Havergal Brian.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

When I first read Malcolm MacDonald's book as a teenager,I hadn't even heard most of Brian's symphonies.

MM's book was all I had to go on. Only a year later I got to listen to symphonies 8 & 9, and the descriptions proved to be absolutely spot-on.

[cilgwyn]

Hadn't you even heard the 'Gothic',then?

It's very hard to describe what a piece music sounds like.Malcolm MacDonald has that rare ability to evoke the sound world of a piece of music in words.
It's quite a slim volume too,really,but there's allot in it.

[cilgwyn]

I heard the Schmidt Gothic after seeing an article in 'The Times' about the upcoming concert. Something along the lines of 'Brian's Gothic mountain looms once more'! Wish someone had that article. It was the first time I'd ever come across him.
The LSSO 10 & 21,came next. By post,I think,via an ad in Gramophone. I just HAD to hear more!
I wonder what would have happened if the LSSO hadn't been such a GOOD schools orchestra?
No doubt,I would have struggled through & Brian's legacy would have lived on,but as first ever recordings,it was a tremendous premiere. I nearly wore my copy through!

[John Whitmore]

I heard the Schmidt Gothic after seeing an article in 'The Times' about the upcoming concert. Something along the lines of 'Brian's Gothic mountain looms once more'! Wish someone had that article. It was the first time I'd ever come across him.
The LSSO 10 & 21,came next. By post,I think,via an ad in Gramophone. I just HAD to hear more!
I wonder what would have happened if the LSSO hadn't been such a GOOD schools orchestra? No doubt,I would have struggled through & Brian's legacy would have lived on,but as first ever recordings,it was a tremendous premiere. I nearly wore my copy through!

You wouldn'thave been royally entertained by me on this forum

[cilgwyn]

 

[Dundonnell]

Actualy, cilgwyn, I thought that what you wrote a few posts back about Rider Haggard was extremely thoughtful and absolutely spot on

You captured in what you wrote the essential essence of just what a pioneering novelist RH actually was and the way in which his stories did open up for a generation of young people in particular all the exotic mystery of discovery of the continent in which most of his most famous stories are set. They are still fabulously good reads and just damned fine stories.

The ability of a novelist to 'tell a story' is often an underestimated talent. If the writer can use his story-telling ability to excite the imagination (or his prose, his evocative descriptions, his vivid analogies, as in the case of MM) of the reader then I take my hat off to him. He has achieved such a fundamental impact-Johan will tell you, a life-changing impact) that the achievement is frankly wonderous

[Dundonnell]

Malcolm MacDonald is a cross between Conan Doyle and Nigella Lawson (as a writer, that is). 

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The ability of a novelist to 'tell a story' is often an underestimated talent. If the writer can use his story-telling ability to excite the imagination (or his prose, his evocative descriptions, his vivid analogies, as in the case of MM) of the reader then I take my hat off to him. He has achieved such a fundamental impact-Johan will tell you, a life-changing impact) that the achievement is frankly wonderous

Reading Malcolm MacDonald's books about Havergal Brian changed my life. And Havergal Brian's music has been sustaining me for decades already.


It's the truth, Your Honour.

[Luke]

Re this, from 10 pages but only a few days ago 

...Over the Christmas break I was reading the first volume of Anthony Burgess' autobiography. But I had to put it down for a while (in fact I've hardly been able to pick it up again) when I turned a page and was shocked to find his damning opinion of the Gothic and Brian in general. He didn't 'get it', perhaps not surprisingly - so many didn't and still don't - but it's not fun to see a writer one admires turn his withering scorn on a composer one loves! Anybody else read it? If not, I will try to grit my teeth and copy it out for the benefit of the thread 
...as this thread is such a valuable resource of things Brianic, has anyone else here read the fairly long and favourable entry on HB in Mark Morris' Dictionary of Twentieth Century Composers? Worth a read (and in the context of this discussion, for its lengthy discussion of the Gothic, which Morris absolutely raves about - it is a masterpiece, he thinks, 'the climax of the Romntic age...an experience quite unlike anything else in musc' which 'entirely justifies' its huge forces). It's not a totally comprehensive dictionary, and the editing leaves much to be desired (in the HB entry there is mention of his Double Fugue in E, for instance), but it's the best thing of this type I've seen. Morris arbitraily awards composer *** or ** or * or no stars at all (most of them). *** is Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok,  Schoenbrg - the BIG names. ** is Enescu, Dallapiccola, Busoni, Adams, Barber, Delius, Bloch, Glass, Dukas, Holst, Miaskovsky, Kurtag, Villa-Lobos, Wlaton, Rubbra, Respighi, Scriabin etc. * is Bantock, Alwyn, Ustvolskaya, Corigliano..... Morris ranks Brian as a ** composer, which is pleasing.

Also OTTOMH is Wilfrid Mellers' passing judgement on Brian in his RVW book. Intrigued, guardedly favourable but not without criticism, essentially of Brian's melodic skills. He may have a point, or he may be missing one...

Please copy the Burgess quotation. Burgess was a symphonist himself and might have resented the fact of Brian's relative success... Very interested in the Mark Morris entry, too. The Mellers I know. But others perhaps won't...

Sorry fort he delay. Here is Burgess on The Gothic. Don't shoot the messenger:

The urge to compose some great orchestral work continued, against all the odds [AB is talking of himself here]. But that megalophonia was, as I should have realised, already out of date. The biog orchestra was an Edwardian folly. Stravinsky's Le Dacre du Printemps was the last of the sonic supersplurges, and it was as much a parody of pretension as an act of self-indulgence - the Russian primitive in Straussian plush.

If I had known anything of the career of Havergal Brian at that tie, I would have been warned off my ambitions. For Brian committed millions of notes to scoring paper and then committed that paper to a drawer. There was no hope of hearing them, and perhaps no desire to expose a musical mind he must have known to be mediocre to the hard Sophoclean light [I'm not enjoying copying this, I hope you know...this theory is a new, ignorant and irresponsible extension of some aspects of the HB myth. Grrr] The writing of melodies unheard is less stoically heroic than it appears. In the 1960s I contributed money to the funding of a performance of Havergal Brian's huge 'Gothic' Symphony, and, like so many, was desperately disappointed and even embarrassed by the display of second-rate musical thinking dressed up with bass oboes and basset horns. The work read far better than it sounded. There are perhaps, after all, no mute inglorious Beethovens.

Nevertheless, HB seems to weigh on AB's mind. In another collection I have of his writing (will I ever buy any more?) his review of the then-new Grove shows that of the millions of entries he could have sampled, the HB entry was one he chose. The terms are less damning here, as he is not tying to make a point, perhaps:

[wuote author=Anthony Burgess, review of The New Grove]On Havergal Brian a judgement is made which is applicable to most of the figures of the British musical renaisance - that the fresh and idiosyncratic are juxtaposed with the banal and the conventional[/quote].

Wilfrid Mellers is much more balanced than Burgess, but that's no surprise. As I said, I feel he may be missing the point re Brian a little, but I can see what he means:

...The Lloyd symphonies are, however, no more than peripheral to the English succession as represented by the symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Rubbra; and the same must be said of the symphonies of a still odder, more phenomenal, composer of Vaughan Williams's own generation - Havergal Brian, a poor boy from the Potteries who, with virtually no cultural background or formal education but by virtue of exceptional intellectual acumen, managed to become a professional composer, producing a vast body of music wherein he defined a unique symphonic world.

In his early days in the late nineteenth century Brian was haunted by German romantic literature, especially Goethe, and his first symphonies are unsurprisingly gargantuan in the tradition of Mahler. His later symphonies became incrementally terser and tougher, more quirky and quixotic, as the years rolled on: as roll they did, for Brian, living a decade longer (even) than Vaughan Williams, wrote thirty-two symphonies, twenty-one of them, incredibly enough, after he had passed the age of eighty. There is something slightly monstrous about so long a carrer devoted to the production of so much music which the composer - at least for most of this century - did not expect to hear performed. Whether we call the idiom of the symphonies European, or just sui generis, it has little to do with Vaughan Williams's concept of an English symphony. Not surprisingly, opinionsas to how important, as distinct from extraordinary, Brian's work is vary considerably. The present writer finds the symphonies' idiomatic oddity in itself fascinating, structurally, texturally and orchestrally, though ultimately vitiated by a lack of memorable melodic inventiveness. But it is more to the point that one of Brian's staunchest admirers should be the finest British symphonist of the generation after Rubbra: namely Robert Simpson who, like Brian and Vaughan Williams, sees symphony (and string quartet) as a spiritual pilgrimage...

With the exception of Simpson - and perhaps in his oddball way Havergal Brian - the composer so far mentioned look, if not backwards, no further forwards than themselves...

Reading that again, I'm struck Mellers' balance, objectiveness and humility (much greater than Burgess's understandably self-centred autobiographical entry). He present Brian fairly, notes that there is debate about his importance (a debate which now, years later, seems to be swinging Brian's way at last, now that, significantly, more people actually know the music rather than commenting on its reputation and on hearsay). He gives his own opinion, as a FWIW, finds it mixed, but then graciously defers to Robert Simpson's. Mellers really was a fine writer, IMO.

The Mark Morris, which includes some extravagant praise which balances out the nonsense from Burgess nicely, is very long - I will copy it out as soon as I get the chance!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Many thanks for taking the trouble, Luke. That first Burgess quote is entertaining as always, though it misses the mark. The big orchestra an 'Edwardian folly'? It was a nineteenth-century development, and Brian was one of its heirs. He also outgrew his 'megalophonia'. Also - judging The Gothic to be a failure after its first amateur performance is a bit premature. As for Mellers - I know the quotes, as I said. And yes, Mellers is very balanced and open-minded. He can entertain the thought that there might be more to Brian's 'oddity' and 'quirkiness' than meets the ear. I like it. I'll be reading his RVW book as a whole shortly, by the way.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The conductor Kenneth Woods just wrote on Twitter:


The most read, most discussed blog post at VFTP [View from the Podium] in 2011:
Havergal Brian- Gothic "Symphony" at the Proms.


As a reminder, here are his two posts, with interesting comments:


http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2011/07/18/havergal-brian-gothic-symphony-at-the-proms/


http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2011/07/23/havergal-brian-the-gothic-symphony-at-the-proms-a-few-more-thoughts/#more-3237

[Dundonnell]

Are we supposed to think that this represents a balanced piece of critical writing

It is appallingly badly written, frequently crass in the extreme, a long-winded stream of consciousness set of musings, only redeemed by occasional insights

[mahler10th]

Are we supposed to think that this represents a balanced piece of critical writing

It is appallingly badly written, frequently crass in the extreme, a long-winded stream of consciousness set of musings, only redeemed by occasional insights

Wholeheartedly agreed.  If Woods wants to listen to Mahler, or Berlioz, or Beethoven or whatever, he should listen to them because he will not find them in Brian (though he's trying hard enough).  Brian is not any of these, nor should he even be compared to them, or anything he's done be 'linked' to them somehow.  There are no other composers who are similar to Brian.  Brians are one in a million.  Pettersson is one in a million.  Llangaard is too.  There are others.  But none of them fit what people like Kenneth Woods expect because they are different from the mainstream.  They don't fit each other either.  Brian was his own man.  These reviews are complete fantasy I'm afraid, and not just because I happen to like Havergals music.  I sincerely hope he does not get paid for writing these.  He completely misunderstands the Brian paradigm with an extremely narrow mind and a badly clouded idea of what Brian actually composed.  What a waste of reading time I spent there...   

[Dundonnell]

Glad we are in agreement, John

Looking back at what I posted I suddenly thought "have it got it all wrong and am I just being choleric, bad-tempered and obtuse"

I suppose that what got me going was the whole opening argument about symphony or anti-symphony, then the comparisons with Mahler, Berlioz and Beethoven, Woods' criticisms of the incapability-as he sees it-of Brian to structure the work properly, his apparent perception that Brian is actually wasting the orchestral forces at his command, etc, etc..........

I am not saying that Woods is totally lacking in perspicacity. He has some interesting things to say but he seems to have precious little ability to find sufficient command of the English language to be able to convey his ideas with a coherence that would allow the reader to assess those opinions with true objectivity.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I am not as negative about Wood's stabs at understanding. Yes, he stumbles and fumbles, and he is no writer, but I found (and find) it commendable he seriously tried to make sense of The Gothic in the first place. We should be more charitable. He isn't blankly dismissing Brian like other critics we could name. I think his two blog posts are very instructive, especially as documents of how someone thinks and feels (and flails) when confronted with something as large and odd as 'The Gothic'... But I can understand your disappointment too, Colin and John, if you had expected much much more.

I just asked him if he has  made any 'Brianological progress' since then. 

[Dundonnell]

I fully expected you to be more charitable, Johan

And your point about Woods "trying to make sense" of the Gothic in contrast to so many of the professional critics is perfectly fair. Woods is a conductor of some distinction and not a writer. Nor is a blog necessarily the place one goes to for a deeply considered critical analysis

I think that the harshness of my reaction was precisely because as I tried to follow his line of thinking it was precisely that flailing around for meaning that I found so off-putting.

[Brian]

As another listener with no experience getting 'inside' the Gothic, I very much related to Kenneth Woods' tone and his search for insight or understanding. After you listen for the first time, there is indeed a need to simply spill out all the many different things you're thinking about the piece; it took a heroic act of self-discipline for me to corral my blog post into a chronological movement-by-movement essay that stayed under 2000 words! I've gone back to Woods' commentary several times, actually, and despite the occasional slip-up (he says 'encourage' instead of 'enrage'), I've found it a great help to see that somebody is climbing the same mountain as I am climbing, perhaps taking a slightly different path.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I think the fewer preconceptions you have of what constitutes a symphony, the easier it is to accept Brian's music on its own terms (if you are susceptible to its rough charms, that is). Sometimes being knowledgeable can be as much of a hindrance as it is a help to understanding. It also works the other way round: if you know something through and through, it may be difficult to understand the problems others are experiencing. That's why I love Brian virgins (don't snigger): they defamiliarise the familiar again.

[Dundonnell]

"Symphonies" come in all shapes and sizes

I don't really care what a composer calls a work and never found the famous Robert Simpson argument that because Stravinsky and Hindemith hadn't written "proper" symphonies their works should be considered separately of any real interest.

Attempting to come to terms with the Gothic as a piece of symphonic development because it is called a symphony is, obviously, both of importance and of concern to those who deem these matters of importance.

I-in my simple-minded way no doubt-don't care. I listen to the Gothic for the sound of the piece and the emotional/aesthetic reaction it produces to my sensibilities. Does it 'touch my soul' (to be overly pompous), does it move me, does it excite me

The answer to these questions has been 'YES' ever since I first heard the work

Should I "UNDERSTAND" it    Yes, of course, I should.........and that is where Malcolm's book, which of course, I read when it was first written and my discussions with him prior to that helped enormously

But...do I fully understand it today   Of course not.......but does that in any way diminish my enthusiasm for the piece......equally, of course not

[John Whitmore]

I think the fewer preconceptions you have of what constitutes a symphony, the easier it is to accept Brian's music on its own terms (if you are susceptible to its rough charms, that is). Sometimes being knowledgeable can be as much of a hindrance as it is a help to understanding. It also works the other way round: if you know something through and through, it may be difficult to understand the problems others are experiencing. That's why I love Brian virgins (don't snigger): they defamiliarise the familiar again.

Had a few of them in the LSSO. Didn't last long though. Reminds me of the line in the Round the Horne sketch about the Romans: "My name if Frigidous Maximus. The girls call me Frigid for short, but not for long".