MI SIC •
BRITISH CHORAL WORKS.
THE reputation of the Wolverhampton Musical Society, one of our " crack " Midland choirs, and the growing attraction of home-made music drew but a small audience to the Queen's Hall two Saturdays ago, and the concert was a little dis- appointing. Not that the new works failed to merit a performance (or, rather, two performances, for almost the same programme was given both in the afternoon and in the evening), but we expect more than fairly efficient singing from a choir that is ambitious enough to attempt such a programme. The unaccompanied twelve-part " Choral Symphony," The Vanity of Vanities of Professor Granville Bantock, the Mass in G minor by Dr. Vaughan Williams, Mr. Graham Godfrey's twelve-part setting of The Forsaken Merman, and half a dozen smaller works were, indeed, arduous singing, and there was no orchestra to muffle the slightest raggedness or the occasionally faulty intonation. However, Mr. Joseph Lewis, the con- ductor, deserves every congratulation ; seldom do we have the opportunity of hearing so many British works on a big scale at one concert.
The works of Professor Bantock and Dr. Vaughan Williams both received their first concert performance in London. They well exemplify the diversity of modem British music. Both composers have " arrived" so far as England goes. Professor Bantock we know as one of the pioneers of the modem move- ment ; his dogged originality is best seen in some of the noisiest symphonic music ever written. Dr. Vaughan Williams, with greater daring, has in his finest work written the quietest symphony in musical history ; while the prevailing harmonies . of the Mass in G minor are the " common chords " disdained by most twentieth-century composers. Professor Bantock, staunchly opposing all foreign influences in our music, has yet written admirable music, glowing with Oriental colour or drenched with the elemental spirit of Hebridean folklore, but he has done little in the purely English Tradition. Dr. Vaughan Williams derives from English folk song, but his work knows no nationality and has no affinities with .other composers of to-day. It is . intensely individual. Individuality of manner is always a potential danger. It may at any moment cause a fixation in the composer's ideas, giving them sameness of manner if not of spirit. With The Lark Ascending this manner became defined. Yet the same idiom flowered more abundantly and with greater profusion of beauty in the Pastoral Symphony. While hearing both the Symphony and the new Mass we think of the composer more than once as a landscape gardener with one unchanging formula. Indeed, the metaphor is natural when talking of Dr. Vaughan Williams's later work. The Pastoral Symphony has the spaciousness, the tranquil and orderly loveliness of some huge wooded park. In the Mass there are the same illimitable vistas, the glimpses of the " hid battlements of eternity " in the turn of a melodic phrase or the fall of a chordal passage, the same level lawns of quiet harmony. The skies are those unchanging skies of the early Italian painters. Monotony, although still scarcely perceptible, is there.
. The gracious curves of melody in the Kyrie are not excelled in any composition by Dr. Vaughan Williams, yet there is in them something fatal and transient, that melodic recipe that we know too well—the tune that hovers about and always returns to the same note. Familiarity with the Mass will perhaps modify these opinions, and we must remember that the intimacy of the concert-hall and the disturbing presence of other wholly uncongenial works served to blunt and diffuse those qualities in Dr. Vaughan Williams's music that are so peculiarly suited to the aloofness of the cathedral. Again, the closeness of the Mass to, and its superficial affinity with, the Pastoral Symphony perhaps blind us to its real significance, but the Kyrie, the last five pages of the Gloria, parts of the Credo and the Agnus Dei, to which the composer's habitual " false relations " give a cold purity, seem to stand far above the rest in achievement.
Professor Bantock's Vanity of Vanities was published in 1913, and it is strange that it has not come to London before. British music has progressed since then, and perhaps that was why we found its psalm-like harmonies a little tiresome, although the work looks well on paper. In a symphonic interlude, when an Eastern melody is sung bocca chiusa with a drum-like accompaniment, Professor Bantock slides back into his Oriental predilections. At best, Professor Bantock attains to what might be called a florid simplicity, but his music has none of the exaltation and austerity of Ecclesiastes.
Mr. Graham Godfrey raises a mountain of technical com- plexity in his The Forsaken Merman, but it cannot hide the gulf between his music and the poem of Matthew Arnold. The setting is disconnected and over-long, and if it is occa- sionally felicitous it is often inapt. The composer seems to have chosen the poem mainly for the opportunity it gave him to produce noises in the choir that would fit such phrases as " the sound of a far-off bell," " the murmur of folk at their prayers," " the sea grows stormy, the little ones moan," " the humming town," " the humming street " and " the whizzing wheel." While perhaps one or two sets of voices are singing the words, the other ten parts, by means of bouche fermie effects, moanings, buzzings and the like supply what are really the equivalent to sounds " heard off " in a melodrama. The setting is undoubtedly clever, but Mr. Godfrey is too insistent with his thunder. He must learn to economize. With judicious revision the Ballad might have many performances. However, Mr. Godfrey has dared greatly and achieved more in his recently published setting of Flecker's Golden Journey to Samarkand. Unfortunately, this was omitted from the programme at the last minute.
A song with choral accompaniment by Mr. Maurice Besley showed in its rich climax that this young composer has things of his own to say in choral music, and Mr. Anthony Gibbs's Cradle Song is a slight but most successful effort in the same medium. Finally, an arrangement of Richard of Taunton Dene by Mr. Gerrard Williams deserves the attention of all choral societies. It is genuinely funny without for a moment
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