Bruce Montgomery: An Oxford Requiem (1951)

Musical Authors: Edmund Crispin/Bruce Montgomery (2)
Although his film work got his music out to a huge audience, the numerous comedy scores in particular stand in stark contrast to Bruce Montgomery’s church music and concert works, with which he started out. These began to appear in the mid-1940s, at the same time his detective novels were appearing under the name Edward Crispin. Church music predominates, the culmination being the Oxford Requiem, commissioned by the Oxford Bach Choir and first performed at the Sheldonian Theatre in July 1951 (also the scene of a crime in his novel The Moving Toyshop – and more personally for me, where the Oxford Bach Choir still holds its concerts today). He may have been motivated to compose the piece following the death of his close friend and teacher, the organist and composer Godfrey Sampson (1902-1949) – thought also to have been the inspiration behind the character Geoffrey Vintner, the organist and friend of Gervase Fen in The Case the Guilded Fly

An Oxford Requiem “is Montgomery’s most considerable achievement to date,” wrote one critic, “and confirms the suspicion that he is a real composer with something of real significance to say.” Malcolm Arnold called the secular choral work Venus’ Praise of the following year “one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard”, and that work, a setting of seven sixteenth and seventeenth century English poems, may well have been the peak of his musical achievement. It was first performed in April 1951 at London’s Wigmore Hall. Montgomery and his friend the composer Geoffrey Bush had hired the hall jointly, and Bush’s Summer Serenade was also performed. (The two also collaborated on a short detective story, “Who Killed Baker”, published in the Evening Standard in 1950).

Even less known are the operas, which include a children’s ballad opera, John Barleycorn, and two intriguing collaborations with his friend Kingsley Amis providing the texts. The first, Amberley Hall, was described by Montgomery as “a mildly scandalous burlesque set in England in the 18th century.” The second, To Move the Passions, was a ballad opera commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Both remained unfinished, and Amis complained that Montgomery was too busy “writing filthy film scores and stinking stories for the popular press.” Unfortunately, only the Concertino for String Orchestra, a substantial three movement piece despite the modest title, and the only purely instrumental work Montgomery ever had published, is generally available as a recording.

Montgomery returned to literature at the end of his life, with the final Crispin novel, Glimpses of the Moon. By now, the composer character, Broderick Thouless, is writing “difficult” film music and light concert works, rather than the other way round (as it was with Napier in Frequent Hearses). Such comic perversity is characteristic of Crispin. But even in the midst of the comedy, it’s possible to read between the lines of, in the words of Philip Lane, “a composer of talent who was perhaps sidetracked, and, not helped by increasing alcoholism, was unable to fulfill his full potential.”

Bruce Montgomery: Carry On Suite (1958-9)

Musical Authors: Edmund Crispin/Bruce Montgomery (1)
Edmund Crispin, whose real name was Bruce Montgomery, was one of the later representatives of what might be considered the “golden age” school of English detective novelists. He wrote a series of crime novels featuring his amateur sleuth, Professor Gervase Fen, which began appearing in the mid-1940s, starting with The Case of The Guilded Fly. Nine volumes appeared between 1944 and 1953. But then there followed a long gap until 1977 when the final Crispin novel, Glimpses of the Moon, was published. Why the silence?

The clues are to be found within the novels themselves. It’s evident from all of them that the author has an interest in music. But two in particular, Frequent Hearses and Swan Song, have a musical backdrop. Swan Song (1947) explores the world of opera during rehearsals for a production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg, while Frequent Hearses is set in a film studio, and includes among the characters Napier, a composer of film music. By 1950, when Frequent Hearses was published, Montgomery was busy elsewhere, also establishing himself as a composer of film music. The best known of these are his scores for the four Doctor in the House series of comedy films, and the first six Carry On films.

“In his concert works,” writes Crispin, “Napier was a somewhat acrid modernist, but like most such composers he unbuttoned, becoming romantic and sentimental when he was writing for films.” In letters to his friend, the composer Geoffrey Bush, Montgomery often complains that writing film scores in order to make money is too hard, taking up all of his time and distracting him from more serious composition. “I’m mortally sick of comedies,” he wrote at one point. He eventually composed the scores for nearly forty films, including documentaries and thrillers. The Carry-On Suite – arranged by David Whittle from the scores of Carry On Sergeant (1958), Carry on Teacher (1959) and Carry On Nurse (1959), provides a representative example, dominated by the main theme, a comedy March. Unfortunately, alcoholism made Montgomery unreliable and he was replaced as the resident composer for Carry On films by Eric Rogers, though the main theme continued to be used.

Belle Gonzalez: When I Am Dead (1965)

The trail that led to this somewhat obscure recording is a complicated one. I was re-reading Colin Wilson’s 1964 book on music Brandy of the Damned when this list of English songwriters stopped me in my tracks. “…such fine minor composers as Ivor Gurney, Gerald Finzi, Herbert Howells and T W Southam.”  Who? The only other clue is in the footnote, which cites a Jupiter recording by the classical tenor Wilfred Brown as containing “Southam’s lovely setting of a Durrell poem, Nemea.” Searching the web reveals that the composer in question was a friend of Laurence Durrell called Wallace Southam, and references to a handful of settings of poems by Durrell, Auden, Charles Causley, Michael Baldwin, Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hood.  No other biographical information seems to be available.  However, there are a few recordings on YouTube, most of them jazz settings sung by Belle Gonzalez. Born in the 1930s in Italy she was the daughter of an opera singer from the Philippines. She performed in cabaret, accompanying herself on piano and guitar, and as singer-songwriter released the album Belle in 1972. Of the Southam songs the Rossetti setting “When I am dead, my dearest”” from a 1965 album called Poets Set in Jazz (also on the Jupiter label) is my favourite.  But I’m still looking for more details of Wallace Southam, and will update here if I found out more.

Update 1: review of Poets Set in Jazz from The Musical Times, August 1965
Update 2: Laurence Durrell’s notes towards a musical Ulysses Come Back
Update 3: Wallace Southam – Songs of a Sunday Composer

Update 4: Belle Gonzalez pays tribute to Southam here

Anthony Burgess: Blooms of Dublin (1982)

Musical Authors: Anthony Burgess (2)
The use of language in the writings of Anthony Burgess often highlights sound over meaning, an interest that he picked up from his enthusiasm for the work of James Joyce. In A Clockwork Orange Burgess distances the reader from the extreme violence though the made-up, Russian-influenced language “Nadsat” the narrator users. That language also creates its own distinctive sound world. Burgess explored this direction to the extreme in the wordless film script Quest for Fire, where he invents a tribal language that prehistoric man might have spoken, and in his non-fiction work on the sound of language, A Mouthful of Air. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess also satirizes the traditional highbrow image of classical music and turns it into a soundtrack for violence – far from “soothing the savage beast”, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony incites Alex into ever more extreme acts of “ultraviolence.” In the film version, director Stanley Kubrick used realizations of Beethoven’s music for the synthesizer, produced by Wendy Carlos, to emphasis this, and in the later stage version with music, Burgess composed his own parodies of Beethoven rather than use the real thing.

However, Blooms of Dublin, a musical setting of James Joyce’s Ulysses written for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1982, takes a somewhat different approach. It’s a very free interpretation of Joyce’s text, with changes and interpolations by Burgess himself, all set to original music that blends opera with Gilbert and Sullivan and music hall styles. The aim seems to have been to make Ulysses more accessible (just as he’d also tried to do with his abridgement, A Shorter Finnegans Wake in 1969). And once again, Burgess blurs fiction and reality. In Earthly Powers (1980) the novel he was writing at the same time, the fictional composer Domenico Campanati has also written a musical based on Joyce called Blooms of Dublin, and seven lyrics derived from the real peace are included in the novel. Even more puzzlingly, the primary character, an author called Kenneth Toomey, comments on the fictional Blooms. His verdict? That Ulysses is “a totally un-adaptable masterpiece of literature”.

The BBC recording of the broadcast isn’t generally available, but I’ve heard it a few times and find it an interesting but uneven work (inevitably, perhaps, as it’s around two and a half hours long). As Toomey points out, the complexities and subtleties of Ulysses aren’t easy to translate into a fairly straightforward musicals format, The number “Copulation without population” in Act Two is an example – it’s a funny, bawdy music hall romp which gratuitously adds a chorus of drunks and whores into the mix, like a precursor to Jerry Springer The Opera. But it has little to do with the corresponding passage from Ulysses. In his defense, Burgess said: “The score is, I think, the kind of thing Joyce might have envisaged…he was the great master of the ordinary, and my music is ordinary enough. I had felt for some time that he might have had demotic musicals in mind ….”.

However, critics at the time were horrified at Burgess’ presumption. One called it “an act of vandalism.” Burgess took particular exception to a stinging review by Hans Keller, and for ever after bore the grudge. A few years later he wrote a new piece he called Hommage to Hans Keller, scoring it for the somewhat unlikely combination of four tubas. The Burgess biographer Roger Lewis (himself something of an iconoclast) described it as “a sort of lavatorial blast.”

Anthony Burgess: Symphony No 3 (1974-5)

Musical Authors: Anthony Burgess (1)
Anthony Burgess inherited his love for music from his mother (a music hall singer and dancer) and his father (a part-time cinema pianist). His early introduction to music is lightly disguised as fiction in his novel The Pianoplayers (1986). He began composing seriously while in the army during the war, and then while working as a teacher in Malaya, but couldn’t earn a living from it. When he was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 1959 and told he had just 12 months to live, Burgess embarked on a series of novels in an attempt to earn enough money to support his wife after his death. He survived the diagnosis, and wrote 11 novels between 1960 and 1964, including his best known work, A Clockwork Orange (1962).

Nearly all the writings, fiction and non-fiction, reflect his musical experiences. Biographical elements concerning musicians, particularly failed composers, occur everywhere. His early novel A Vision of Battlements (1965) concerns Richard Ennis, a composer of symphonies and concertos who is serving in the British army in Gibralter. His last, Byrne (1995), a novel set in verse form, is about a minor modern composer who enjoys greater success in bed than he does in the concert hall. Fictional works mentioned in the novels often parallel Burgess’ own real compositions, and provide a commentary on them, such as the St Celia’s Day cantata described in the 1976 novel Beard’s Roman Women, which surfaced two years after the novel was published as a real Burgess work. But the influence goes far beyond the biographical. There are experiments combining musical forms and literature such as Tremor of Intent (1966), the James Bond spoof thriller set in sonata form, and the Napoleon Symphony, a literary interpretation of Beethoven’s Eroica. His use of language often highlights sound over meaning.

Burgess wrote three symphonies himself, but the first two are lost. In his third, he contrived to take a theme directly from the pages of Shakespeare, using six notes quoted in sol fa notation by Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. As Burgess himself explained: …“the pedant Holofernes, who was probably played by Shakespeare himself in the first presentation of the comedy, has a very interesting speech, in which he praises the old poet Mantuan, quotes a line from him, sings a snatch of Italian song – “Venezia, Venezia, chi non ti vede non ti prezia” – and also warbles the notes do re sol la mi fa. This snatch is, I believe, the only tune that Shakespeare wrote [Burgess was wrong here, there’s another sol fa sequence of four notes hummed by Edmund in King Lear] and it has been unaccountably neglected by Shakespeare scholars.”

The sol fa notation translates to the notes C D G A E and F, but of course there’s no indication of rhythm. Burgess points out that such as sequence “is suitable for a ground bass; it can be extended into a fugal subject. If we repeat it a tritone higher or lower, we have a perfect twelve-tone Grundstimmung for a serial composition”. In the third symphony, he says: “My finale pays homage to Love’s Labour’s Lost by basing itself on that brief Shakespeare motif – forward, backward, and upside down – and setting the Venezia words to an appropriate Adriatic- or Neapolitan-type melody, corny, full of schmalz, and with a mandoline tinkling away in the background.”

The symphony was commissioned by the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra in 1974, resulting in the first public performance of an orchestral work by Burgess – a momentous occasion for the composer which spurred him on to renew his composing activities with other large scale works and chamber music, including a violin concerto. A short extract of the Symphony can be heard here.

Paul Bowles: Once a Lady Was Here (1946)

Musical Authors: Paul Bowles (2)
Essentially a miniaturist in both music and literature, Paul Bowles’s most lasting work is likely to be his sixty-odd short stories, described in a recent collected edition as “orchestral in composition and exacting in theme”. A typical Bowles story features a “civilized” outsider struggling to understand and connect with an alien culture – and often failing to do so with disastrous consequences. As Lawrence Stewart has pointed out: “In Bowles’s world, music frequently traps man into expressing his primitive instincts.” The theme of music’s “deception and appeal”, which first surfaced in the concluding episodes of The Sheltering Sky, becomes a structural device in one of Bowles’s best short stories, “The Delicate Prey.”

The two activities of literature and music come closest together in the art song settings, which Bowles continued to compose even after his literary career took off. Ned Rorem has said that Bowles remains “the finest craftsman of art songs that America has produced” (a label others have bestowed on Rorem himself or on Samuel Barber). He produced settings of the poetry of Stein, Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Lorca and his wife Jane Bowles, as well as settings of his own texts, such as the slinky “Once a Lady Was Here”, a fascinating fusion of art, jazz and popular song with meters alternating between 4/4 and 5/4. Virgil Thomson highlighted how tightly the text and music are matched in the songs. “The texts fit their tunes like a peach its skin,” he said. Like his short stories, the art songs are essentially dramatic in conception, contrasting apparently simple means – such as folk and popular song like melodies – with more complex material often held in reserve to maximize the theatrical effect.

Bowles’s ethno-musicological activities, collecting the traditional folk, art and popular music of Morocco for the Library of Congress, are often overlooked today, though these interests are reflected in both his writings (the travel collection Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue) and in his own music (the piano piece Tamanar, for instance). Even though his compositions were overshadowed by his subsequent literary fame, it’s clear that music remained one of the key driving forces behind his work, and during the 1990s it became the focus of a significant revival. Gore Vidal has identified the combination of music and literature as his defining characteristic: “something most writers don’t have, the result of which are his disturbing stories, like nothing in English literature.”

Paul Bowles: Concerto for Two Pianos (1947)

Musical Authors: Paul Bowles (1)
The artistic reputation of Paul Bowles (1910-1999) rests on his four novels, his many short stories and various autobiographical writings, most of them written during the fifty years he spent as an expatriate in Tangier, Morocco. Bowles turned to writing fiction fairly late in life, having failed to establish himself as a poet in the Paris of the 1920s and then – against all the odds – having succeeded in making a living as a composer during the 1930s and 1940s in the US. Under the mentorship of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson he became a central figure in the New York music scene, writing a considerable amount of theatre music while also working as a music critic.

 But Bowles appeared to reach some kind of a barrier in his musical development. His pieces are mostly cast in short forms that rarely span more than ten minutes and show little evidence of symphonic development. Due to the constant demand for him to write more incidental or film music, he only occasionally had the opportunity to compose more ambitious works, such as The Concerto for Two Pianos (1946-7) and the opera The Wind Remains (1941-2). Depression set in. “I felt: ‘if this goes on, my creativity will always have to be poured into a vessel held by others,’” he told music journalist Robert Schwarz in 1996.  

 His rapid transition from composer to successful author occurred just as he left America for Morocco in 1947. “There were a great many things I wanted to say that were too precise to express in musical terms,” he said. The Sheltering Sky, his first novel, was published in Great Britain in 1948 and the following year in the US. It entered the New York Times best seller list in January 1950 and stayed there for ten weeks.  Influential literary friends such as Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams helped the process along with highly positive reviews. Bowles explicitly compared the novel to music in a 1952 letter to Harvey Breit. “I did think of the three parts as separate ‘movements’ but I can see that was an error. A novel is not a symphony or a sonata. If it’s anything that can be compared to music, it’s a melody.”

 The Concerto has been recorded on a CD, The Music of Paul Bowles, issued in 1996, which also includes excerpts from The Wind Remains and songs setting words by his wife Jane Bowles and others. The four movement Concerto is a work of weird juxtapositions, alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) sounding like Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Poulenc and even Steve Reich and John Adams, with a bit of jazz thrown in for good measure. The descriptive  final movement, Galop, is a good sampling point.

King Palmer: Hackney Carriage (c1945)

For years I’ve been intrigued by Cedric King Palmer (1913-1999), who I knew of only as the author of Teach Yourself to Compose Music (1947, second edition 1973). This seems like an impossible subject for the famous Hodder & Stoughton series to have tackled, and in truth my readings of the book didn’t turn me into a composer. But the book is one of the clearest and most concise expositions of the basics of traditional harmony, counterpoint, melody and rhythm that I’ve seen – and much easier to read than the typical music theory text book (like the Walter Piston series). I still recommend it to friends who are curious to learn more about how music works, and sometimes buy second hand copies to give them. I always wondered though, about Palmer’s own career as a composer. He’s pretty modest, and uses only one example of his own music in the book – “Love Song and Sunset” from the orchestral suite Down a Country Lane.

During the 1970s it seemed impossible to get hold of any examples, printed or recorded, even though some 600 recordings were made between the 1940s and 1960s. But now, on YouTube, it’s easier to find. Palmer was a jobbing musician and band leader who mostly wrote production and mood music for commercial purposes, some of it still used today. It’s even possible to see Palmer conducting his own orchestra on a video called “Rhythm of the Road”, a 1930s advertisement produced for the Ford Motor Company. Hackney Carriage is a classic example, recorded on the now hard to get Music for TV Dinners CD (Scamp, 1997), evoking the era of horse-drawn taxis trotting down the road – you may have head it many times as background to a nostalgic scene in various documentaries or adverts, but even If you haven’t, it sounds instantly familiar. It’s good to find out that King Palmer had impeccable credentials himself as a composer.

Mozart: Quartet in D minor, K421 (1783)

Musical Authors
One of the “ten celebrated string quartets”, Mozart’s Quartet No 15 in D minor (K421) is notable for many reasons. For instance, Mozart’s wife Constanze is said to have told Vincent and Mary Novello that the rising melodic figures used throughout the unconventionally phrased second movement Andante were a reference to her cries from the other room while she was in labour with their first child, Raimund, on the seventeenth of June 1783. But the prompt for including this piece here was a passing comment I came across while re-reading Constant Lambert’s fascinating study of modern music from 1934, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline.  Here it is, from page 23 of the Pelican paperback’s 1948 reprint. “The Siciliana that forms the finale of the D minor quartet [is] a simple dance tune into which and its variations Mozart seems to have compressed the emotional experience of a lifetime”. As we have already seen (and will see in future posts), Lambert himself used the siciliana form for some of his most emotionally intense compositions.