The Youth Orchestra
in Reverse by Arthur Butterworth
It is now more than
sixty years since the founding of the
National Youth Orchestra. Of course,
even before 1948 young people learned
to play orchestral instruments and in
the more advantaged schools, usually
those from wealthier parts of the country
or where fee-paying schools abounded,
the school orchestra was already a cultural
asset. Gustav Holst had charge of one
of the more well-known of these at St
Paul’s School, Hammersmith; where the
girls played not only the then conventional
string instruments but quite a number
of wind instruments too. Other schools
- especially boarding schools - up and
down the country encouraged orchestral
music-making too, but many such school
orchestras tended to be puny affairs
on the whole. This could have been for
a variety of obvious reasons: the cost
of instruments, the lack of adequate
teachers, and perhaps not least the
attitude in education generally that
such things as sophisticated music-making
were not for most young people who needed
to be taught the basic essentials of
life rather than being provided with
social graces. This certainly was the
view of many school heads who tended
to frown on such activities as a waste
of time, especially since the statutory
school leaving age was around fourteen.
In a relatively short school life, children
would have no time for such frills as
intensive music-making. Whatever music-making
there was concentrated almost wholly
on class singing, which undoubtedly
reached a high standard and eventually
contributed to the general enthusiasm
for local choral societies and the church
or chapel choir.
This writer attended
a splendid north of England boys’ grammar
school, which had the services of a
music master on only three days per
week - but he was the only member of
the staff to possess a doctorate, for
all that. This influential person was
of course a choral man: a fine church
organist and choir trainer who maintained
a first-rate school choir. Around 1937
or 1938 he decided to try to establish
a school orchestra. Already there was
perhaps a handful of boys who played
the violin, two played the clarinet
and this writer played the cornet. There
were no flautists, and certainly no
oboists or bassoonists. The "French"
horn - as it then so pedantically used
to be termed - was regarded as far beyond
the capability of any mere school boy
- so how, one wonders, did Gustav Holst’s
school girls manage this instrument
at St Paul’s School a decade or so earlier?
Early attempts to start
a school orchestra were not promising,
but at least it was the very first time
that this writer ever took part in a
"performance" (if one could
call it that) of a Mozart symphony -
or indeed any kind of symphony - this
was the Symphony No. 39 in E-flat; the
early experience being remembered vividly
to this day, seventy years later. So
the weekly rehearsals after school on
Fridays revolved around painstakingly
rehearsing this symphony: five or six
violins, two clarinets, a cornet and
the piano: at least it was a start.
Maybe a month or two
later some toy percussion instruments
- more appropriate to an infant or junior
school - were acquired by this otherwise
academically high-flying grammar school.
Other boys eventually joined in, playing
toy drums, triangles, castanets, tambourines
and the like, but it was dispiriting
to the few boys who had already had
a brief taste of trying to play ’real’
music; for instead of Mozart we played
the very simplest so-called school orchestra
arrangements of little folk dances.
These, somewhat surprisingly, included
some very, very easy arrangements of
dances by Beethoven.
For the most part such
school orchestra music as was available
at that time had been carefully arranged
(or should one say much watered down)
by teachers who fully appreciated the
limitations of children’s abilities
not only to play their chosen
instrument to the modest basic beginner’s
standard, but to be able to take part
in a group - in other words what passed
for a school orchestra. Two or three
London publishers did sterling service
in making such very easy things available.
There were usually parts available for
flute (or recorder) oboe - ad lib,
clarinets I & II in B-flat,
bassoon (or trombone) - ad lib cornet
in Bb (not trumpet), horn in E-flat
(rather than F, meaning probably the
brass band tenor horn in E-flat?), drums
(whatever could that mean - certainly
not in those days the proper timpani?),
violin I, violin II, violin III (in
lieu of unlikely viola), cello and equally
unlikely bass. These simple arrangements
worked well: Little extracts from classical
symphonies, divertimenti, easy dances,
folk tunes, familiar operatic airs,
choruses from oratorio, easy marches,
minuets, gigues, pavans, sarabandes,
and such like. They had a charm and
were invariably short and did not demand
endless, frustrating rehearsal. The
scores were cunningly arranged so that
everything was covered by the
ubiquitous piano, which in itself was
easy, so that the music master or mistress
might direct the group from the keyboard,
half conducting (merely beating time)
and playing along too.
In the later 1940s
and onwards other publishers - literally
- jumped on this useful and lucrative
"band-wagon". Such specially
arranged easy versions of the classics
grew more adventurous and gave enormous
satisfaction to young players, and surely
contributed to the eventual possibility
of youth orchestras being established.
But these later developments no longer
needed such naïve, watered-down
and much simplified versions of the
music they once tried to play: they
were now more and more able to take
on the proper, original score of the
music they longed to perform.
Now, more than half
a century later, the situation is very
different indeed. Youth orchestras exist
widely and in general are very competent,
and do not lack the instruments once
thought to be beyond either the financial
means or technical abilities of young
players. At least that promised to be
the state of things, although, due to
causes other than music, there have
been inevitable signs of retraction
from time to time, as resources have
often shrunk.
This is not the whole
story: While the emphasis has long been
on young people - and indeed still is
- over a number of recent years there
has grown up a kind of mirror image
of the youth orchestra movement. There
have long been, and happily still exist,
a large number of most capable and astonishingly
excellent amateur orchestras throughout
the country; capable of performing with
distinction virtually the whole of the
known orchestral repertoire from the
baroque, classical, romantic and avant-garde.
Performed by amateur societies furnished
with every instrument specified as necessary
by composers. Nothing is wanting: a
set of pedal timpani (not the old battered
hand-tune variety of the 1920s), flutes,
oboes, cor anglais, clarinets, bass-clarinets,
contrabassoon, double horns, trumpets,
full brass, harps, keyboard and multifarious
percussion instruments, and the supporting
string orchestra to balance. All playing
the original versions of a composer’s
score.
However, the youth
orchestra idea has taken root in the
opposite direction too. Now that many
people appear to be living longer and
have a leisure retirement that can be
made use of - depending of course on
a reasonable continuity of physical
health and stamina, quite a number of
older people are beginning to take a
practical interest in what they were
once at pains to encourage their children
(and now their grandchildren) to take
up: an orchestral instrument. While
it is one thing to learn when young
and full of natural vitality and physical
abilities, it is often a much more challenging
undertaking to take up - perhaps for
the very first time in life - the demanding
study of a musical instrument on retirement.
But it does happen, and apparently quite
widely.
However, it means that
a lot of the earlier "school orchestral
music" originally designed for
children, is now coming into its own
again; this time for grandparents. For
similar, but quite opposite reasons,
this music has to be easy. Whereas for
children it needed to be relatively
emotionally as much as physically easy
(for children develop relatively quickly
in their physical capabilities), with
older people, they generally encounter
no emotional or intellectual hurdles
to their appreciation of the music (since
they have heard it for a lifetime when
performed by others), their problems
are primarily physical; persuading recalcitrant
joints and fingers to perform the complex
tasks of handling a musical instrument.
In both situations
a musical principle becomes involved:
It concerns the nature of orchestration.
In fully professional music, the composer
encounters virtually no technical limitations;
whatever his inventive imagination suggests
can be accommodated by the player. Since
classical times the complexity of music
has increased enormously, although as
has already been remarked, amateur players
of middle years, who have reached intellectual,
emotional and technical maturity differ
only very slightly from the professionals.
With young people they have still to
reach this accomplished stage, so they
need music to be put before them which
they can manage to perform. In the same
way - but, as already suggested - for
the opposite reason, older people need
to have music which their now more restricted
physical limitations can handle.
As remarked, composing
a professional score holds virtually
no limits for the composer, but reducing
such unlimited technicalities to what
really amounts to basic essentials can
be quite revealing, and in a sense is
not so easy as might at first be imagined.
For a composer, it amounts to this:
what is the basic essence of what I
want to convey through the music I write?
Much earlier music was far simpler and
yet made its point more than adequately
even to us in our sophisticated modern
age (think of Handel, Mozart, Schubert,
Beethoven …). But what of Wagner, Richard
Strauss, Mahler, Elgar …? Is it possible
in some way to simplify such complex
scores? It might be argued that even
to try to water-down such richly-wrought
music would be to desecrate it beyond
all recognition. However, I do not agree
with this haughty, rarefied intellectual
view.
Elgar’s own experience
- as a young man with his very ill-balanced
Powick Asylum Band - taught him some
basic lessons about the nature of music’s
structure, and not least the art and
practical craft of orchestration. I
am of opinion that probably most of
the vast, complicated scores for huge
orchestra can somehow be effectively
reduced to their fundamental structures,
and made to work; not in the richly,
polished, gargantuan way we know them,
but - revealingly - for what in essentials
they really amount to. That many composers
realise this is evident from the fact
that they have often themselves for
one reason or another undertaken slimming-down
revisions of their originally-large
conceptions. There are also numerous
re-orchestrations not necessarily by
the original composers, which illuminate
what might be called the bare essentials
of musical structure, often to its advantage.
So, while it is always
dazzling to hear a huge professional
orchestra play a luxurious score in
all its glory, it is not necessarily
a bad thing to encounter the same work
in a more modest - but structurally
essential - format. This is where unassuming,
quite modest, as one might term them
school arrangements can be, especially
to the modest amateur performer - whether
he or she be in the school orchestra
or the older person’s local University
of the Third Age orchestra.
Arthur Butterworth,
October 2008
