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MARTIN
SHAW (1875-1958)
an
appreciation by Erik Routley
Any celebration
of Martin Shaw's life is in a very real way an English occasion;
and therefore in some sense an old-fashioned occasion. For
we are here reflecting on the life of the man whose special
distinction it was to restore to English church music the
quality of being English. This he did because he profoundly
- we might almost say fanatically - believed in the virtues
of being English. Times have changed, manners and assumptions
have changed unrecognizably; and it will be as if we were
writing of somebody who belonged to a far distant age. That
is inevitable. I must try to bring to life a man whom I myself
met only once - although memorably - but whose name has ever
since I can remember anything been among those which I most
affectionately honoured.
Martin Shaw
came of a Yorkshire family. His father, James Shaw, a gifted
musician, was born in Leeds in 1842 and served as a choirboy
in Leeds Parish Church. He was accustomed to say that he served
under Samuel Sebastian Wesley there, but that eminence of
English church music left Leeds in 1849: even a short apprenticeship
under him, however, would have been memorable. James Shaw
moved to Edinburgh in 1862, and was organist in St John's
Episcopal Church, Princes Street, 1862-64, and at the church
now known as SS Paul and George, York Place, 1864-69. He then
moved to London, where he was organist at the Bedford Chapel
until 1876 when he became organist at Hampstead Parish Church
and music master at Clapham Grammar School. Martin Shaw was
born in Belsize Park on 9 March 1875, the eldest of three
brothers: Geoffrey, born 1879, became almost as well known
as Martin, though in the field of school music rather than
that of the church, while Julius, who died in the First World
War, was an actor. Geoffrey died in 1943; Martin lived to
the ripe age of eighty-three, leaving us at the end of 1958,
only a few months after his revered friend, Ralph Vaughan
Williams.
I have already
implied that Martin Shaw was a church musician. But that could
be misleading. One slips into these descriptive phrases when
one can find nothing that will serve better. Exactly what
sort of a musician Martin was is a question you cannot answer
by tying a label on him. The nearest we can get in a short
phrase is to say that he was a natural musician whose talents,
after being exercised in many directions, came to find a special
response in the English church. But to the end of his life
he was engaged in composition and lecturing, and every kind
of musical activity that took him far outside the field of
church music.
an Edwardian family
group - Martin Shaw second from right
A 'natural
musician'. That he certainly was. In his autobiography,
Up to Now - which tantalizingly stops at 1929 - he says
that he cannot remember a time when he did not love music.
But I am sure it is relevant to add that the theatre was as
much in his blood as music was. We have just noted that one
of his brothers was a man of the theatre. Martin Shaw turned
out to be a personality of quite compelling force, a man who
loved an audience, a man who when he first broadcast on the
BBC in 1924 (he was one of the first ever to do so) mentioned
the disconcerting effect of not having an audience. To understand
him, and indeed to understand his music, one must always have
this in mind. He was, and always remained, the reverse of
the perfectionist, introverted, lonely musician who prophesies
from a distance. He was first and last a communicator - a
ready writer, a strenuous correspondent, a man of ideas who
must express them, a man who listened hard and, after listening,
found the music which would say successfully what he wanted
to say without leaving the player or the singer or the hearer
feeling that the new message was hard and demanding. Musicians
like this can go two ways. They can simply put their talents
at the disposal of vulgar taste, and write music they know
to be bad because that's what people want. Or they can write
what they are sure is good, but yet what people can readily
assimilate, and become the prey of a hundred pedantic critics
- which last of course has been Martin's fate.
I almost implied
that he wasn't a perfectionist. No: in one sense he was. He
never knowingly wrote below his best level. That does not
mean that everything he wrote was first-class, even on its
own scale. Anybody can have his off days, and those who know
and enjoy his music admit that Martin Shaw had his. But this
is quite different from writing below your best level. There
is, however, something that is different again: this is writing
below your capacity. This I feel sure Martin Shaw did most
of the time. He wrote not to the limit of his capacity but
within the limits of his constituency's capacity. He wrote
what children could sing, what amateur choirs could sing and,
what concerns me most here, what the parish could sing.
And here we
must bring out a point concerning church music which is vital
to our understanding of church music, and especially of this
composer's contribution to it. Church music (I have ventured
to say this elsewhere before) is music designed to be sung
by, or in the presence of, the unmusical. Hymns are the property
of a congregation containing mostly people who need not be
musical at all. Liturgical music is partly for those people,
partly for choral musicians of limited talent. Only cathedral
music gives the composer the chance to write for highly trained
musicians, and Martin Shaw had little interest in cathedral
music. It was the parish, and the slightly dim parish at that,
that he sought to evangelize. Church music at this level can
only be written with any success by people who have renounced
the desire to appear to be great composers, and who regard
the gratitude of ordinary devout parish congregations as ample
compensation for the lack of international fame and the dubious
promise of immortality. Indeed, there are some who would say
that writing for the parish church is an activity in which
certain kinds of musician should not attempt to engage; for
it is, let's face it, a kind of journalism, and there is always
a danger that it will corrupt the style, and soften the intellectual
integrity, of a certain kind of musician. What nobody should
say is that the journalist can never be a man of letters,
and that the church musician who produces a splendid hymn
is a musician of inferior status and lower talent than he
who presses out to the frontiers of thought in his symphonies.
It remains
true that the great symphonist can't often write a popular
hymn tune or a manageable short anthem. Vaughan Williams never
wrote a popular hymn tune after he became a symphonist, though
at the end of his life he did show that he could write a perfect
epigram in church music -'0 taste and see'. Martin Shaw might
well have made a symphonist if at the age of, say, twenty-five
he had been urged in that direction. But two things stopped
him. One was the way his temporal life fell out at that time,
and the other was his own nature. He had something to say
to English music that wasn't musical at all, but political.
He set himself to say precisely that in his music.
He was, at
the beginning, an orthodox professional in as much as he went
to the Royal College of Music. He became a pupil of Stanford
- what could be more respectable than that? But anyone who
has any association with academic institutions knows that
when they are at their best their students learn as much from
each other as they do from their senior preceptors. And what
a gang those contemporaries of Martin Shaw must have been!
Coleridge-Taylor, Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland,
Rutland Boughton, Thomas Dunhill - he knew them all. These
were the people who influenced him. And in Up to Now
he gives the whole secret away in a telling paragraph:
During the
whole of my college career I felt vaguely dissatisfied.
I knew that something I instinctively wanted was not there,
though it was not till long after that I discovered what
it was. I will borrow from The Times critic
a word which describes it most adequately: 'Englishness'.
It is quite
understandable that he couldn't, while he was at the college
in the nineties,, put a name to the thing he was looking for.
As he says, the expression 'folk song' was never mentioned
there in those days. But what he did know was that he was
reacting against the assumption that the musical Kremlin was
located in Germany, and that what Brahms didn't say wasn't
worth hearing.
We shall see
in a moment where that led him. But for the present we will
recall what happened to Martin after he left college. He left
as what one could call a 'dissenting' musician. He accepted
the post of organist to Emmanuel Church, Hampstead, which
he held from 1895 to 1903. As an organist he was never a recitalist,
but, as those who heard him testify, always a magnificent
accompanist and brilliant extemporizer. He also had an admirable
opportunity of discovering that tradition of church music
which later he committed himself to abolishing.
But something
far more important than this happened in 1897. In that year
he met Gordon Craig, and it was Gordon Craig, that dynamic
innovator in the theatre (whose Life was published
by his son, Edward Craig, in 1968) who gave him something
to live for. He first met him in Southwold - the town in which
he himself spent his last years. Their friendship lasted sixty
years. And Edward Craig says that it was Martin Shaw who 'was
to introduce him [Gordon] to the magic and power of great
music'. They collaborated at the local pub in the introduction
to a scene from Craig's Francis Yillon, Poet and Cut-throat,
Martin playing the pub piano. A better pub story than that
is of how he and Martin walked over Hampstead Heath, while
Martin expounded the music and the drama of the St Matthew
Passion; and when they arrived at Jack Straw's Castle
they made straight for the bar-parlour piano, on which Martin
played enough of the music for Gordon to decide, on the spot,
to produce the Passion with visual effects which would
have commanded the respect of any theatrical manager of the
1960s. 'For,' as Edward Craig writes, 'in his mind, as Martin
played, he had seen visions of great flights of steps, crowds
of moving figures,, crowds that opened up as a single figure
ascended to his destruction.'
Gordon Craig in
1905
The vision
came to nothing, although Craig worked on it seriously over
a period of fourteen years. But when Craig launched a little
magazine called The Page in 1898 he gave himself the
distinction of publishing in it the first works of Martin
Shaw to see print; this was followed in 1899 by The Dome,
a somewhat more ambitious journal, which again featured the
occasional contribution by Martin. And in the same year the
Purcell Operatic Society came into being. Purcell (like the
St Matthew Passion) was virtually unknown to the British
public at the time. Indeed it was he who first introduced
Purcell to Craig and their production in 1900 of Dido and
Aeneas which he conducted, that rescued Purcell from oblivion
and initiated the process of restoring him to his rightful
place in the pantheon of British composers - as well as being
Craig's first ventures in the arts of stage production and
design. There is a superb story telling how a favourable review
from a contemporary journal was posted in three envelopes
to 'Gordon Craig Esq.', 'Martin Shaw Esq.' and 'Henry Purcell
Esq.', all at the Coronet Theatre.
An impression of
Marrtin Shaw conducting by Gordon Craig
In 1903 Martin
Shaw left his organist's post, with its respectable security,
and threw in his lot with the world of the theatre. One thing
led to another, and it was not long before he found himself
conducting orchestras for the legendary Isadora Duncan. The
years 1903 to 1908 found him travelling all over Europe conducting
for her orchestras, which were never better than fourth rate
and one of which he described as 'solid, stolid, and squalid'.
He spent much time in Germany and the Netherlands, but went
as far north as Stockholm and as far south as Rome. There
was no money in this - he used to return to London with a
few pounds in his pocket and no certainty at all whence the
next meal would come. In the intervals of travelling on these
romantic assignments he turned to anything, from copying tunes
in the British Museum for the English Hymnal to sorting
stamps for the editor of the Daily Mail.
But in 1908
things took a new turn again. Martin went back to the organ
loft. It is doubtful if he would ever have done so for anybody
but Percy Dearmer, but it was Dearmer, Vicar of St Mary's,
Primrose Hill, who persuaded him. And in Dearmer of course
he found a kindred spirit - a lover of the ancient and the
catholic in church liturgy, a fastidious and dedicated apostle
of craftsmanship in all church matters, including music. Thus
began a partnership which did so much to set a new standard
in English congregational music; the partnership whose fruits
were Songs Of Praise and, more importantly, the Oxford
Book of Carols. It is probably safe to say that Martin
Shaw never in all his strenuous work for English religious
music did it a greater service than he did in the second of
these books. Dearmer's preface to it, and Martin Shaw's selection
and editing, injected something into the English church culture
which irreversibly transformed it. This was the celebration
of authentic folk song and authentic English music.
But at his
appointment to St Mary's, the Oxford Book of Carols
was still twenty years away. Martin Shaw had found, just when
he needed it most, not only an economic focus, but a focus
for his talents. He would never forget, and he would never
stop being influenced by, his theatrical experience. He would
never become a 'churchy' composer; indeed it was to be said,
quite rightly, that his finest compositions turned out to
be his secular songs. But from here on, for fifty years, he
was to be increasingly an apostle of renaissance in church
music.
He found one
thing here that the theatre did not give him; he could communicate
and command an audience otherwise than through making music.
He began to lecture and to write. He was closely associated
with the English Folk Dance & Song Society. And he had
something to work on. For the English Hymnal, whose
editor Vaughan Williams was already a good friend, with its
crusading zeal for musical purity, gave him his programme.
Here, in folk song and well edited plainsong and in other
new styles, was a new vocabulary for English parishes. Here
also, in liturgical renewal, was a new code of behaviour.
Just what Martin Shaw could get his teeth into!
The First World
War found him hard at work promoting English music of all
kinds,, articulate where his fellow-composers were contemplative,
pugnacious where they were resigned. Only Vaughan Williams
shared his crusading zeal, and VW sometimes thought Martin
went rather far. Certainly the consequence of the outbreak
of war was dramatic for Martin. He was never fit for military
service - his sight was always weak and he had other afflictions
- but a ferocious hatred of Germany and all things German,
to which he often gave uninhibited expression, reinforced
his passion for England and English music. Consequently -
and it is fascinating to follow this through the pages of
the Musical Times and other papers of the years 1917-20
- his mind all through the war was on his plans for celebrating
English music and delivering it from the tyranny of German
music after its end. When what he would have innocently called
victory came, he was - one cannot put it any other way - rarin'
to go. And it was his mind and energy that fostered the musical
celebrations that followed the war, and that, using the impetus
of these, drove English congregations to seek new musical
languages for their popular songs. Indeed, he very much wished
to influence secular popular music as well as the folk song
of the church - but this was more than even he could really
do much about.
During the
1920s his influence and fame became widespread and assured.
He made countless friends and disciples by the ten thousand.
It was his organising of the Bristol Summer School of Church
Music in 1922 which led to the founding of the Royal School
of Church Music. He was too much of an individualist to see
eye to eye with that other massive influence in church music
of the same era, Walford Davies, yet between them those two
were responsible for a standard of music in the humblest parish
church of, say, the 1950s, which makes the standard of a big
London church in 1900 look laughable.
It was not
uncharacteristic of him that he should follow Dearmer eventually
to the Guildhouse. This was an extraordinary adventure on
Dearmer's part in intellectual evangelism. In a chapel which
the Congregationalists had recently vacated in Eccleston Square,
Dearmer set up a new-style preaching service at tea-time on
Sundays in which he sought to combine the intellectual drive
of contemporary nonconformity with the decency of ritual and
music whose advocate he had been for, by then, at least twenty-five
years. Martin Shaw ran the music. They used Songs of Praise,
which began as a broad-church version of the English Hymnal
but developed into a real frontier-book for intellectual Christians
- searching literature for good hymns which weren't to be
found in the usual repertory, setting Shelley and Shakespeare
to music alongside Watts and Mrs Alexander, catering for progressive
schools and far-out congregations. Once when somebody wrote
to The Times deploring the traditional tune to '0 Valiant
Hearts', Martin wrote back saying, in effect, 'Come to the
Guildhouse next Sunday and hear a decent tune by HoIst'.
All this would
make a fascinating study if it was appropriate to go into
it here. The point, however, is that here once again Martin
Shaw was evangelizing through high-quality music. He was making
it, and making it well, but he wanted the gospel spread. He
would never be one to lock himself up in a cathedral and let
the world go by. He wanted ordinary people to share the pleasures
of refined and simple music; and he wanted the best composers
of his time to write what ordinary people could sing. (In
this last his dreams weren't realized: most of the 'big name'
new tunes in Songs of Praise were non-starters.)
So that when
the Diocese of Chelmsford created for him the office of diocesan
music organizer - as it were, bishop of music - in 1936, one
simply comments, 'Why on earth did they wait so long?' And
when the Archbishop of Canterbury gave Martin and his brother
Geoffrey the Lambeth D Mus (the inextinguishable story is
that he read the formula for the D D until Geoffrey jogged
his elbow), one wonders again what caused him to delay so
long. Martin was turned sixty by then, yet only then did he
get recognition from the Church. Of course, in the light of
later history this isn't surprising: the office, when Martin
Shaw retired, was not continued and no other diocese imitated
the fitful enterprise of Chelmsford. And in a way, Martin
Shaw had already earned this honour to such a degree that
one has to say that his best and most influential work was
by then done. Not but what he had twenty years yet to live,
and remained in great demand as a teacher and lecturer. He
carried on as long as his unsteady health permitted, and until
his death he was, without any doubt, the most talked-about
of English church musicians.
But if one
wants to know what made Martin Shaw the person he was, looking
back over his story we can say that there were three utterly
dissimilar forces at work. The first was, undoubtedly, his
father - that strange, unreliable, picturesque character who
at sixty determined (with no success whatever) to become a
concert pianist, and of whom Martin himself writes with a
sort of helpless affection. They loved but did not always
understand each other - and obviously they both depended for
their very life on the compensating good sense of Martin's
mother. Yet where else did Martin's extraordinary power of
responding to impulses and his restless questing for musical
adventure and truth come from?
The second
influence was clearly Gordon Craig - that wild and eager man
who, had he been the only influence, would probably have killed
Martin Shaw with overwork and over-strenuous enthusiasms,
but who gave Martin such insights into the theatre and who,
even more importantly, listened so avidly while Martin talked.
The third influence,
however, was the most potent of all: so preoccupied have I
been with the adventures of his outward and professional life
that I have not mentioned at all the fact that he married
Joan Cobbold in 1916. His references to it in his own book
permit his chronicler to reveal that he saw her once, determined
to marry her, and did so - the storybook poor musician invading
an aristocratic family and carrying off one of its most gifted
members. It is not fair to say that under her influence he
'settled down' - she would have hated to be thought of as
restraining him in any way. But under her influence he finally
found himself: and it is no accident that his most creative
and organized period dates precisely from 1916. And after
his death in 1958 Joan Shaw did everything possible to keep
his memory alive and to promote what he stood for.
Well, the time
has come, in conclusion, to say something of Martin Shaw as
a composer. I believe it has been right to emphasize up to
now that side of his work from which musical history has most
conspicuously benefited. I believe he would agree that it
is primarily in making us free of other people's music, in
opening the doors of history, in challenging our parochial
notions of culture and vocabulary, that he did his most memorable
work. But it would be absurd to leave unmentioned the fact
that his published works amount to at least 300. If you cast
an eye over the list, running all the way from the beginning
of the century to a year or two before his death, you may
well be impressed by the variety of forms he made his own.
Opera, chamber music, instrumental music are there; no symphonies
(nobody ever gave him the time), but several cantatas and
a fine oratorio, The Redeemer, and a long list of songs,
part-songs, anthems and liturgical pieces. His cantata God's
Grandeur, to words by Gerard Manley Hopkins, was composed
for the first Aldeburgh Festival and received its first performance
in the same concert as the first performance of Britten's
St Nicolas.
Martin Shaw with Benjamin
Britten, Peter Pears and Leslie Woodgate at the first Aldeburgh
Festival in 1948, for which he wrote God's Grandeur
At this moment
his music is not, and one is bound to say regrettably, very
much heard. He made little contribution to cathedral lists.
His 'Folk Mass' is still known in parishes up and down the
country. The anthem, 'With a voice of singing', with its famous
quotation from Vaughan Williams's 'For all the saints', is
still a universal favourite - not least (I am not sure if
this would have pleased him) in non-anglican churches. The
hymn books continue to find his tunes 'Marching' and 'Little
Cornard' indispensable (the second badly needs a text fit
to sing). The schools sing his unison songs with undiminished
gusto, especially 'Cargoes' and 'The Seekers'. And no composer
however eminent could have been anything but proud of his
exquisite 'Song of the Palanquin bearers' - an early work
of remarkable sensitiveness. But behind the little that is,
during a restless and cacophonous age, popular at present
there is a good deal that somebody will one day discover again.
Why, they are writing theses now on the Victorians and the
Edwardians; anyone who explores Martin Shaw will have something
a good deal more useful than that to work on.
No; he was
a composer of absolutely faultless integrity, who so limited
and restrained his talent as to make it accessible to ordinary
choirs of children, schools and parishes, and to ordinary
singers in ordinary pews. But if the chaotic state of music
publishing at present allows a passing cloud to obscure some
of his best work in music, and if - as is more understandable
and less reprehensible - the changes of fashion and new insights
cause the revision of some judgments he would have made, what
history can never take away from him is the influence he had
on English music-making. Others shared in the movement that
produced that influence - Ireland, Bax, Holst, Vaughan Williams;
but they would all say - indeed, at one time or another each
of them did say - that it was Martin Shaw who made the movement
bite, by communicating it to people whom the others never
reached. Name any British composer who is getting published
now, be he as eminent or as avant-garde as you like: Martin
Shaw helped to make the world safe for him.
And this zestful
communicator, this cheerfully dogmatic apostle of renaissance,
this outgoing, self-giving, strenuous, tardily-appreciated
musical evangelist was a man who carried with him throughout
his life one of the most alarming facial disfigurements any
mortal ever had to bear. Those who met him remember the birthmark
which ravaged the whole of one side of his face; and they
remember how after a minute and a half in his presence you
completely forgot it. For a man who loved an audience, in
whose blood the theatre always was, this could have been a
crippling frustration: not so for Martin Shaw. The course
of his life was always public, always outgoing, always in
the front line; and where others would have gratefully opted
for the life of the retiring and contemplative musician because
of this apparent disability, Martin Shaw, urged on by those
good friends who helped to give direction to his life, never
hesitated for a moment to do things the hardest way.
When he was
eighty (in 1955) his loyal friend Vaughan Williams was persuaded
to visit Southwold and give the oration at a service of thanksgiving
in the parish church there. Everybody who was there (and it
was a good company) remembers how VW at an early stage deserted
his prepared script and spoke freely and with characteristic
truculence about the music of the English Church. One credibly
gathers that near the climax the old lion roared, 'Cursed
be all who do not listen to Martin Shaw!' More cautiously,
as befits a humbler member of the animal kingdom, I should
say that if you do not know about Martin Shaw you are missing
a good deal, and that if you do not honour and respect a man
who so single-mindedly devoted himself to the educating of
the English musical mind, you don't know a good thing when
you see one. To him the English song tradition, the English
choral tradition and the tradition of English church music
owe more than any of them know; their best compliment to him
has been their taking for granted now so many of the things
which when he first said them were surprising and even revolutionary.
We haven't followed his denunciations of 'German' music; and
we haven't altogether embraced his detestation of all things
Victorian. But we know to whom we owe the fact that we look
at both with new and clearer eyes.
MARTIN SHAW TRUSTEES
Birketts llp
24-26 Museum Street
Ipswich IP1 1HZ
MUSIC REPRESENTATIVE
Robert Shaw
c/o Inside Intelligence
13 Athlone Close
London E5 8HD
