Havergal Brian.

[cilgwyn]

Is he bigger than me?!!

[cilgwyn]

The initial experience of Brian's music,described in this Musicweb review:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2015/May/Brian_sys_8573408.htm

"At first hearing Brian's music can seem too dark, over dense and rather impenetrable...."

I remember being disappointed by my off-air cassette of the Schmidt Gothic....feeling that the choral music sounded opaque and 'samey'! I ended up being able to hum most of the work all the way through. It fact,I have since come to regard the Gothic as one of the most tuneful choral works I know. The later symphonies took allot longer and I still can't hum them,but it's probably a good thing!!

Other composers you persevere with and end up admitting defeat......or that there just isn't enough substance to justify any more of your time. Holbrooke,for example,intrigues me;and I do enjoy some of his music;but I can't say I want to spend hours immersed in it. Errki Melartin? Wow!! I want to hear more!! Daniel Jones? Now,he's another self contained hinterland with multiple layers waiting to be peeled systematically away. He pulls me in! York Bowen? Phuuuut! Well crafted,tuneful,urbane,he dries to be deep,but I think I'll stick to Ireland,Bridge,Bax and Scott! Bax? Now,he's got his own special universe!! Spohr? Mmmmm! Now,he is really satisfying!!
It's all just a question of taste,I suppose;but some composers have it and some just don't. I think with Brian,part of the 'appeal' for me is the feeling of all those multiple layers.Teasing them all apart in your mind. A cryptic crossword,as someone once described his muse. Bach is another example. The complexity of those keyboard works can keep your mind occupied for hours. Brahms,likewise. Not that there's anything wrong with a composer who just composes straight forward tuneful music. Gershwin and Johann Strauss can be immensely rewarding if you are in the right mood.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Thanks for the link, cilgwyn! I am in agreement with most of what Cookson says. My only disappointment is with this: "Not for the faint-hearted this uncompromising work is rife with determination, high energy and dark menace." What the... ?!? Symphony No. 6? I wish he would have said that it is one of Brian's most accessible creations.

[springrite]

I wish he would have said that it is one of Brian's most accessible creations.

Well, you never know. Some people are driven away by "most accessible" music, you know...

[cilgwyn]

Thanks for the link, cilgwyn! I am in agreement with most of what Cookson says. My only disappointment is with this: "Not for the faint-hearted this uncompromising work is rife with determination, high energy and dark menace." What the... ?!? Symphony No. 6? I wish he would have said that it is one of Brian's most accessible creations.

Wierd! Knowing Brian's music as I do,from years of listening to it;I would have thought it would be the other way around! Maybe,I'm just a bit dense myself  but the Sixth was one of the symphonies I found the easiest to crack...........if not the most immediately accessible of all!!

I must be missing something!

[Klaatu]

"Lasting slightly less than twenty-minutes the opening work is the Symphony No. 6 titled Sinfonia Tragica. This single movement score marked Brian's first entirely instrumental symphony..."

Oh - did I miss the choral bits of 2 and 3?

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

"Lasting slightly less than twenty-minutes the opening work is the Symphony No. 6 titled Sinfonia Tragica. This single movement score marked Brian's first entirely instrumental symphony..."

Oh - did I miss the choral bits of 2 and 3?

That's not wholly fair to the reviewer (though I'd appreciate the joke if the quote ended there). He continues:

written in his newly conceived concise and economical style that he was to employ regularly over the next twenty years.

   

[cilgwyn]

I'll get my crash helmet ready for my next hearing of the "not for the faint hearted" sixth......just in case?!!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

 

[Luke]

Wierd! Knowing Brian's music as I do,from years of listening to it;I would have thought it would be the other way around! Maybe,I'm just a bit dense myself  but the Sixth was one of the symphonies I found the easiest to crack...........if not the most immediately accessible of all!!

I must be missing something!

Conventional logic would say that if Brian = difficult then the most 'Brianic' of symphonies would = the most difficult. But, oddly, for me the very easiest symphony of all to 'get' is also the one which is perhaps the most concentrated expression of Brian at his most extreme - the 8th. For large areas of the piece there's nothing but juxtaposition of wildly contrasting elements, each fully imagined and wondrously scored, one following the other and sending the next one to an even further extreme. It's utterly dazzling, completely compelling, rigorously shaped, and it just works. This is a symphony totally reimagined from first principles by a man who had symphonism running through his veins. It's emphatically a symphony, it breathes the feeling of 'symphony' from first note to last (it reminds me of Sibelius 7 in this respect), and yet there's virtually no trace of 'tradition' in it, nothing to compare it to, nothing to relate it to other than itself. It just sears itself on your mind without reference to any other world than the one it is creating before you. 100% Brian and no hint of anyone else - perhaps that radical simplicity of style (though not of content!) is why it is such an appealing work, and that also suggests that the 'difficulty' with Brian is not his style per se but the contexts he presents it in...

There's a table near the end of MM's vol 3 which gives his own family-tree division of the symphonies on this scale of 'classical' to 'radical' - and note, it's not a ranking of quality, just an indication of type. He puts the 8th right at the pivotal point of the radical side of the tree, giving birth to #10 and to the Elegy, from which, as MM sees it, all the more radical later works issue. This suggests to me that when I'm responding to what I feel to be an overwhelming sense of radical, fecund potential in #8, the boiling down of style to its essentials, I'm mirroring what MM says about the symphonies. (I should add that I fell head-over-heels in love with #8 years before I read MM's vol 3, or indeed vol 1.)

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Food for thought. Thanks, Luke. On a more personal note: Brian's symphonism has, in its turn, been running through my veins for decades and I can see its fruits in my style and my structures as a writer. What you say about the Eighth weirdly applies to the climactic pages I am writing at the moment, where multiple perspectives are radically interwoven and clash, without any recourse to traditional narrative methods. (And in an extremely condensed style, paragraphs only one line each.)

[Luke]

I completely understand that - and the idea that you have reached the 'climactic pages' is very exciting! In my own much, much lesser way I've been writing something of my own recently, about which I make no claims whatsoever. I bring it up only to mention that I too have been very aware - too aware, perhaps - that I'm constructing it like a composer, that as I slowly put my paragraphs together I think like a musician, introducing themes, repeating them, developing them, combining them, transferring them from one character to another etc. etc.. Weirdly enough I have a feeling - unsubstantiated as yet by any concrete results - that writing the book will feed back into my composition, too. In many ways that's why I've written it - to promote new composing. As a composer I'm very aware that I suffer from the short-windedness of my ideas, from the epigrammatic quality of what I write. I'm not good at scale, at letting things grow, at introducing lots of material and letting it develop. Writing the book has taught me how to go off on a tangent (but to keep it relevant), how repetition and growth can occur and feed off each other - things I knew consciously, but which I wasn't very good at letting happen on manuscript paper. Well, you have to let them happen in literature, and I'm fairly hopeful that this experience will rub off on my composing too. We'll see...

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Interesting. I had the same problem as a younger writer: I had loads of ideas and an extremely compact style. How to tell a story, when you are so 'vertical', is the problem I now have solved. It has been a long road... Good luck with your endeavors!

My bed beckons...

[Sean]

You describe holistically structured music well, Luke! Wagner, Bach, Schumann, Bax, the minimalists and others variously focus on aesthetic content per se without getting lost in formal framing imposed from without; the attention finds its spiritual self instead of being drawn to intellectual structures. (The critical theorists of course got things the wrong way round.)

I also spend much of my time writing and though I make plenty of points I've long since seen architectonic, premises and conclusion, argumentation as a bit silly and immature. It doesn't access truth and instead becomes a formal game inviting interminable responses; there's a John Cage quote on this I can't quite remember...

Can't agree so much about Brian though! My eyes boggle at the length of this daft thread.

[Augustus]

I see the recent performance of English Suite 3 given at the English Music Festival in May by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Martin Yates will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 next week, on the 9th June at around 3.30 pm.  It will be interesting to hear a different interpretation from the Brabbins disc.  Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xqbq0

The remainder of the concert is the following afternoon.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I got a message from the HBS about the upcoming broadcast. Thanks for alerting the others here to it, Augustus!

[cilgwyn]

Thanks for alerting us,Augustus. I did notice something when I was flicking through the R3 schedules on my tv,but it somehow slipped my mind & it didn't say what it was! The English suites are lovely works and deserve more hearings. As you say it will be interesting to hear another interpretation. I just got one of the EM cds a few days ago. Violin Sonatas by Bantock,Scott and Sacheverell Coke. Beautifully produced,excellent sound quality and fascinating booklet notes with some lovely photographs. Wonderful music,too. Unfortunately , I was so pleased,I couldn't resist purchasing their Holbrooke/Bantock cd,as well!! I'm glad they're doing some Brian at the EMF. Hopefully,some more will follow in another Festival year!

[Augustus]

Did anyone listen to the broadcast of English Suite 3 last week?  It's still available for replay for another 24 days at the link I posted above.  I thought it compared well with the Brabbins recording and came off surprisingly well.  I bet it's not easy to rehearse.

What did others think?

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I listened. I found the tempi, brisker than in the Brabbins, quite natural. A pity the sound picture wasn't as clear and spacious as in the recording. This new performance won't supersede the older one, but it certainly has the virtue of showing Brian's orchestral  inventiveness.

[John Whitmore]

Did anyone listen to the broadcast of English Suite 3 last week?  It's still available for replay for another 24 days at the link I posted above.  I thought it compared well with the Brabbins recording and came off surprisingly well.  I bet it's not easy to rehearse.

What did others think?

I enjoyed it. Uncomplicated music. Nothing especially memorable but a pleasant little suite with immediate appeal. Won't have done the Brian cause any harm at all. Not taxing to play and sounds great fun to perform. The brass didn't have a particularly glorious day but hey ho. Much prefer it to the 5th Suite.