With intrigue, I read Norman Lebrecht’s recent contribution to these pages, “Some composers are rightly obscure”. Among other things, Mr Lebrecht writes that the place for marginal composers is on the margins. Regardless of the legitimacy of this claim, what interests me is the critical question that would seem to arise from it: how, and by who, are those margins drawn?
But first, a confession. I admit to being, per Lebrecht’s description, a beady-eyed one. The faith group to which I proudly subscribe is the recently formed Sir Arnold Bax Society. As my essay develops, it shall be an honour to defend this brazen, unjustly neglected romantic.
We must begin by interpreting the root of the taunt. The inference is that a marginal composer is so because the value of his work serves to marginalise him. Of course, in the case of certain marginal composers, this may well be true.
Determining a musical composition’s value is a complex, albeit essential, undertaking. As a piece of music, its intrinsic value, or its artistic quality, can be determined objectively. A composition’s quality is the sum of its craft and style. Craft is a composer’s technique. That is, a composer of strong craft is cognisant of, among many other things: music’s temporal and geometric realities; that musical instruments produce what sounds they do according to the laws of physics; that music must be effectively notated to convey meaningful instruction; and so on. Conversely, style concerns aesthetic. A composition’s style breeds the mood or moods its music seeks to evoke. There are an infinite number of moods that music can conjure; some of these are obvious while others are not easily described in language. Because listeners are wont to project their individual tastes, style and its umbrella term, quality, are sometimes erroneously conflated. Although taste does stem from style, style can only come once the composer has achieved a sure craft.
The intrinsic value of any of Bax’s seven numbered symphonies withstands musicological scrutiny. (For balance, I am not sure if the same can be said of his 1907 Dresden symphony.) These are, upon deep investigation, quality works. Each is well crafted and possesses style. For my tastes, I love them all, and especially the Third. My enjoyment of the Third is not the result of Bax’s compositional style but, rather, his compositional technique, from which evolves a style specific to the symphony, traces of which can subsequently be found to varying degrees in his other works.
A composition can possess value beyond its artistic quality. There must be few professional violists who in their student days did not play Telemann’s G Major concerto. That composition, then, has a kind of extra-musical value, additional to its artistic quality, in that it serves a pedagogical function.
To wit, it was Glenn Gould who reported that he knew a man who would, each night after dinner, take brandy in his study and write symphonies as if he were Bruckner, simply for the sheer love of doing so. Herbert Howells drew inordinate personal value from writing Hymnus Paradisi, a work which he did not initially intend for public performance. Bax’s Spring Fire never premiered during his lifetime. It is a mistake to assume that a composition achieves any kind of value — and especially artistic quality — only during performance. Ultimately, the act of expressive creation, not recreation, must be the greater joy for the vocational composer.
Nevertheless, a composition’s value is most effectively and honestly presented during performance. And a playwright hardly pens his manuscript simply to declare that such is, in of itself, live theatre. It stands, then, that orchestras, ensembles and companies should always prioritise performing works that are of an irrefutable artistic quality, for such works are the more likely, in a perfect world, to be considered valuable. Here, we arrive at the crux of the issue.
It has been more than eighty years since Bax’s Third Symphony received a Proms performance. The festival most recently presented the Second in 2011, with Andrew Litton conducting the RPO. Before that, it was the Fifth, courtesy of Raymond Leppard and the BBC Philharmonic, in 1984. Why is it that these symphonies, as quality artworks, are so avoided?
Should it wish to survive in perpetuity, a composition must face a series of challenges in the wake of its public premiere. Most importantly, and obviously, it must be worth preserving; works of objectively poor artistic value have no business troubling performers and audiences alike.
The work must also inspire acolytes. While it holds that all marginal composers are marginal, equally is it that some marginal composers are more marginal than others. Upon cursory inspection, there are no movements attached to the legacy of Sir William Cusins, Sir Walter Parratt or Sir Walford Davies. That there are societies dedicated to Bax, Bliss, Brian and others may actually be telling of these composers’ individual merits, at least relatively.
Incidentally, the International Gustav Mahler Society Vienna was founded in 1955, with Bruno Walter serving as Honorary President. Bernstein’s enthusiasm for Mahler was insatiable. It does no harm to any composer when their acolytes are just as, if not more, luminous. The musical relationship between Robert and Clara Schumann was undoubtedly symbiotic. But whereas there were almost no virtuosic, female concert pianists to rival Clara and diminish her prominence, Harriet Cohen, Bax’s lover and greatest champion, faced several British contenders alone, such as Myra Hess and, later, Moura Lympany.
A work, as well as its composer, must be able to weather logistical and historical challenges. Many of my friends were involved in the first international performance of The Gothic. It was a colossal operation. Moreover, if the continuity of Mahler’s legacy was disrupted by the Great War and, later, an antisemitic Reich, it might be said that Bax’s Celtic Twilight was equally disaffected by the Easter Uprising and the subsequent, protracted tensions between Dublin and London. His was music that, in its youth, played itself most comfortably in Ireland; even today, the Shamrock’s symphonic infrastructure is dwarfed by that of the Red Rose.
Vernon Handley perfectly diagnosed a significant obstruction to Bax’s music: conductors. We might reflect upon why Mahler’s symphonies (or, as Handley cheekily regarded them, his “extended suites”) are so beloved by conductors. These are works of artistic quality, to be sure, but they are also grand works which, in essence, play themselves; they are known backwards to professional orchestras, both technically and stylistically. The showman, as opposed to the conductor, finds refuge in this fact, as he does in similarly canonised repertoire. A Bax symphony requires not flamboyant arm-waving but sensitive, controlled leadership. It also requires, due to its unfamiliarity, extended rehearsal.
“Today, it seems the arts as a field is strongly associated with the far Left, which I find very curious,” Samuel Andreyev recently told me, when I interviewed him as part of my own music pages. Certainly, the statistics uncovered by the ever growing and vital Freedom in the Arts are damning. There is a sect within music, itself marginal but — apparently — loud and scary, that claims a composer’s race, sex, sexuality, political views, culture and wealth are reliable indicators of the artistic quality of that composer’s work. By such metrics, Bax, a white male, famously heterosexual, somewhat liberal, even pagan, in his beliefs but otherwise an affluent, upper-class English gentleman, now dead, measures badly. The majority knows this prejudice is nonsense, whether it is applied to past or contemporary composers, and not at all reflective of artistic quality. Why, then, can we not just have the courage to say as much?
The margins we have drawn, or allowed others to draw, are not always helpful or forward-looking
The greater an audience’s knowledge of music, the deeper its engagement and appreciation is in the concert hall. Consider, then, the state of music education, which, in my own country, the late Richard Gill described as a “national disgrace” more than twenty years ago. Government’s forced amalgamation of Australia’s independent conservatoriums with the domineering university machine has imposed the very worst of modern academia upon music – which is, fundamentally, not a discipline of research but a discipline of practice. The crisis has trickled from the lecture hall into schools; in Queensland, it is no longer a formal requirement that Grade 12 classroom music students be able to read basic notation.
Ultimately, I am advancing that the margins we have drawn, or allowed others to draw, are not always helpful or forward-looking. That we would be content to tabulate composers and their work by way of this flawed methodology seems unwise. What surprises me most about Lebrecht’s position is how remarkably institutional it is. To write that the symphonic canon requires focused attention is, surely, to embolden the very incumbent bureaucrats that have focused us into stagnation. Rather, may the daring, like John Gilhooly at Wigmore Hall, pave the way towards a reimagined cultural future, one of individualism, entrepreneurship, objective artistic quality and, dare I hope, Sir Arnold Bax.
