The British are Coming!
Edward Elgar 1857-1934
Edward Elgar
1857-1934
Edward Elgar
Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1

By the time Edward Elgar wrote his Pomp and Circumstance March No.1 in 1901 as a way to uplift the national spirit, he had become famous. To the chagrin of Britain’s music establishment, Elgar – an outsider lacking academic musical training – was the first English composer to achieve world fame since Henry Purcell in the 17th century. In 1899, at age 42, his Enigma Variations propelled him from parochial obscurity to worldwide recognition.

“I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em – knock ‘em flat,” wrote Elgar to a friend after the premiere in October 1901. A few days later, conductor Henry Wood performed it at the London Proms where he had to repeat it twice, “just to restore order.” Ever since it became an annual fixture at the Last Night of the Proms. Many people who have never heard of Elgar will immediately recognize the march, his most familiar composition. Example 1 Generations have been marching in graduation processionals to the tune from its middle section, which has been set to words of the patriotic anthem “Land of Hope and Glory” by A.C. Benson. Apparently it was King Edward VII who suggested that words be put to the music, and Elgar obliged.

Elgar went on to compose four more Pomp and Circumstance marches, but none achieved the popularity of the first. The title of the set of marches comes from Shakespeare’s Othello after Iago first plants the seeds of jealousy in the susceptible Othello.

Richard Harvey b. 1953
Richard Harvey
b. 1953
Richard Harvey
Concerto antico for Guitar and Small Orchestra

Richard Harvey describes himself as “…a prolific composer, a performer and collector of instruments blown, plucked, keyed, bowed, beaten and programmed, a conductor and a traveling musicologist.”

His compositions include near 80 film and TV scores. Born in England, he started recorder lessons at age four, was first clarinet with the British Youth Symphony Orchestra, from which he went to the Royal College of Music to study composition. He has toured extensively with his folk-rock ensemble, Gryphon, made up of a group of his classmates from the Royal College of Music. He performs on over 30 instruments, including the bass Krumhorn.

Harvey composed Concerto antico in 1995 for his friend, guitarist John Williams, and the London Symphony Orchestra. The composer throws his whole eclectic being into this piece. The movement titles borrow from renaissance and baroque European dances in the tradition of such twentieth-century composers as Ottorino Respighi, Maurice Ravel and Joaquín Rodrigo. But while these earlier composers tended to keep their dances and melodies intact, Harvey injects surprising elements into each one. Shifts in meter, imitations of early or ethnic instruments and delicate tone painting -– and humor – result in a hybrid of dance suite, solo concerto and even concerto for orchestra. While the guitar is certainly the star, Harvey gives lengthy and important parts to orchestral soloists; frequently, in fact, the guitar takes part the accompaniment with subdued plucked or strummed time keeping.

1. Alborada: Familiar to audiences from Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso, the alborada is a dawn serenade. Harvey creates a tone painting beginning with a slow “sunrise” that starts with flute and chime, adding the other instruments in a gradual swell of insect and birdsong. Example 1 As the sun rises, the composer adds hints of the main theme to come. Example 2 Once the sun is up, the guitar presents a lively allegro theme, a “fulfillment” of earlier hints of the melody. Example 3 Harvey envisions a busy rural market, with a crowd of orchestra soloists getting in on the act. Perhaps it is the sultry heat of the day that slows the momentum as the movement closes.

2. Contredanse: A pan-European dance dating from the Renaissance, the contredanse is in a steady 4/4, but Harvey plays a nasty trick on anyone who would try to take this piece on the dance floor with unpredictable meter shifts. Example 4

3. Cantilena: The only movement unrelated to the dance, Cantilena is the centerpiece of the Concerto and fulfills the genre’s requirement for a slow movement. Cantilena is a set of free variations that begins with a cello solo presenting part of the main theme. After the guitar has completed its own riff, the cello returns for the single complete version in its purest form. Example 5 As cantilena means “song,” the movement is composed in the traditional ABA song form, the middle section, already embellished introduced, by the guitar. Example 6

4. Forlana: The forlana is a Northern Italian dance in 6/8 time. With characteristic self-irony, Harvey admits that his version is not only not in 6/8 but is in a combination of 7/8 and 4/4 (which doesn’t even average out correctly). In this movement, the guitar uses a capo on the fifth fret, making it sound more like a lute. Despite the metric complexities, the melody and sound quality recall Italian dances of the Renaissance. Example 7

5. Lavolta: Harvey writes: “The original lavolta was an innocent but startlingly indelicate Tudor dance after an Italian model in which the female partner was levitated in a highly indelicate manner.” While the guitar has often had to share the limelight with other soloists, Harvey lets it shine here with a challenge to John Williams as, “…a piece that would stretch John’s technique by being impossible to play…” Indeed, the guitarist gets quit a workout, playing in the full extent of the instrument’s range. The movement opens with a side drum solo and a minimalist-sounding introduction, Example 8 followed by a little bit everything, including a little flamenco riff that morphs into an authentic Tudor melody. Example 9 Then the pyrotechnics begin, interrupted by a reprise of the Cantilena. An accompanied cadenza and a con fuoco flourish conclude the concerto.

Ralph Vaughan Williams 1872-1958
Ralph Vaughan Williams
1872-1958
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Symphony No. 2, “A London Symphony”

"The first startling thing about our decision to do a VW weekend was the blank looks when we mentioned it…But not as startling as the reactions to the weekend itself. If I had a quid for every time I heard someone say 'I never knew he wrote music like that' I'd be as rich as…" writes Richard Morrison, chief music critic of the Times (London) of a weekend commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Ralph Vaughan Williams \x2014 and this in the composer's own backyard.

Known primarily for his English pastoralism, the soaring violin writing of The Lark Ascending and the Renaissance polyphony of the Fantasy on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Ralph Vaughan Williams (or as the British write, "VW") poured out some of the most intense and personal music in Britain's history.

VW came from a distinguished family: his paternal grandfather was the first Judge of Common Pleas. His maternal grandparents were Josiah Wedgwood III and a sister of Charles Darwin. Although the family encouraged his youthful musical talents, they later disapproved of his choice of music as a career; VW prevailed, graduating with a Mus.B from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1894.

His progress was slow and uncertain. He went to Berlin in 1897 to study with Max Bruch, and to Paris in 1908 to take lessons from Maurice Ravel. But he was drawn to English folksong and Elizabethan and Jacobean music. His music became rooted in Tudor polyphony, uncovering that rich heritage for contemporaneous audiences. He also had a passion for English folk music; his collection of over 800 folksongs, on which he worked between 1903 and 1910 and his selection of the songs for The English Hymnal in 1906 set the stage for the future development of his musical language.

In his long, productive life – his last symphony was premiered just four months before his death at age 85 – VW practiced what he preached. He wrote music for numerous instrumental and vocal combinations, as well as for level of sophistication and performing ability. Considered radical in his young days and a lifelong agnostic (despite his contributions to religious music), he believed that music was the birthright of every individual.

Vaughan Williams's nine symphonies, spanning over 50 years of creative writing, reflect the composer's changing outlook on life and the world around him. With text by Walt Whitman, his early, cantata-like A Sea Symphony, started in 1903 and finished six years later, reflected his liberalism and idealism. Later he expressed a pastoral mood in the tone poem-like London and Pastoral symphonies. His unsettling and dissonant Fourth was his major experiment in musical modernism – quickly rejected. By the time of the Fifth symphony and later he reached a kind of tranquility and inner piece, in spite of the fact that its composition, begun in 1938, spanned the most horrific years of World War II. Witness to the human and territorial devastation of World War I, he composed his choral masterpiece of 1936, Dona nobis pacem, using the American Civil War poems of Walt Whitman, as an anguished outcry on the eve of World War II. While his older contemporary Edward Elgar was the musical spokesperson for British imperialism, VW was the most quintessentially English but "the least jingoistic" of composers.

One of Vaughan Williams' close friends was the composer George Butterworth. He recalled that about the time of the premiere of the Sea Symphony in 1910, "George…had been sitting with us one evening, smoking and playing. And as he was getting up to go, he said in his characteristically abrupt way 'You know, you ought to write a symphony.' I showed the sketches to George bit by bit as they were finished." The new Symphony was finished in 1913 and premiered the following March. Sadly, Butterworth was killed in France in 1916. Characteristically, the composer polled his friends and colleagues for comments and criticism, and in 1918 revised the Symphony extensively. It went through a series of further revisions during which the composer cut out about 20 minutes of music (there is a recording of the original version).

A London Symphony is a fond salute to VW's adopted city. While it contains actual musical quotes from city life – the familiar Westminster chimes, as well as a lavender seller's cry in the third movement – it is no mere potpourri of tunes. Rather, it incorporates the unmistakable language of English folksong, along with dramatic elements that suggest the complex – and not always salubrious – life of the city. Critics and scholars have conjured both landmarks and historical/literary imagery to match the themes and overall emotive tone of certain passages – everything from VW's own image of Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon (for the slow movement) to Dickensian horrors. It is a great piece of program music – without the program.

A slow introduction on the cellos and basses suggests a murky London fog that gradually adds the upper strings into the four-note motto for the movement, Example 1 and finally by the familiar Westminster chimes. Example 2 The Allegro begins with a snarling motive (nicked by Alfred Lloyd Weber for Phantom of the Opera). Example 3 It continues with another prominent motive Example 4 but then builds up to a typical jaunty VW folk theme, introduced by the motto from the introduction. Example 5 Considerably later in the movement the composer introduces a sentimental section. (ex 6) The variety of musical ideas drift in and out of the fabric of the movement, a considerably varied sonata form.

The elegaic Adagio features a series of beautiful orchestral solos. It begins with a three-note motive in the lower strings, which is woven into a number of themes throughout the movement. Example 7 Its principal theme is introduced on the oboe but is completed late by the strings. Example 8 Like most slow movements, this one is a ternary (ABA) form; the middle section contains a series of melodies, including a lovely violin solo Example 9 and a transformation of the three-note motive into a birdcall. Example 10 A variation of the opening theme concludes the movement.

The third movement generally follows the scherzo/trio pattern. Underlying the scherzo is ostinato in rapid triplets. It is a series of very short motives, beginning with a clarinet solo. Example 11 There follow three more little figures that show up seemingly at random in the fabric of the scherzo. Example 12 & Example 13 & Example 14. The very short trio is folkdance with "accordion" accompaniment. Example 15 The movement ends, however, on a pensive note as the scurrying scherzo gives way to a forecast of the mood of the final movement. Example 16

The last movement is unusual for a symphonic finale, usually a rousing, or at least optimistic affair. Instead, it is rather funereal, opening with a grim harmonic progression Example 17 that leads into slow march, albeit with a British folksy air. Example 18 The movement is, however, cyclic, in the tradition of many nineteenth-century finales, bringing back material from the first movement – first a snatch of the folk theme. Example 19 After picking up the tempo of the march, the Westminster chimes specifically recall London once again. Example 20 At last the four-note motive from the opening of the Symphony recurs quietly to conclude it as it began. Example 21

Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009