Vaughan Williams and the summer of love


Walt Whitman's line 'Behold the sea itself' opens Ralph Vaughan William's Sea Symphony* in a huge wave of sound that breaks over the audience. Hearing RVW's stroke of genius again at Friday's opening Prom performed by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra excited many resonances. Alex Ross' tweet that "the opening gesture of Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony carries me away every time" resonated with these words written by that great editor and publisher Robert Giroux** for the introduction to Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain :
In books that become classics ("A classic is a book that remains in print" - Mark Van Doren) the opening words often seem to be inevitable, as if they possibly could not have been otherwise - "Call me Ishmael," "Happy families are all alike," "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
The opening of the Sea Symphony may be bold and inevitable, but Vaughan Williams is still all too often pigeonholed as a timid English pastoralist. This despite some of the most brutal music ever written coming from his pen, including the Sixth Symphony which is another work that opens with a massive avalanche of sound. It is also still thought in some places that Vaughan Williams' music needs a British conductor. But on Friday the BBC Symphony Orchestra's new Finnish chief conductor Sakari Oramo once again proved that assumption woefully wrong. That great British conductor Sir Adrian Boult will always be my first choice for Vaughan Williams. But my love affair with his nine symphonic masterpieces was first triggered by that American son of German refugees André Previn's more virile interpretations recorded between 1967 and 1972 with the London Symphony Orchestra - how many other celebrated interpreters of Vaughan Williams are on record as having dabbled in hallucinogens? As we agonise over how to attract young audiences to classical music it is worth remembering that in the late 1960s young audiences - including a young me - were listening to Vaughan Williams and Michael Pretorius as well as Led Zeppelin thanks to the advocacy of animateurs such André Previn and David Munrow. We may have Twitter, but where are today's equivalents of those prodigiously talented generation-bridging animateurs?

1967 was the 'summer of love' and that is reflected in Andre's sartorial tastes as captured on the artwork for my original vinyl LP set of his RCA RVW cycle seen above. And resonance excites resonance. Walt Whitman was a quasi-transcedentalist and Saturday's opening Prom also included the first performance of Julian Anderson's Harmony*** which sets a text by the nineteenth century mystic Richard Jefferies - will mysticism be the next big thing at the Proms? Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, peace activist and friend of Joan Baez, and his advocacy of inter-religious dialogue in the 1960s led him to the mystical tradition of Sufism. That tradition provides the following personal favourite among inevitable openings which comes from Robert Irwin's autobiographical tale of Sufis, mystics and the sixties Memoirs of a Dervish:
It was in my first year at Oxford that I decided I wanted to become a Sufi saint. I wish I could remember more.
I remember my own recent and far more modest travels with a Sufi saint here.


* The opening line of the Sea Symphony is usually mistakenly quoted as 'Behold the sea' as the word 'itself' is inevitably drowned - in more ways than one - by the first orchestral crescendo.

** Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Alex's book The Rest is Noise is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the publishing house that Robert Giroux joined in 1964 and which is now owned by Macmillan, a subsidiary of the German multi-national Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

*** An article titled In Harmony by Julian Anderson in The Musical Times introduced the ideas and music of Tristan Murail.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. No freebies were used in the preparation of this post. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Comments

Pliable said…
Classical music trivia. What is the link between André Previn and Sakari Oramo, other than that they both do Vaughan Williams rather well?

Previn was one of the first artists to sign to Jasper Parrot's new management agency when it was formed in 1969, and Harrison Parrott now manages Sakari Oramo.

Even in the early days Jasper Parrott specialised in 'package deals', which resulted in Previn recording with other artists managed by him including Vladimir Ashkenazy and Christina Ortiz.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - http://www.overgrownpath.com/2013/07/variations-on-theme-of-harrison-parrott.html
7:27 am
Anonymous said…
A small detail - Robert Giroux did not co-found what began as simply Farrar, Strauss; he joined the firm after it had been in existence for some time.
12:13 pm
Pliable said…
Thanks James, my error and I have corrected the wording.
12:20 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

Image
With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so
Read more

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
Read more

In the shadow of Chopin

Image
The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau
Read more

I am not from east or west

Image
The ranking of the Muslim Rumi as America's best-selling poet is, like the embrace of vinyl by a hard-core digital culture, one of the paradoxes of recent times. Rumi's inclusive message of joy and love explains his universal but still surprising appeal , and in populist interpretations by Coleman Barks and others this message resounds in verses such as "I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim, I am not from east or west" and "I am a drunkard from another kind of tavern. I dance to a silent tune. I am the symphony of stars". Rumi's life-affirming poetry has been set to music by notable figures including Philip Glass , John Tavener , Jonathan Harvey , R. Murray Schafer and Karol Szymanowski , while takes on Rumi by rock musicians have included the 1996 album Three Fish by the eponymous band led by Pearl Jam 's Jeff Ament. All of these settings of Sufi poetry use translations of varying accuracy of Rumi's original vers
Read more