Philip Rupprecht's new book is a welcome addition to Cambridge University Press's ‘Music Since 1900’ series. Rupprecht takes the works of Goehr, Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle as a starting point for an examination of how British composers responded to the radical musical developments of the 1950s in mainland Europe, placing their music in the wider context of the reception of new music and ideas in the British media. In doing so, he shows that the history of the British avant-garde is more nuanced and complicated than traditional narratives have allowed. By examining the ways that composers of the fifties (specifically the so-called Manchester school) assimilated the structuralist and serialist concerns of an avowedly internationalist project into the British context, he maps out the creation of a British modernist art music (his term) that looks both backwards and inwards to local traditions and (in the works of later composers like David Bedford and Tim Souster) forwards and outwards to pop, rock and live electronics.
The early chapters look at the notion of modernism in relation to a British national tradition. Wisely, Rupprecht avoids trying to define exactly what makes British music ‘British’; instead he looks at how nationalism might be created or invented and transmitted, drawing on Homi Bhabha's understanding of the nation as both a fixed historical image and an evolving entity. To give the reader who might (like me) be unfamiliar with Bhabha's work an idea of how this may be worked out in modernist music, and jumping ahead of his narrative, Rupprecht takes Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side (1969) as an example of a composer applying a modernist approach to archaic British folk materials.
The second chapter looks at the historical landscape of the Cold War and the internationalist ideals that attracted younger composers to the Darmstadt Summer School. Rupprecht disabuses those (are there still any out there?) who think of Darmstadt as a monolithic citadel of European serialism with an account of British involvement; as late as 1954 (the year of the first performance of Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I–V), Britten's Lachrymae: reflections on a song of Dowland (1950) was performed there. The parallels between visual and musical ideas of abstraction – athematicism, pointillist textures, parametric independence – are considered, as is the ideological significance of abstraction.
Though the music of the Manchester school forms the backbone of the analysis (musical and cultural), other composers are part of Rupprecht's story. Lutyens appears as a forerunner and mentor to the younger generation of firebrands, having ploughed her serial furrow virtually alone in the face of ridicule. A chapter is devoted to some more-or-less contemporaries of the Manchester school: Thea Musgrave, Nicholas Maw, Gordon Crosse and Richard Rodney Bennett. These composers, too, grappled with the problems of how to integrate the ideas and techniques coming out of mainland Europe into their own developing language. Musgrave, slightly older than the others, soon abandoned serial thinking (though finding it a great discipline to have acquired) in favour of a more direct engagement with tradition. (Incidentally, Rupprecht touches on the virtual absence of women composers amongst the British – and European – avant-garde community. It might have been interesting to follow up on this. Why weren't women welcome in the club?) Maw, likewise, broke with the avant-garde both as an assertion of artistic independence and in order to explore his music's relationship with the late romantic past (a route that was soon to be taken further by Robin Holloway in the later 1960s).
Rupprecht's assessment of Crosse is particularly welcome; he often seems overshadowed by his peers and at one point looked as if he had disappeared off the new music radar, but in the sixties he was regularly talked about as a natural successor to Britten. His concern with structural and technical issues, typical for the time, was balanced by a desire for direct communication with audiences and musicians (a desire shared by Maxwell Davies in his role as teacher at Cirencester). He too became disillusioned with the possibilities – or lack of them – of the highly formalised European serial language, and the resulting impersonal, anonymous sound world. In the case of Richard Rodney Bennett, it's good to be reminded of his Boulezian credentials. He has perhaps suffered from a (British?) distrust of versatility and a sceptical attitude towards professionalism, as if exhibiting technical fluency is showing off. Bennett's early career took him from studies with Lutyens to the Royal Academy of Music, where he befriended Susan Bradshaw (Boulez's future translator) and Cornelius Cardew (with whom he gave the British premiere of the first book of Structures in 1956), and on to Darmstadt, before he became a private pupil of Boulez. Bennett was already mature enough to know that he was copying Boulez, and later withdrew all but one of his apprentice works, but Boulez's influence and Bennett's role as a conduit of the latest European serial developments shouldn't be underestimated. Like the other composers discussed, Bennett too pulled back from the implications of total serialisation in order to enrich his language, engage with the musical past and communicate with a broader audience.
A similar engagement with the past is apparent in the music of the Manchester group going into and through the 1960s. Maxwell Davies's Monteverdi- and Taverner-related works, Birtwistle's creation of an archaic archetypal British past (Monody for Corpus Christi, Punch and Judy, Down by the Greenwood Side) and Goehr's reassessment of classical forms in the Little Symphony are a world away from the European serial aesthetics that inspired the composers in the 1950s. This aesthetic shift coincides with a shift in their cultural status, away from revolutionary firebrands towards established (if not yet establishment) figures and teachers.
Although individually each was pursuing a separate musical path, making it harder to speak of a Manchester school as such, the group still acted as a collective through their teaching activities, at the summer courses at Wardour Castle (1964–65), and through Maxwell Davies's and Birtwistle's involvement with the Pierrot Players. This involvement naturally led to a concentration on music-theatre. Rupprecht ignores to a large extent Maxwell Davies's overtly theatrical works, such as Eight Songs for a Mad King (though he gives space to an analysis of Revelation and Fall, which Maxwell Davies regarded as music-theatre only in a limited sense), in favour of the instrumental theatre of Musgrave (Chamber Concerto No. 2) and Birtwistle (Verses for Ensembles, inevitably). Placing the British vogue for music-theatre in a wider European context that includes Kagel and Berio, Rupprecht draws on the sociology of everyday human encounters as articulated by Erving Goffman, relating ideas of self-presentation and territoriality to the musical characters and interactions of the Musgrave and the ritual locations of the Birtwistle.
A chapter entitled ‘Vernaculars: Bedford and Souster as pop musicians’ takes the narrative beyond the 1960s into a decade in which the boundaries between modernism and vernacular music became more porous. The composers under discussion were not constrained by ideas of stylistic purity, and they happily drew on pop music both as a source of enriching their own music and as a way of connecting with a wider audience. I must confess that I find this chapter not so much out of place as frustratingly incomplete; it opens up so many new issues that to place it towards the end of a book dominated by serial and post-serial analysis means that it can only be a foretaste of a possible future book.
While it is welcome to see David Bedford and Tim Souster get the critical attention I've always felt they deserve, Rupprecht's decision also to include Maxwell Davies (represented by St Thomas Wake, 1969) and Malcolm Arnold (Fourth Symphony, 1960) jars slightly with the general argument of the chapter, which is that the worlds of popular music and the avant-garde were inevitably going to impact upon one another (as Souster argued in the course of an article on the Velvet Underground). Whereas the younger composers assimilate the experience of pop music in a modernist environment, Arnold's engagement with popular music in the form of Latin rhythms and what Rupprecht terms a ‘music-hall-type tune’ is on the level of nostalgia for a world of comfort and simple pleasures, while Maxwell Davies's parodistic distortion of foxtrot likewise draws on popular music of an earlier time. Curious too is the absence of John Tavener, whose cantata The Whale famously fascinated the Beatles and appeared on their Apple label, and whose image in the 1960s placed him amongst the ‘beautiful people’ of the time. That aside, Rupprecht's account of Bedford's and Souster's engagement with pop music shows the creatively positive response of composers who came to compositional maturity when British pop music was having its greatest cultural impact. How these composers negotiated their situation deserves a whole book in itself.
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Continuing the Manchester theme, Métier has released a CD of ‘New Sounds from Manchester’. There's a direct link between the original Manchester school and one composer on the disc, Philip Grange having studied with Maxwell Davies. All the composers on this release have connections with Manchester University; three currently teach there, while John Casken was professor of Music until 2008. The music is varied, ranging from a brief piece modelled on an aquatic relative of jellyfish (Reeves's Fireworks Physonect Siphonophore, hereafter referred to as String Quartet No.1) to a substantial meditation on the killing fields of the Somme (Grange's Ghosts of Great Violence). The CD is, coincidentally, an example of what Rupprecht at one point in his book calls ‘conservative modernism’, a restraint in the face of European modernism; there is no desire to rethink the nature of the medium of the string quartet such as there might be in (for example) Xenakis or Lachenmann. Not that there's anything wrong with that; on the strength of the music here, the conventional string quartet still has something to offer composers.
Reeves's two pieces (I shall refer to Dactylozooid Complex as the second quartet …) are closely related, String Quartet No.1 (the shorter of the two) sounding like a warm-up for the longer second quartet. They are strongly gestural, dramatic pieces inhabiting a similar sound world. The three movements of the second quartet all share the same basic material and follow a similar trajectory of dynamic activity followed by quiet static material, but grow increasingly long. The composer draws parallels between the music and the structure and behaviour of jellyfish-like organisms, suggesting that the string quartet itself functions rather like a jellyfish (there is no record of what the players think of this).
Richard Whalley's Interlocking Melodies was written as a tribute to Ligeti, whose presence (as filtered through Nancarrow) is occasionally detectable. Other aspects, particularly the melodic and textural writing, have a touch of Ravel, though this is perhaps inevitable when you're dealing with whole-tone material (even if coloured by quarter-tone differences).
The title of John Casken's Choses en moi points to the use of self-quotation and allusions to earlier works of his. I'm sometimes puzzled by this sort of self-referentiality – does the composer expect the listeners to be as familiar with his output as they are? Is the piece a kind of ‘spot the quotation’ game? Why quote particular pieces and not others? Does it matter if the listener is oblivious to the references? And if it doesn't matter, then why draw attention to it in the programme notes? Having said that, Choses en moi is an attractive piece (again with a touch of Ravel in its textures – what is it with string quartets and Ravel?), elegantly structured and well-paced.
The most substantial piece is Philip Grange's Ghosts of Great Violence, clocking in at just short of half an hour. It is the one piece on the CD that comes close to being a traditional string quartet, in four movements, even having a kind of scherzo as the third (albeit a darkly sardonic one). The music has an elegiac quality, particularly in the first and last movements, and each instrument is foregrounded at some point (cello in the first movement, first violin and viola in the second, and second violin in the third). The title is deliberately ambiguous, and the music has a restrained quality in the face of the horror of the Somme. The music, like all the pieces on the disc, is played with dedication and commitment.
A couple of small niggles: ‘New Sounds from Manchester’ is perhaps a bit of a misnomer (to say nothing of an unimaginative title). There's nothing here that would frighten Bartók (or Bartók on steroids in the case of Camden Reeves). Also, how representative is it of current compositional practice in that city as a whole? Are there any composers who aren't at the university? And aren't there any female composers in Manchester?
