Programme Notes

C.W. Orr: Songs from 'A Shropshire Lad'
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Along the Field
Juliet Hess: The Poplars
Ivor Gurney: The Western Playland
Ralph Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge

Our season begins with a programme of musical settings of poems from A.E. Housman's collection A Shropshire Lad. This collection appeared in 1896, and was in many ways a response to the tragic loss of life in the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed. The longing for lost innocence and for the simple pleasures of English rural life, which Housman captured so eloquently and precisely in these poems, resonated strongly with the generation of composers who lived through the First World War, and whose lives were defined by its devastation – and it continues to resonate today.

The poems, and the songs based on them, became immeasureably more poignant in the context of World War I, for audiences and for the composers themselves. Vaughan Williams and Gurney fought in the war; Gurney's physical and mental health were permanently impaired, and Vaughan Williams was profoundly affected by his experiences, and by those of his contemporaries. Orr had enlisted, but a medical condition made him unable to fight. The inclusion of a commissioned cycle, by contemporary Toronto composer Juliet Hess, underscores the horrible continuity of human conflict, and the loss of young lives in war today.

Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth, recalls her experience of the First World War, and in particular her correspondence with four young men – her brother, her fiancé and two of their close friends. In August 1914, when the war broke out, she was just beginning at Oxford, having spent two frustrating years persuading her conservative father to let her go there. Her beloved younger brother was also just "going up" to Oxford, along with three of his close friends, one of whom became Vera's fiancé. All four young men left immediately to join the army. Vera stayed one year, and then joined the nursing auxiliary corps, serving in England, Malta and France. All four of the young men were killed in the War. Vera eventually returned to Oxford, where she studied politics and international relations; she devoted her life thereafter to promoting peace and international cooperation.

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Charles Wilfred Orr (1893-1976): Four Songs from A Shropshire Lad, for voice and piano

C.W. Orr was a West Country composer, of sufficiently privileged background to pursue his compositional career – and his fascination with the work of Housman – independently. He studied at the Guildhall in London, and was befriended and encouraged by Frederick Delius, whose influence, along with that of Hugo Wolf, was crucial in Orr's formation. The bulk of Orr's output is represented by thirty-five songs, many of them settings of texts by Housman.

The four songs in this evening's programme have been selected from different collections and different periods of Orr's career. Into my heart an air that kills echoes the anguished declamatory lyricism of Wolf. The other three songs occupy a territory similar to that of some of Delius' works: the rhythms and melodic shapes, as suggested by the deceptively simple metres of the poems, resemble those of English folk-song, but the chromaticism owes more to the intensity of continental late romanticism. The irony of this juxtaposition serves to underline the tragedy of both the Boer War, which inspired the poems, and the First World War, which inspired so many of the musical settings: young men were uprooted from backgrounds of bucolic tradition and continuity, and sent to die, or to be broken in body and mind, in a conflict wholly alien to their experience.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1972-1958): Along the Field (1954), for voice and violin

Although Vaughan Williams is not recognised primarily for his songs, he composed more than eighty during the course of his career, sometimes, as in this set, abandoning the conventional combination of voice and piano for the pairing of voice with a single instrumental line, to create a sparer texture and a more precariously balanced counterpoint.

Some of the texts in Along the Field are taken from Housman's Last Poems, rather than A Shropshire Lad, but the landscape and the elegiac air are all of a piece. Each song is a perfect miniature, displaying Vaughan Williams' astonishing gift for English text-setting: the lines unfold organically, with a simplicity which is never trite, drawing together and integrating the elements of folk-melody, subtle chromaticism, and the stretching and bending of metres called forth by a sophisticated reading of the poems' structures. The violin supports the voice, converses with it, sustains its own viewpoint, as in In the morning, and ultimately unites with the voice in the autumnal hush of With rue my heart is laden, in the fading summer hues of gold and rose, as the recollections of happier times finally give way to solitary resignation.

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Juliet Hess (1979- ): The Poplars (2008), for baritone, violin, viola, cello, and piano

Juliet Hess' studies at the University of Toronto emphasized composition, music education, choral music, voice, and world music, and her compositional focus is on works for solo voice and chamber ensemble, with a concentration on poetry by such writers as Federico García Lorca, Stephen Crane, and William Butler Yeats. Her published choral works have been geared towards younger singers, and she currently teaches elementary vocal and instrumental music in the Toronto area, directs a number of choral, instrumental, and drumming ensembles, and performs as a freelance percussionist, choral musician, and drummer and dancer in Ghanaian performance groups. Her personal goal is to travel throughout the world to study the rich drumming and dancing traditions of the world's cultures, integrating diverse musical practices into her work as a composer and an educator.

The Housman cycle, Hess says,

...aims to depict musically the irony and sadness present in these four poems... In Think No More... the cheerful melody is accompanied sardonically in an irregular meter, with aspects of atonality, and a highly chromatic bass line. The Poplars depicts a perfect evening in nature where the protagonist is surrounded by a glittering brook, majestic poplars, and starlight... [but also] reflects loss and solitude, which is echoed in the legato string lines. The Day of Battle is also extremely ironic in nature and is set quite cynically with the violin imitating a badly-played bugle. The heroic-sounding melody is offset with a sarcastic undertone in the accompaniment, with elements of atonality and a driving piano part. The Winds has an accompaniment that represents the title, with an ostinato-like pattern being passed from piano to viola to cello [and] the viola... tremolo assists with the painting of the windy landscape. The climax of this final song comes at the end of the fourth stanza, after which the fifth gives way to the powerless despair of the lonely survivor.

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Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) – Songs from The Western Playland (1921), for baritone, string quartet, and piano

Ivor Gurney had a traditional musical training, first as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, and then as a student of Stanford at the Royal College of Music. His first settings of Housman's poetry, some of which were to form The Western Playland, appear to date from 1908, but the complete cycle, for voice, string quartet, and piano, was not assembled until 1921. In the interim, Gurney had fought in France, had been gassed and invalided back to England, and had attempted suicide. He had planned to resume his musical studies with Vaughan Williams, but his mental and emotional fragility precluded any further academic training, although he continued to write fine music and poetry in considerable quantity. Gurney died in 1937, having spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals; his manuscripts were salvaged and published by his friends Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson.

Gurney's settings of Housman are on a relatively small scale, compared with those of Vaughan Williams, but they are highly individual and responsive to the subtleties of the text – not surprising in a composer who was himself a poet. The emotional intensity of his settings derives not from the application of any "symphonic" techniques, but from Gurney's intellectual and experiential connection with the world of the poems. His own love of nature and of the lyricism of English folk-song, as well as the shattering consequences of his own battlefield trauma, found a reflection in Housman's lyrics, and a powerful stimulus to his musical creativity.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) – On Wenlock Edge (1909), for tenor, string quartet, and piano

Sir Arthur Somervell had composed the first song-cycle based on A Shropshire Lad in 1904, but Vaughan Williams' six settings for tenor, piano, and string quartet, which make up On Wenlock Edge (1909) were the first to achieve lasting popularity. At this point in Vaughan Williams' career he had reached a balance and fusion of the various elements which contributed to form his compositional style: the early influence of German nineteenth-century music, particularly that of Brahms; his own research and collecting in the area of English folk-song; and the "French polish" which he acquired during three months studying with Ravel in Paris. All are discernible in On Wenlock Edge, from the symphonic scale of the storm in the opening song, through the atmospheric effects of Bredon Hill, to the modal, folk-inspired melody of Clun, evoking the quiet resignation of death. The songs are not motivically linked in any systematic way, but Vaughan Williams achieves an extraordinary unity and breadth of spirit, a sense of acceptance which transcends the bitterness of some of Housman's texts.

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