invention.
If I have a grumble
about this Wigmore Hall series containing
five examples of Simpson’s string chamber
music – and of course one should hardly
be complaining, it’s welcome enough
to find any sustained attention being
cast upon Simpson’s output – it’s that
four of those five works are among his
shortest. These four – the Second, Seventh
and Fifteenth Quartets and the Second
Quintet – are also one-movement pieces,
their argument being continuous and
concise. It’s only in the last piece
to be heard in this series, the Sixth
Quartet, that you get a work in several
movements, and on the large scale in
which Simpson habitually wrote. Indeed,
as I hope I’ve made clear by now, the
sense of large scale, the ability to
project an argument along imposing spans,
is one of his characteristic qualities
as a composer. But none of the works
heard in this series could be described
as ‘minor’. Simpson had that power of
compression, of ferocious concision
even, that we find in the great masters
from Bach to Sibelius. There are no
redundancies in his music, no padding.
He had little interest in the colouristic
and textural effects which some other
masters have made the stock-in-trade
of modern quartet-writing: no slap pizzicatos,
no wild glissandi, no mistuning of the
instruments, no playing on the wrong
side of the bridge and with the wood
of the bow – he doesn’t even use harmonics,
as a rule, except for the natural ones
obtainable from the strings without
special fingering. I think he felt quite
strongly that such things were decoration,
or misdirection – they got in
the way of the real stuff of the music.
In Simpson, what you hear is what you
get: music as substance, and
that substance in motion, or finding
rest, to create meaning. Objects in
Motion; Objects at Rest (you can tell
I’m a Babylon 5 fan).
Also, the four Simpson
Quartets that are being played in this
series each comes from a different one
of these three-quartet groupings I spoke
of: No.2 from his early trilogy, No.6
from his Rasumovskys, No.7 perhaps
the work that initiates his later period,
and No.15 – the quartet we’ll be hearing
tonight – his last essay in the genre
and very nearly his last work of all.
He wrote only one piece after it, and
that’s the Second String Quintet which
is being played on March 29th.
So I’ll just say a
little about these four quartets and
the Quintet, taking them in chronological
order rather than the order in which
they’re being heard in the series. In
the early part of his career Simpson
enjoyed a close association with the
violinist Ernest Element, leader of
the Element String Quartet, who gave
the premières of his first three
string quartets. Quartet No.3 is dedicated
to their violist, Dorothy Hemming, while
Quartet No.2, which was played here
last Saturday, is dedicated to the Element
Quartet as a whole. As I’ve mentioned,
these first three Simpson quartets,
though not planned as such, came to
form a kind of trilogy or triptych.
Quartet No.2, as the central panel of
that design, has an expressive argument
of strenuous development that carries
it from a mood of cheerful relaxation
(in which Quartet No.1 had ended) to
one of despondent melancholy (in which
Quartet No.3 would open). Its an excellent
example of Simpson writing a piece in
a single movement that’s articulated
by the idea of different speeds obtained
through lengthening or shortening notes
and phrases over a constant pulse, with
the metronome mark at the start holding
good until the end. Different characters
and kinds of motion are thus created
as different aspects of a single underlying
tempo – this was to become one of Simpson’s
compositional trademarks, whether in
single movements or entire works.
There’s a carefree
opening idea, like some kind of Haydnesque
bird-imitation. But this immediately
comes under attack from a sinister,
swift-moving idea that starts with a
low thrumming in the cello and then
disappears as quickly as it arrived.
[Example: from opening
to c.50"]
After this the carefree
opening never really re-establishes
itself. A third theme in a contrasting
cantabile vein enters on Violin
I, and these three ideas constitute
the Quartet’s principal material. It’s
among the most intense of Simpson’s
essays in the form, as it’s also one
of the most concise. Most of it is given
over to development of the contrasting
ideas, culminating in a fugato whose
searching and abrasive qualities look
forward to the Quartets of his later
years. Every time the cheerful tune
tries to take command it creates further
tension with the other elements, engendering
eventually a wild climax; and the end
of the quartet is unmistakably tragic,
with the appearance of a new, lamenting
viola melody (which seems, in fact,
to presage the opening of Quartet No.3).
Simpson is often celebrated
as a renewer and continuer of the great
classical traditions of tonal composition.
But he’s also a modernist. His love
and appreciation of Haydn and Beethoven
allowed him to understand their music
‘from inside’ as very few other modern
composers have, but he still viewed
it from the perspective of a different
century, and brought to it a critical
knowledge of what had happened since,
in music and in the world. On the most
basic levels of melody and harmony,
Simpson’s music could only have been
written in the second half of the 20th
century. These issues are raised in
acute form in his Quartets Nos.4, 5
and 6, which followed his first three
after a gap of nearly 20 years. Each
is in the classical four-movement form,
and on a very ample scale, approaching
or surpassing 40 minutes’ duration.
Form and scale are intimately connected
with the fact that these three Quartets
were conceived as counterparts of the
three Rasumovsky Quartets of
Beethoven. As Dr Simpson himself put
it, they ‘constitute a close study’
of these particular Beethoven quartets.
Now, these Quartets of Robert Simpson
will certainly enhance our understanding
of Beethoven’s Rasumovskys, if
that’s what we want to use them for.
But their primary purpose is simply
to be real, magnificent music – Simpson’s
music, not Beethoven’s. They’re satisfying
and indeed enthralling musical creations
absolutely in their own right, without
any need of reference to Beethoven.
They aren’t any kind of musicological
treatise. We could say they carry
the principle of Variation to an entirely
new level, each Quartet being not a
variation on a Beethoven theme, but
on a whole pre-existing Beethoven Quartet.
Simpson’s approach should remind us
that all art is, ultimately, patterned
energy, which awakens answering
patterns on our pulses and our minds.
What he does in Quartets 4- 6 is to
find, in his own 20th-century
language, patterns of energy that will
affect us in ways comparable to Beethoven’s
Rasumovskys.
When we come to the
Sixth Quartet, the one modelled
after Beethoven’s Third Rasumovsky,
which is being performed at the Wigmore
on April 12th, we find Beethoven’s
original being treated with the greatest
degree of freedom - though paradoxically
the superficial resemblances are obvious.
The result is a work that seems to mark
a significant development in the evolution
of his own musical language.
As is well known, in the Third Rasumovsky
Beethoven begins with an Introduction
that concentrates on a tonally ambiguous
dissonance – a diminished seventh –
from which he opens up new harmonic
vistas, leading into the main Allegro.
[Example: Beethoven
– 1’00"]
and so on. Simpson
felt he could no longer use a harmony
as obvious as a diminished seventh,
but he devised an equally ambiguous
chord consisting of a pair of major
seconds, widely separated by two octaves
and a fifth. Strung out over these intervening
octaves, the notes of the chord – A,
D, G, C, reading downwards – give you
a stack of perfect fifths that can move
in many different tonal directions.
[Example: Simpson
– to 1’16"]
The result is striking,
but it’s utterly unlike Beethoven in
sound, even if you notice a direct quotation
from Beethoven in the cello. The music
seems to grope towards the light, and
it finds it in a rough triple-time dance,
complete with allusions, not to Beethoven’s
Third Rasumovsky, but rather
to the famous dotted rhythms of Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony.
Now that seed of harmony
Simpson uses to start off the Sixth
Quartet - its intervals reading downwards
major second, major fourth with or without
octave extension, and major second again,
or rearranged into a chain of fifths
– that interval collection comes to
determine the course of the music in
many ways. For example, there’s a lot
of melodic doubling at the fifth, a
sonority we find frequently in his later
music. But the interval collection can
also become a melodic motif, and even
more importantly it acts as a harmonic
ordering of contrapuntal material.
All the other three movements begin
with some form of melodic imitation,
such as a fugato or a canon, and the
four imitative voices will come in on
pitches reflecting that initial dissonant
harmony.
This process has sustained
effect in the third movement
of the Sixth Quartet. Beethoven’s
third movement is a formalized Minuet,
an unusual archaic survival in the context
of the otherwise boldly symphonic idiom
of the Rasumovskys. For the form
of his movement Simpson goes even further
back, to the strict counterpoint of
Bach, and he writes, not a Minuet, but
an elaborate and very ethereal double
canon. It’s absolutely strict, and very
resourceful in the way the two subjects,
as they proceed in parallel, answer
and mirror and share each other’s salient
figures. But there’s no hint of archaism
in the actual sound of it, for
once again the four voices are separated
by the interval structure of the seed
chord, the four instruments entering
once again in a descending order on
A, G, D and C.
[Example: 55"
(to fade)]
This process of obtaining
a new harmonic direction through exploitation
of a particular set of intervals is
one that profoundly influenced Simpson’s
later music, and for a composer whose
name is associated with traditional
tonal language it led him in some very
unorthodox directions. He’d now more
or less turned away from the ideas of
‘progressive tonality’ that he had found
in Nielsen. In his later works it’s
often a single pitch or group of pitches,
an interval or group of intervals, rather
than a key as such, that provides the
listener’s ear with a firm reference
point. The ear, however, always remained
central to the entire process. As Simpson
said of this canon in the Sixth Quartet,
the strictness with which it follows
a particular order of intervals had
to be "a strictness in relation
to fundamental and natural harmonic
phenomena".
Quartet
No.7, which will be heard here on April
1st, strikingly illustrates
this new approach. In this work Simpson,
a passionate amateur astronomer, celebrates
the birth centenary of the distinguished
astronomer Sir James Jeans. Utterly
different in form from the three preceding
Quartets, No.7 is in a single movement
– indeed, like Quartet No.2, a movement
with a single controlling pulse, where
different tempi are suggested by the
use of longer or shorter note-values.
So in essence, this Quartet is a study
in motion: Simpson suggested it could
be seen as a metaphor for aspects of
the universe as revealed to us by astronomy:
something quiet and mysterious yet pulsating
with energy. The music suggests vastness
and slowness, yet it also hones in on
objects moving, within that cosmic context,
at unimaginable speeds. Though the Quartet
begins and ends with the note D, repeated
on the cello, it can hardly be said
to be ‘in’ the key of D: rather Simpson
uses the physical fact of the instruments’
tuning, with their open strings tuned
in fifths, to enact a vast circle of
fifths like a journey through successive
fields of gravitation. Basically it
falls into three spans, the outer ones
slow, the central one a tremendous Vivace
expressive of mighty elemental processes.
Simpson’s by-now profound mastery of
motion is clear in the way he moves
from span to span, from slow to fast
and back again.
Many
works of subsequent exploration lie
between that work and the Fifteenth
and last Quartet – though of course
Simpson had no thought it would be his
last – of 1991. This is the work we’re
hearing tonight and again this is very
concise, in a single movement that nonetheless
divides clearly into three different
spans: it’s not so symmetrical in intention
as No.7. It’s a tough, hard-bitten piece,
which I personally find one of Simpson’s
hardest and grimmest, not to say most
enigmatic, quartets. The intervals from
which it springs are unusually dissonant
ones – minor sevenths and semitones
– and it’s fascinating how much of the
work grows from pairs of voices moving
in contrary motion, or even mirroring
each other, the upper voice falling
while the lower voice rises, and vice
versa.
[Example:
from opening to 1’44"]
The
main part of the Quartet is a big central
scherzo marked – unusually but accurately
– Severo, severe. The harmony
in this movement is among the toughest,
the most granitic, that Simpson had
written. And the ending, too, is unusual
for him. The final section is marked
Allegretto, and it’s the first
area of relaxation in the entire Quartet,
beginning with a tender violin melody.
Many of Simpson’s works bring clarity
and sweetness out of struggle, often
signalling the moment where this is
achieved with a burst of lyric melody.
But this time the piece doesn’t, as
we might then expect, move to a quietly
decisive end: instead it evanesces away
into silence, without a resolution.
I’m sure this reflects the fact that
Simpson wished to return to the issues
raised by this Fifteenth Quartet in
the subsequent quartets he planned to
write. And indeed I feel he did return
to them in the one piece he wrote after
this Quartet, namely the Second Quintet,
which is being played here on March
29th.
In
its severity of utterance, the Second
Quintet seems very much a continuation
of Quartet No.15. It’s entirely based
on the melody heard at the outset –
a duet for the two cellos which outlines
the salient intervals of perfect fifth
and tritone, both rising and falling.
A single eventful movement grows pout
of this opening. Essentially it divides
into seven sections, alternating two
contrasting (but not opposing) tempi:
the Moderato of the beginning
and an Allegro that sets in after
the first few minutes. The four Moderato
sections are interleaved with three
Allegro ones: the Moderatos
contain music of gaunt, intense
polyphony, rather like a very severe
modern version of a 17th-century
fantasia for viols, while the Allegros
are appropriately fleeter, more scherzo-like,
though there is no lightening of mood
throughout this deeply serious, formidably
focussed piece. The effect is of two
separate, but mutually enriching processes
of development, proceeding in tandem
to the explosive yet wintry climax of
the third Allegro. Suddenly its
energy seems to dissipate and the last
Moderato begins as an intensified
variation of the first, subsiding to
a mood of bleak calm and a final, glacial
sequence of chords which descend, in
diminuendo, to extinction.
[Example:
about 2’00"]
Those were the last
bars Robert Simpson wrote, and he wrote
them with immense effort, after his
stroke. There is a sense of finality
there, as I feel there isn’t
after the previous Quartet. Some might
say it’s a very bleak finality, and
probably at the time he felt so too.
But after all, he had also written,
in the text for his motet Media morte
in vita sumus – one of his very
few vocal works – ‘All perceived human
acts endure / through the generations.
/ Among his fellows no man can vanish
/ utterly, not even in death. / All
human lives change others, and so through
the generations.’ Robert Simpson’s music
is a human act worthy of perception,
if ever there was one. In Simpson’s
Quartets, just as in those of Haydn
or Beethoven, you feel yourself in touch
with the absolute essence of music,
without any distractions or double meanings
or questions of style. It simply is,
immovable and undeniable, with the physical
and intellectual force of an absolute
truth. © 2000
Malcolm MacDonald
Reprinted
with permission
see also
Robert
SIMPSON AN
INTRODUCTION TO THE STRING QUARTETS
An Illustrated Talk by Malcolm Macdonald
£10.00 + 95p p&p (£8.00 + 70p p&p)
from 2 Park Close, Glossop, Derbys.
SK13 7RQ
DUNELM RECORDS DRD 0110 (CD) (DR0110(mc)
cassette) [67.00?]
Simpson’s
quartets are much less frequently heard
in live concerts than the Shostakovich
or Bartók but they are a comparable
achievement. This issue will, I hope,
argue their case and is strongly recommended.
… see Full
Review
Peter
Racine FRICKER (1920-1990)
Symphony
No.2 Op.14 (1951) Robert
SIMPSON (1921-1997) Symphony
No.1 (1951) Robin
ORR (b.1909) Symphony in
One Movement (1960-63)
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir John Pritchard (Fricker) London
Philharmonic Orchestra Sir Adrian Boult
(Simpson) Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Sir Alexander Gibson (Orr) Recorded
in Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, 13
and 14 August, 1954 (Fricker)* No.1
Studio, Abbey Road, London, 24 and 27
January, 1956 (Simpson)* City Hall,
Glasgow, Summer 1965 (Orr) *Mono ADD
EMI BRITISH COMPOSERS 7243 5 75789 2
9 [72’17] [TH]
What
some of the forgotten music of the post-war
years actually sounds like. … see
Full Review
SIMPSON,
Robert.
String Quartet no 14 and no 15; Quintet
for clarinet, bass clarinet and string
trio.
Joy Farrell (clarinet), Fiona Cross
(bass clarinet), Vanburgh String Quartet.
Hyperion CDA66626 [DDD] [65'
38"].
