19 FEBRUARY 1983, Page 26

Music

Time-honoured

A.S. Henry

omposers need their anniversary cele7 IL/ brations rather in the way that cricketers need the one benefit season which they are normally allowed in their profes- sional careers. Just as cricketers will have this single chance to be highlighted, and the public asked to put their money where their enthusiasms are, so a composer's reputa- tion, once in a generation at best, may be boosted. Anniversary celebrations have been known to do wonderful things. Some- one of Beethoven's stature hardly need- ed 1970, but he couldn't exactly avoid it and our understanding of his output in its entirety was certainly deepened. More im- pressively, Vivaldi's present-day popularity really dates from his 250th anniversary in 1928; Bach after 1950 and Purcell after 1959 similarly made themselves more com- fortable in our communal heart.

This year sees the anniversaries of two English composers, Orlando Gibbons (born 1583) and Arnold Bax (born 1883). There are difficulties inherent in an Englishman talking enthusiastically about English com- posers, which make me hesitate. If you are foreign you will think that the whole exer- cise is some arcane piece of mutual back- patting of no signficance to the advance- ment of European culture as a whole. If you are English the depressing likelihood is that because the foreigners think what they think, and they produced Beethoven, Mozart and Verdi, you will think as they do. To take Gibbons first, to foreign readers I would like to suggest that he is a composer who merits careful study and was, with J.S. Bach and Richard Strauss, one of the finest contrapuntists ever to write music; to English readers I would say that he had a quite exceptional talent by any standards which, for once amongst English writers, almost realised its full potential. Theonly blot was that he died young (In 1625); but others, equally mature, have been known to suffer from that disability,

without it affecting their reputations over- much.

Gibbons wrote in almost every style of his day — church music, consort song, viol consort music, keyboard music for the virginals and organ. He was not equipped to be a good madrigalist, preferring counterpoint and rather moralistic texts; and for these reasons he, like William Byrd, eschewed the lute-song. He was a renowned organist, well described by a contemporary as 'the best finger of that age'. Through his church music Gibbons was English in a quite special way: he was the first major figure to write exclusively for the Anglican church. He never set a word of Latin. His greatest predecessors, Byrd and Tallis, wrote for the Anglican rite but remained faithful to Catholicism. 1 know a number of Catholics today who refuse to take Gibbons seriously as a religious composer because he' certainly does not show the same intense spiritualism` of Byrd. They miss the point. Gibbons, believe it or not, was a committed Anglican, and his church has never been profoundly spiritual in the Catholic way. It is concerned with man-size problems, and the humanity of Gibbons's music is as deep- ly satisfying to those who will open their ears to it as anything by Byrd.

For consistency of achievement over a varied if quite small output, Gibbons ranks more highly than any of his immediate con- temporaries — even than Thomas Weelkes or Thomas Tomkins. John Dowland, in keeping to secular music, is not really com- parable, nor is William Byrd, who I think had a less fluent technique. The intelligence behind Gibbons's writing is evident in every (editorial) bar and it gives rise to his characteristically harmonious polyphony. if someone must be called the 'Father of English Church Music', which 1 suppose they must, Gibbons is a more suitable can- didate than Tallis. It's a pity that no one has matched up to him since: 400 years is a long time.

Very little joins Gibbons with Arnold Bax, except the coincidence of this year. Bax lived to be 70 and wrote a very great deal of music of very uneven quality. Nor did Gibbons write novels under an Irish Pseudonym (Bax called himself Dermot o'Byrne). Bax first came across Irish culture in the poetry of Yeats, and, as he said himself, 'the Celt within me stood revealed'. He spent most of his life travel- ling in Ireland and found much of his in- spiration there; though the Celt within him took him also to Cornwall, as the sym- phonic poem Tintagel shows. He was made Master of the Kings Music in 1939 with the usual consequence that he wrote nothing worthwhile thereafter, except his autobiography. Our best composers have always

somehow managed to avoid this

Post. If his novels are as entertaining as his autobiography they should be worth reviv- ing — it was Bax who observed, perhaps cocking a snoop at Vaughan Williams, that "e was prepared to try anything once 'ex- cept incest and folk-dancing'.

This year should provide the opportunity to hear Gibbons. In case this article seems intolerably chauvinistic, which it really is not meant to be, let me lighten your burden by sharing with you the unlikely fact that Philippe Henri Edmonds, the cricketer to be benefited this season at Lord's, is half Belgian.