17. What does English music sound like? And Bach at the double!
Butterworth, Elgar, Bach.
Do you think that classical music is not for you and you don't know where to start? Or maybe you're a fan already and would welcome a fresh approach? You've come to the right place. Perfect pitch is for everyone, beginners or experts, whatever your age. Lend Nick Healy Hutchinson your ears for his weekly dose of classical music that will enrich your life.
SPEAKER_00In an earlier podcast, I posed the question what makes music sound German, French, or Russian, or Italian, or Czech or English? Funnily enough, I think English is perhaps the hardest to put into words. If you called upon our most famous composer, Edward Elgar, you'd struggle to find anything that you could immediately identify as quintessentially English. The pomp and circumstance marches, to take one example, are certainly nationalistic, but that does not necessarily give them an English identity. The only way I can think of putting it is as if if a countryside could emit a music, the result would characterize the sound of Englishness. Certainly, that's where my mind wanders when I listen to the likes of Ray Four Williams, either Gurney, or George Butterworth, the common thread between these three being a love of the English folk song. And yet you couldn't group them stylistically with William Walton, Odelius, a Holst or Britton, any more than you could group those four with each other either. In other words, there are several styles which weave their way through these composers. And yet there is a sound which is distinctly English. It's a sweet melody, not obviously going anywhere, but just exploring with a playful woodwind and expressive strings. I don't know if that's any help. It certainly shows how difficult it is to describe music in words, and you can tell I'm no musicologist. The best way is to give an example, and for that I'll turn to George Butterworth. Butterworth was born in 1885, and belonged to a group of composers known as the Pastoral School. His output was not substantial, with his key interest being folk song, something he shared with his good friend Rafael Williams, and he is best known for his settings of A Husman's A Tropshire Lad. He only wrote three orchestral pieces all of just several minutes, but enough, I'm certain, to establish that we were deprived of an enormous talent by his untimely death as the victim of a sniper's bullet at the Battle of the Somme in August 2016. His body, like so many others, was never recovered. He was awarded an MC, and his commanding officer was not even aware that Butterworth was a composer. The Bangs of the Green Willow, based on a ballad of the same name, has a tune which I'm sure will be known to many of you. Its tale is a little unsavoury, but that's not what matters here. As I listen to it, it immediately transports me to those images of English countryside. It is, in short, incidentally and quintessentially English. It's a work of pure charm, with sun and rain, but it's ultimately tranquil, serene, peaceful, or even heavenly. It's also a fitting legacy to a life and talent cut short. We hear much and rightly of the works of the poets of Owen and Sassoon, composers who suffered similar fates seem to be overlooked. Butterworth deserves to be ranked along with these, a fact which War Williams evidently recognized when he dedicated his London symphony to his old friend. This is the real sound of English music. Butterworth of Angles of Greenwillow is played here by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Grant Butterwell. Let's listen to a couple of songs by Edward Elgar. He said five poems of music in a group now known as his sea pictures. The second one is a short song about the endurance of love, a poem written by his wife Carol, and the fourth one, where corals lie, is probably the most famous of the lot, and a beckoning to the sea. Apart from the language, of course, where corals lie in particular, it sounds to me as if it could so easily have come from continental Europe, save for one thing. The very last chord of the piece. The orchestra drops into almost a whisper, and quite unexpectedly changes a key to a chord of such a sweetness that it could so easily have come from the hand of his fellow countryman Ray Form Williams. At that point, and I would argue at no point before could you definitively state it was English music. Dame Janet Baker made a celebrated recording of these, but another living game is her match, and it's right that we trumpet our contemporary artists in current circumstances. In Haven and where corals lie are sung here by Sarah Connolly with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simon Wright.
SPEAKER_03Not from a rapid fancy life, crawling my way and share a tone.
SPEAKER_00The upside is that it enables me to play you the whole of one of Bach's most lovely concertos, that for two violins and orchestra. There's not a great deal I need to say about this music, really, written in 1730 towards the end of the Baroque period, beyond making a couple of observations about its structure. The first and the third movements are taken at a sprightly lick, and are written in what is called a ritornello form, which means that the two solos that are playing together exchange tunes with those around them who respond with the same and vice versa. In between them, you have one of the loveliest slow moments of all music, giving light of the myth that Bach's music is devoid of emotion. So here it is, the Bach double concerto played by Aunt Sophie Mutter and Friends.
SPEAKER_01That's it for now. Thank you for listening to Perfect Pitch with Nick Healy Hutchinson. He'll be back again next week with some more treasures for you, so please do join him then. And you can subscribe to this podcast by clicking on the link below.
