Musical Memories: Music Associated with a Place
My choice is the main theme for Out of Africa, composed by John Barry: I chose this before realising that Barry authorised Don Black to add some lyrics to his music which Black called ‘Places'. He had previously worked with Barry on providing the lyrics to ‘Born Free' (another film made in Kenya, also based on an autobiography of a woman's experiences there; in ‘Out of Africa', it was based on Karen Blixen, in ‘Born Free', it was Joy Adamson). The lyrics to ‘Places' are a bit iffy ("Places. I still remember places, Those precious times in places, When everything was new", etc): Places (Out Of Africa Theme) - John Barry - The Man With The Midas Touch , but I do think Barry's music manages to evoke the majesty and awe of the African landscape. He won one of his 5 Oscars for Best Original Score for this soundtrack. The excerpt from the film shows the two leading characters taking a plane ride over the neighbouring Serengeti Plain in Tanzania. If you don't like the music, hopefully you'll enjoy the video!
I tried hard to think of a song that reminded me of a place I knew. There were not many songs written about where I grew up. The obvious example is Billy Bragg's A13 Trunk Road to the Sea. However, as Bragg pointed out in an interview Barking and Dagenham are names that are not so romantic sounding as San Bernadino and St. Louis.
I did consider The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the spring of 1963 I met Judith, the woman who was to become my wife. We both lived on the Harold Hill council estate. It was not a very attractive place and I am sure no one has ever written a song about it. We would always go out every Saturday night, usually the Basildon Locarno or the Ilford Palais. Unfortunately, Judith worked at Sainsburys and therefore I used to spend the day without her. I lived with my mother and brother in a flat and we did not have a garden. However, you only had a ten minute walk to be in the open countryside. Most Saturday mornings I would take a book and would find a place in a field on the way to Noak Hill. It was always deserted, and the only sound was birds singing. During this period I had heard for the first time The Lark Ascending on the radio. Whenever I hear the music now, I remember being in love in the countryside looking forward to taking Judith out that night. It also brings back memories of being 18 and being excited by the future.
I have actually chosen a song about a place I have never visited although I did come very close to it. It is Kate & Anna McGarrigle song Mendocino (1976) a small place on the California coast. About 20 years ago I spent a few days in San Francisco for a series of business meetings. I had one free day and my host, David Talbot, suggested I took a trip along the coast. San Francisco runs a guided mini-bus service for tourists. I spent one of the best days of my life in this mini-bus with seven other people from all over the world. We did not get to Mendocino but we did see several similar places on this beautiful coast. The song captures the feeling of returning to the home that you love.
This month's ‘Musical Memories‘ topic - " Music describing a place, or any music associated with a place " - seemed to hold great promise and, in the end, I was spoilt for choice. In his notice about this month's session, Steve stated that, ideally, our contribution would have "some personal connection as a Musical Memory ". I have noticed there is a scarcity of songs which refer to those places which have figured in my life – Chingford, Debden, Dagenham, Barking, Romford, Ilford, Walsall, Birmingham, Basildon, Westcliff, Southend-on-Sea, Brighton – most of which were situated in what was then generally referred to as the county of Essex. As my brother John has already noted, Billy Bragg A13 Trunk Road to the Sea made a brave attempt to include a roster of Essex place-names in his song in his ‘English version' of Bobby Troup's song Route 66 (e.g., " By-pass Barking and straight through Dagenham, Down to Grays Thurrock, And rather near Basildon."). Ian Drury, lead singer of Ian Dury & the Blockheads, when performing his song Clever Trevor live in concert, would often ad-lib by reciting the names of the Essex towns of Ilford, Romford, Barking and Dagenham.
I have found it difficult to find favourite songs or pieces of music that relate to the places where I once lived or now live (Brighton). An old college friend of mine suggested the song Brighton by the American singer-songwriter Dawn Landes, but although the song is actually about the Sussex seaside resort which is now my home city, I couldn't, in all honesty, select it as a personal favourite. [I wonder if Worthing-based MM members have had the same problem. After some cursory research, I have only found only two modern popular songs that reference the town of Worthing – Al Stewart's Manuscript: "Ah the day we decided to drive down to Worthing, it rained and rained… "; Suede The Next Life: " We can drive away from here, Far away, So far away, Down to Worthing, And work there ." ]. I could have spread my net wider and chosen a place from further afield, but I am not a great traveller and not that interested in holidays, either taken in the British Isles or abroad. I have no real ‘personal connection' with any of the places that featured in the shortlist of the music that I selected for this topic.
The song I have chosen for my contribution to this month's theme is Randy Newman's song Baltimore. This song is about the socially deprived city of Baltimore in the North American state of Maryland. I have never been to Baltimore and, in fact, have never even travelled to the United States. Newman's song Baltimore appeared on his 1977 album ‘Little Criminals' . During the 1970s, I was a fan of the song-writing talents of Randy Newman and during that decade I purchased five albums by this singer-songwriter. I shouldn't apologise for having no personal connection with the city of Baltimore because Randy Newman, who composed the song, has admitted that he had no real knowledge of this American city when he wrote the lyrics. Newman had no first-hand experience of Baltimore and his contact with the city was fleeting. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Newman explained " I had been through it in a train, and I saw this story about it in National Geographic ." I believe that in his song Baltimore, Newman was describing any run-down city. In my mind, 'Baltimore' could stand in for a host of dying British seaside towns – Clacton, Southend-on-Sea, Hastings, Littlehampton – which I have visited over the years. (" Hard times in the city, in a hard town by the sea .").
Although I admire Newman's song-writing, his vocal delivery is not always to my taste. I rarely listen to his albums nowadays and I often find I prefer cover versions of his songs. ( I remember being moved by a live rendition of Newman's song I Think It's Going to Rain Today given by American folk singer Carolyn Hester at a folk club in the late 1960s).
The song I have chosen for my contribution to this month's theme is Nina Simone's 1978 cover version of Randy Newman's song Newman's song Baltimore which appeared on her 1978 album of the same name. (CTI Records, January 1978]. Personnel : Nina Simone (vocal), Eric Gale (guitar), Gary King (bass), Al Schackman (piano), Jim Madison (drums), Nicky Marrero (percussion). String section arrangement: David Matthews. Producer: Creed Taylor. This particular video features photographs of the US city of Baltimore taken in the late 1960s.
My choice of music about a place is Louisiana 1927, written by Randy Newman and appearing on his 1974 album "Good Old Boys" which was envisaged as a concept album about the American South. Newman was born in Los Angeles, but his mother was from New Orleans and he spent much of his young life on holiday there. The song is about the devastating floods in 1927 which was the worst natural disaster in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
"Good Old Boys" is my favourite album by Randy Newman and I have all of his early albums, but I have not chosen his version of the song. Instead I have chosen the Aaron Neville version from his second solo album "Warm Your Heart" from 1991, produced by Linda Ronstadt and arranged by Van Dyke Parks.
Aaron Neville is a soul, r'n'b and gospel singer from New Orleans who first performed with his three brothers as the Neville Brothers in 1977. He went solo in the late 1980s although the Neville Brothers continued to perform and record irregularly and he has had four platinum albums and has been successful in country music as well. I particularly like his voice and I think his version of the song is superior to the original which I think is not always the case with covers of Randy Newman songs.
Lettice Maltravers
I have chosen a 1912 song setting by George Butterworth of A E Houseman's poem 'Is my Team Ploughing' from his collection of poems 'A Shropshire Lad', published in 1896. The singer is the baritone Dan Kempson, whose interpretation and expression of the two poetic voices in this song is, I think, the best I have heard. I find the poem deeply moving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQV-IpVgZ2o
Read more about Dan Kempson if you wish:
https://www.dankempson.com/about
I first heard the music of George Butterworth about twenty years ago at a Brighton and Hove Philharmonic Society concert at The Dome in Brighton. The piece I heard then was the Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad, and I was transported by musical colour and the emotional impact. It seemed to me to be the very essence of an idyllic English rural landscape, and yet full of regret and the recognition that the end of an era was fast approaching.
Listen to the Rhadsody played by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields if you wish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTiUSV7Z4Lc
The date of this song, 1912, is even more poignant because through the clarity of hindsight we can see that the rural idyll is about to be shattered by the First World War: the death and homesickness of the ploughman from the end of the nineteenth century brings us echoes of the plough horses and ploughmen who were ripped away from their Shropshire homes and perished on foreign soil. And among the losses was counted Butterworth himself, an officer decorated for bravery who was killed at the battle of the Somme aged only 31. A tragic loss of a sensitive soul who could paint a whole landscape with his music.
Read more about George Butterworth if you wish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Butterworth
Gladys Maria Knight, born May 1944 in Atlanta, Georgia, singer, actor, author, film and TV personality. Gladys made her professional debut in 1953, along with members of her family and in 1961 went on to become Gladys Knight and the Pips. The pips were made up with her brother "Bubba" and cousins William Guest and Edward Patten but they got their name from another cousin James "Pip" Woods.
She has had many recording companies such as Brunswick Records, Vee Jay Records, Motown from 1966 until 1973 when she joined Buddah Records. It was whilst with Buddah Records that she started her solo career without the Pips.
She has been married four times and has 3 children and took a break from her career to raise them. She did a Farewell Tour in 2009 in the UK but has continued to tour practically every year and is due to tour again in 2021 at the age of 77.
Midnight Train To Georgia was written by Jim Weatherly and tweaked by Gladys became a worldwide and now classic song. She relocated to New York but became disillusioned and moved back to her home city of Atlanta, which reflects very well in the song. I chose the song as I have an affinity with Atlants having two brothers living there, and Georgia in general which is a lovely State.
I have decided on Robbie Robertson and The Red Road Ensemble The Ghost Dance. Robbie is best known for his years with the band ( and supporting Dylan). This album is "music for the Native Americans". (My favourite track on the album is Golden Feather but it is just too smooth!). Issued in 1994, Wikipedia describes this album as a return to his roots. Its an expression I dislike but it added to awareness of the shocking treatment of the native Americans.
The Crazy Horse memorial is an unfinished mountain sculpture in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It will depict Crazy Horse on a horse pointing to his tribal land. Work was started in 1948 and continues. The original sculptor died and his widow continued the work until her death. One of their children continues to oversee the work. When, if, completed it will be the second highest statue in the world after the Statue of Liberty. It is about 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. There the Presidents heads are about 60 feet, Crazy Horse is depicted with an 87ft head.
In a former life I had a bit of a reputation for running quiz nights for charity. I would always have a music round in the quiz and one of the music themes that was very popular was "Where in the World ?" Having listened to a short snatch of a song, participants would then have to guess the title, from which they could work out the location. I would usually include popular choices like "Barcelona", "Hotel California", "Life on Mars" etc, but my favourite was always Kirsty MacColl's "There's A Guy Works down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis ". It's a brilliant song and Kirsty Macoll is a great performer: once I started playing it everyone in the hall forgot about the quiz and they all got up and started singing along. It would have been my first choice for "Music Describing A Place" but I fear it really would have earned me a red card this time.
Instead I have chosen a track that I never included in any of my quizzes: Bruce Springsteen's My Hometown. I must apologise that it doesn't meet the condition that " Ideally your contribution will have some personal connection as a Musical Memory " but, unfortunately, this qualification was added sometime after I had put most of my submission together.
"My Hometown" describes Springsteen's early life in Freehold, New Jersey, the place where he was born and raised, but it could easily be a song about many similar towns.
Freehold is a small town about 35 miles south of Manhattan. Prosperous in the early 20 th century, it had begun to decline by the mid-century; something that happened in many parts of the US, as downtown areas shrank and suburban areas began to grow. Today Freehold has become a suburb of New York City.
In the 1960s – Springsteen's teenage years – Freehold suffered from economic decline and racial tension. In the song he sings " They're closing down the textile mill " - referring to the closure of the A & M Karagheusian rug factory in 1961. The factory had been the largest employer in Freehold and its closure had a devastating effect on the local economy.
Freehold was also an important centre of African American civil rights activity in New Jersey during the 1950s. But, by the 1960s, there was a lot of racial tension in the town, eventually leading to rioting.
At the beginning of the song the singer remembers the pride in the family's hometown instilled in him by his father. As an eight year-old child, he was driven around the town in his father's Buick "…son, take a good look around. This is your hometown." It seems like the song is going to develop into a romanticised description of the singer's childhood but instead the lyrics go on to catalogue the problems that Springsteen witnessed growing up in the area in the ‘60s: the closing of the local factory, leading to unemployment, closed-up shops on main street; racial tension at his high school, violence in the community etc.
(Whilst the incidents described by the lyrics are not all literal descriptions of his early life, when Bruce sings about " two cars at a light on a Saturday night " in the second verse, he is referring to a real incident he witnessed in 1965, when racial tensions were running high.)
Eventually, as the singer grows up and starts a family of his own, he and his wife reluctantly decide to leave. But, before he goes he takes his son for a last drive around the town, trying to instil in him the same sense of pride in the community that he got from his own father. Just as his father had done, he sits his son up behind the wheel and tells him, "… son, take a good look around. This is your hometown"
The reason I like this song is because, in a couple of verses, the lyrics encapsulate life in a small town, during a period in history when many small towns in America were experiencing the same problems. Although it paints a pretty bleak picture of life in this working class community, you get the feeling that Springsteen is nostalgic about the place he grew up and still has a fondness for it.
As his surname suggests, Bruce's family were originally of Dutch descent but he had a mixed Italian (mother)- Irish (father) heritage- a common enough occurrence in Freehold at the time. For the first few years of his life he lived in his paternal grandparents' house on Randolph Street. Unlike the father- son connection in the song, he and his father had a difficult relationship and, as he later recalled: "When I was growing up, there were two things that were unpopular in my house, one was me, and the other was my guitar." Raised in a working class household, he describes growing up " pretty near poor" . As the song suggests, " In those days if you were broke the only…. entertainment you had was a drive" which involved three generations of the family cruising down Main Street, out to the edge of town and back.
Life could be hard and dangerous at times. Bruce describes Freehold in the mid-sixties as "..redneck ugly…..there was no shortage of guys who were willing to make their rejection of your fashion choices a physical affair." It wasn't uncommon to see fights outside the town's bars and one night someone shot a bullet through the front door of the Springsteen family home. Racism was commonplace and racial tensions exploded into violence at Bruce's high school. Freehold experienced a lot of racial strife in the ‘60s.
Hanging over this period was the spectre of the Vietnam War. For young people in the UK this could mean attending marches and protests, But, when he was 19 (1968), Bruce was actually called up to fight. He only beat the draft by presenting himself as mentally and physically unfit to the Newark draft board, which, fortunately, was reputed to be one of the easiest going draft boards in the country.
Although my early life was obviously very different to that of Bruce Springsteen, we were born in the same year and when I re-read his autobiography " Born to Run " I did recognise some of the things he experienced growing up in Freehold. He describes the first time he heard artists like Elvis and the Beatles and the huge impact they had on him. After this came the Stones & Motown, followed by Clapton, Hendrix and Cream etc – the same music that influenced me and a pattern of musical memories very similar to my own.
As Bruce puts it "Freehold stood dead centre between two socially incompatible teen cliques, the ‘rah-rahs' and the ‘greasers'." Not directly comparable with the ‘mods' and ‘rockers' but not so very different either. He describes the early days of the Castiles – his first proper band - playing at every available venue in the Freehold area. This even included the local psychiatric hospital, where the Castiles' rendition of the Animals' " We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" was received with great enthusiasm by the inmates. I well remember that, during my teenage years – well before the days of the disco - there was always a band playing at the local village hall/youth club every weekend.
These "shared" experiences may appear superficial in comparison to many of the events that marked Bruce's early years in Freehold. But they certainly resonated with me and made the song even more meaningful.
My Hometown was the last track on the Born in the USA album – Bruce's most commercially successful album and one of the highest selling albums of all time. It was recorded in 1983 and released as a single in 1985 -the last of seven US Top 10 singles from the album. The fact that the single was released in late November and featured " Santa Claus is Coming to Town" on the B side probably did no harm to the sales figures.
According to the reviews, the song helped earn Springsteen the reputation as " a voice for the common man ", although I'm sure there are critics who fail to recognise this description. It would be fair to say that Bruce has had a bit of a love-hate relationship with his hometown. But he is a musician who believes that his performance work is heavily influenced by the events that have shaped his life story and, although he left Freehold in 1969, aged 19, it's clear that his formative years in this small borough helped define his life and work.
In 1996, Bruce returned to Freehold to play in the gymnasium of his old Catholic elementary school, St. Rose of Lima. This was a small benefit concert in aid of the parish's Hispanic community centre. Bruce's original home in Randolph Street was next to St Rose of Lima Church and was torn down many years before his return, to accommodate a parking lot for the church
In his 2016 autobiography Springsteen talks about " the grinding hypnotic power of this ruined place ". " This town, my town, would never leave me, and I could never completely leave it, but I would never live in Freehold again ."
This is the Official Video of My Hometown which features Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing the song on the "Born in the USA" tour of 1984-5.
And, if for no other reason than you might fancy a bop round the kitchen, I've also attached Kirsty MacColl singing There's A Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis.
A strong association of sound with place for me is the noise of foghorns on the Thames at Dartford where I lived as a child. On a misty night the sound carried clearly into my bedroom, as I imagined ghostly ships drifting in the fog.
Quite separately, the idea of a foghorn takes me to the Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland. I've visited twice, to see the spectacular red metal foghorn and lighthouse, near the most westerly point on the British mainland. The foghorn was not working and so this is a visual memory for me.
Most foghorns in the UK have been silenced by GPS navigation, and in 2013 there was a requiem musical performance celebrating foghorns, based around the Souter foghorn in South Tyneside. Here is an article on the event
And so this is my music with a geographical association. It is edited from the 50-minute performance at Souter Lighthouse Foghorn Requiem.
The stories of towns that once were thriving and vibrant lend themselves to songs by Dylan, Springsteen, Kate and Anna McGarrigle McGarrigle and others.
These places, not always ghost towns, come alive again in songs tinged with nostalgia, sadness and longing. The song I've picked, Old Jerome, was written by Kate Wolf after she played a concert there in 1983.
Jerome is a town in Arizona and had a population of 10,000 when it was the centre of the biggest copper mining industry in the USA.
Sadly, the copper deposits were worked out and the miners moved away in the late 1940's. The population dwindled to less than 400 and it now survives as a tourist spot where people come to see the mines and relics of the people who lived,worked and died there all those years ago.
Kate Wolf, whose songs have been covered by Kris Kristofferson, Nanci Griffiths and Lucinda Williams, died in 1986 at the age of 44 from leukemia.
Pamela and I were on a Riviera holiday to Croatia and there was a rep on the trip checking up on things and looking into some new hotels for the Dubrovnik stay. We got talking to her and asking about the various trips we wanted to go on including the Classical Spain tour. She told us that the firm used two hotels in Granada, one in the main town and the other just opposite the Alhambra Palace. She suggested this one because on the day that one arrived in Granada having travelled from Cordoba one could go round the Palace at night when it is all lit up. She said it was well a visit and didn't cost much. Riviera arranged as part of the tour an escorted guided around the Palace and gardens on the next day, but it was worthwhile having been there beforehand.
We booked our tickets around 7 euros I recall in England before the trip and when we arrived in Granada went to collect them. Our slot was 10 p.m. and we turned up at the Palace. There were no guides and very few people and you could just roam around this magnificently illuminated building which had such a magical even spiritual impact. We heard a guitar playing and came to a little alcove where the musician was sitting. Directly I heard the guitar music I was reminded of this piece of music Parcet mihi domine from the Officium defunctorum written by Cristobal de Morales (c 1500-1553) played on the original 1993 Officium ECM CD by Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble. The guitar music in the Alhambra setting seemed to trigger in my mind the monastic recording of this piece and my thoughts always drift back to that visit whenever I hear it. There is a capturing of spirituality and beauty , with quiet reflective meditation highlighted by Garbarek and the Ensemble with saxophone and voices joined in unison.
We went on the tour the next day which was very inspiring, beautiful, but crowd, but I always think of the quiet solitude of the Alhambra at night when I see pictures of the Palace. It is well worth a visit at night if you happen to be in Granada, a place with a strange rather sinister vibe I thought.
Sit down, turn off the lights, set up a candle or two, have a glass of your favourite drink beside and let Mr. Garbarek and the Ensemble do the rest.
Anyone with an interest in what is loosely called ‘classical' music is spoilt for choice if ‘music describing place' can also be interpreted as ‘ any music associated with a place'. I have limited myself to depictions either within the British Isles or by British composers. I have not provided copious links, the curious can make their own explorations.
Taking Sussex first, Ralph Vaughan-Williams (1872-1958) was educated there and made a study of its folk music , particularly in Horsham. He wrote a Fantasia on Sussex Folk tunes for the cellist Pablo Casals , one of those concerted works ( for soloist and orchestra) of his which is yet not a concerto; like his Lark Ascending ( violin) and Flos Campi ( viola). He also ended his Fantasia on Christmas Carols with a Sussex carol.
Much earlier, Thomas Weelkes (1576 -1623) was born at Elsted. He was a respected composer of church music and madrigals, but also the drunk and disorderly organist and choirmaster at Chichester Cathedral. In 1965 the same cathedral commissioned the Chichester Psalms from Leonard Bernstein ( 1918-1990).
Hubert Parry (1848-1918) wrote Jerusalem in his house in Rustington ; setting words written by Blake in Felpham. So England's green and pleasant land may be the South Downs and Littlehampton the New Jerusalem.
Gustav Holst (1874-1934) played the trombone in a band on Brighton Pier.
John Ireland (1879-1962) lived at Rock Mill, Washington and is buried at Shipley. He was much inspired by the area around Chanctonbury Ring and wrote a Downlands Suite – originally for brass band- and a piano piece entitled Amberley Wild Brooks .
Frank Bridge (1879-1941) who taught Benjamin Britten, but also wrote music of his own including The Sea . He was born in Brighton and lived in Friston. Perhaps he met Holst on the pier.
Arnold Bax (1883 -1953), symphonist and womanizer, shipped up at the White Horse Inn in Storrington towards the end of his life-it has blue plaque. He wrote a number of pieces depicting the sea in various places but alas none of them was inspired by Worthing.
Debussy (1862-1918) corrected the proofs of La Mer while staying at the Grand Hotel Eastbourne with his pregnant mistress, Emma Bardac (formerly the mistress of Fauré). You can now stay in the Debussy Suite, though presumably not in the same bed. The piano piece Reflets dans l'eau pictures an ornamental pond in an Eastbourne park.
Moving west along the coast we come to depictions by William Walton (1902-1983) of Portsmouth Point and by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) of Plymouth Town , where Drake is no doubt still in his hammock . Inland, Holst provides a gloomy portrait of Hardy's Egdon Heath , and the ghostly drummer of Salisbury Plain makes an appearance in Vaughan Williams's 9th symphony . Holst also wrote a Somerset Rhapsody and a Cotswolds Symphony (he was born in Gloucester).
Rounding Cornwall we have Bax's Tintagel, a musical portrait of the castle, adulterous romance, and the surrounding sea. Holst offers a Severn Suite ; otherwise we may ignore Wales and pass rapidly by Ireland too, noting only two Irish Symphonies by Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) and Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) , and Bax's The Garden of Fand (Fand is the Irish God of the Sea, so his imagined garden is off the coast).
Looking inland again there distinguished musical settings of poems from A E Houseman's A Shropshire Lad by Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, George Butterworth (1885-1916) and Arthur Somervell (1863-1937).
In Scotland Mendelssohn (1809-1847) gave the Overture to the Outer Hebrides : Fingal's Cave and a Scottish Symphony -although never called it such-initially inspired by a visit to Holyrood. Hamish MacCunn ( 1868-1916) , a native, offered The Land of the Mountain and Flood' and Highland Memories ( mostly forgotten).
Peter Maxwell Davis (1934-2016) who settled on the Orkneys wrote a number of Strathclyde Concertos and An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, possibly the only ‘classical' piece apart from PDQ Bach's Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons to feature a Bagpipe solo.
We should mention classical bagpipe music as some of its compositions have place names. Pibroch , piobaireachd or ceòl mòr is an art music genre associated primarily with the Scottish Highlands that is characterised by extended compositions with a melodic theme and elaborate formal variations. Unless someone has in mind ‘ my favourite bagpipe music' as a topic we shall never have a chance to explore this oeuvre again so I offer up this short example :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU_nftyKdpw
The four redcoats are evidently bad shots.
As we move around the coast to Northumberland we encounter Debussy again. Between 1905 and 1909 he wrote three Images pour orchestre the first of which Gigues Triste , is his wet and misty image of England and uses the tune The Keel Row as a theme.
We next pause at Bradford, where Fritz Delius (1862-1934) was born of German parents. Delius wrote The Song of a Great City but it was Paris, not Bradford, that he had in mind. He also wrote Over the Hills and Far Away which may better have expressed his intentions regarding his home. But he did write four North Country Sketches and before that, Brigg Fair .
His father was a merchant. Delius was sent to Stroud, then Germany, Sweden and France to develop his business sense but in the last three he kept absenting himself to pursue his artistic interests (there was presumably no such temptation in Stroud). Finally he was sent to Florida to manage an Orange Grove, which at least got him away from the wool trade. But things went on as before; he showed no more interest in oranges than wool but was enraptured by local black singing and, probably, black women- he is said to have fathered a child while he was there. Musically this produced a Florida Suite and later Appalachia: Variations on an old Slave Song with Final Chorus.
But this is an excursion: Brigg Fair is an annual fair in Lincolnshire, bringing us towards East Anglia. Here we can add 2 Norfolk Rhapsodies and In the Fen Country from Vaughan Williams (he and his wife lived in Norfolk for a time). E J Moeran ( 1894-1950) collected Norfolk folksongs as material for his works. The slow movement of his symphony was inspired by the Norfolk sand dunes and may have links with his arrangement of local song.
Between 1925 and 1928 Moeran had been co-tenant with Philip Heseltine, ‘Peter Warlock' (1894-1930) of a cottage in the Kent village of Eynesham. The cottage was a magnet for bohemians and weekends were devoted to all night drinking and sexual orgies. In 1927 ‘Warlock' threw off the delightful Christmas piece Bethlehem Down to keep the booze temporarily flowing. So we may add Kent and Bethlehem to our musical tour. Heseltine committed suicide in 1930 but not before adding another ornament to British culture, the gestating embryo of the art critic Brian Sewell.
Moeran took the longer route to oblivion, his association with Heseltine had left him a hopeless alcoholic, destroying both his health and his creative capacity. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1950.
In Suffolk Benjamin Britten, born in Lowestoft, depicted aspects of the North Sea in the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes . The opera is set in the Borough, a fictional version of Aldeburgh, where Britten settled.
Passing round the musical wasteland of Essex we come to London where we are spoilt for choice. Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks were both commissioned for public events in London. Haydn's last 12 ‘London' Symphonies were aimed to please the new middle-class audience in that city.
Much later on, 1901, we have Edward Elgar's Cockaigne Overture' In London Town ‘cheerful and Londony…but not vulgar' as the composer said.
Percy Grainger (1914- 1961) wrote Handel in the Strand , a sort of quasi-baroque clog dance, 1912.
(Grainger was also born in a Brighton, but it was Brighton, Melbourne. I learnt from a review of his biography that he would' run distances often to concert engagements, he would sleep naked on the top of a piano with a window wide open to winter blasts, and he would burn off excess energy, as a passenger on long voyages by stoking the ships' boilers…
He was anti-Semitic and obsessed with what he regarded as the purity of the Nordic races and the corruptness of all Latin influences. His sexual predilections were dark; he was interested in homosexuality, incest, sado-masochism -- self-inflicted whip flagellism (he often used to launder his shirts himself to remove the blood-stains) and paedophilia.'
I cannot help feeling that his music , which includes arrangements Shepherds' Hey and English Country Gardens , is somewhat at odds with his sado-masochistic tendencies.
1914 brought Vaughan Williams' London Symphony, depicting Hampstead Heath, Bloomsbury Square, the Embankment. There are the sounds of Hansom Cabs, sellers of violets etc. Finally the Thames makes its way at night through the Docklands to the open sea leaving the frenetic energy of the capital behind.
Louis Vierne (1830-1937) published the Carillon de Westminster in 1927. It is an organ fantasia on an inaccurate version of the Westminster chimes, just as Monet's depiction of the clock tower is ill proportioned .
In 1930 Gustav Holst's Hammersmith, a prelude and scherzo, was commissioned by the BBC for military band. Holst produced an orchestral version in 1931 but the original version for wind band was premiered in Washington DC in 1932 by the United States Marine Band and promptly forgotten. It re-emerged 20 years later. Holst knew the area, and the Saturday night market, well. The music first depicts the quietly flowing Thames before the bankside bursts in to life.
Eric Coates (1886-1957) wrote a London Suite in 1933 and, on to a good thing, followed up with London Again Suite (1936). In the same year John Ireland produced A London Overture (he had already produced piano depictions of Chelsea and Soho).
In 1958 Phyllis Tate (1911-1987) , a Buckinghamshire musician wrote London Fields – Suite (1958) for a light music festival. It Springtime in Kew, The Maze at Hampton Court, St James's Park – a lakeside reverie, and Hampstead Heath.
There are no doubt others but the time has come to make a choice.
‘In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.' I hesitated between Bax's Tintagel and Britten's East Anglian Coast ; two areas with which we have family connections. Bax was a romantic ship-wrecked in the 20 th century, and the music , which quotes from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, probably reflects his own love life too. Britten was a conservative modernist with much tighter economy of expression, Peter Grimes is an outsider and Britten was a homosexual , but if the music is personal it is less obviously so.
There were two outliers. Vaughan Williams composed a Sinfonia Antarctica depicting Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole: it seemed to capture perfectly the true spirit of Brexit, but I thought it was too self-consciously eccentric a choice. If I had not limited myself to Britain I might have chosen Carl Nielsen's cantata Springtime in Funen; a very Danish work celebrating the arrival of Spring on Nielsen's home island.
A latecomer was from Bax once again. November Woods was completed in 1917. I have just lost a relative who lived in Northern Woods, just outside High Wycombe, for 50 years or more. I think of the Chilterns most days, but I cannot go to the funeral:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
(That cheery stuff is actually from A Shropshire Lad; see above).
So when I read that November Woods depicted a beech wood in the Chilterns in late autumn it seemed a perfect tribute. But Bax insisted that the work was not to be taken as a mere depiction of a windswept wood but rather as a reflection of his own troubled experiences of the period; with the second theme suggesting a feeling of happier days in the past. He had just left his wife for his mistress. The music is a little too stormy and as my relative had a long and happy marriage November Woods had to be put aside.
Finally I chose a piece which hasn't featured so far. Years ago we visited friends in Worcestershire and had an exhilarating walk on the Malvern Hills. Ken Russell's great 1960s biographical film opened unforgettably with the young Elgar riding across the Malverns to this music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaW0mzEeGXw
Barbirolli's recording is still the one to have but for those who prefer something more visually exciting than a turntable I can offer this, with potted Ken Russell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwt4rw3-Tdw
To me there is a perfect balance between energy and nostalgia, the intimate and the large scale, and the technical demands are apparently formidable. The main theme is said to reflect the rise and fall of the hills, which are therefore embodied in the work, and there is a distant view of Wales through the quotation of a Welsh tune. And we can all look forward to striking out on our own hills as spring sets in.
