In February 1929, the respected
music magazine Monthly Musical Record
began a series of profiles entitled ‘The Younger English Composers.’ These were
written by prominent musicologists and historians. Composers featured included
Edmund Rubbra, Peter Warlock, Constant Lambert, Arthur Bliss, Lennox Berkeley,
Gerald Finzi, Gordon Jacob, Freda Swain, Alan Bush and William Walton. In
January 1930, the eminent English music critic Edwin Evans produced a 2000-word
study on Ernest John (E.J.) Moeran. I
present this text in two blog-posts and include a few footnotes and have made a
few minor syntactical changes. I have included Evans’s evaluation of the use of
folk music with which he opens his pen portrait. Dates of compositions are included
where appropriate.
ONE of the strongest influences
contributing to that side of a composer's ego which reveals his nationality is
admittedly that of folksong, which has played so conspicuous a part in the
general upheaval of musical nations during the past few decades.
With some composers, especially
during the early phases of the various wars of independence, it was
deliberately cultivated as a means of extrication from other influences. Having
fulfilled its mission, it has become in more recent years a mere affectation of
students, who love to write pentatonic tunes - the easiest of all to write - plaster
them with a few triads on the less frequented degrees of the scale and call the
result composition. These two extremes have one attribute in common. They are
artificial and adopted of a set purpose, which is in one case emancipation, in
the other the finding of a short cut to the satisfaction of one's budding
musical vanity.
But not all preoccupation with
folksong is deliberate. There are some to whom the employment of the folksong
idiom comes naturally, as being in tune with their own characters. They have
the gregarious instinct, and it leads them, metaphorically or in person, to the
company in which folk lift up their voices in song. They have Elizabethan leanings,
but they cultivate them less in the study than in their mental attitude towards
music, which they conceive to be an art of human habit, an expression of life,
but also an amenity of human intercourse, and none the worse for being perhaps
an occasional aid to conviviality. It is an attitude of mind that recurs
sometimes in our poets, and then they produce verse that can be delivered
lustily, with gusto, in contrast to the mournful tone so often adopted for it.
They are the true lyri[ci]sts. If the Elizabethans teach us naught else, they
teach us that the man who makes a good song when it is wanted is a man
responsive to moods, and capable of interpreting many others besides, including
those of nature.
If Moeran's music reveals the
influence of folksong it is not because he sought it out and cultivated it, but
almost for the opposite reason, that it sought him out and cultivated him. It
invited him to an ambit in which he could have his musical being, take his
musical ease, stretch his limbs, and let his mind roam over scenes that had
attracted it, so that it gave forth not merely the adaptation or even
transfusion of folk music, but also the lyrical expression of moods more
intimate than is compatible with the theory and practice of folk music.
It was the air he breathed during
the formative years, and it is the reason why, without deliberate intention on
his part, his music has a racial lilt which we recognize at once as being
native to these islands. Not that it is of one racial type. It alternates between
Irish and English, the former being atavistic, the latter the product of
environment; and since his use of it is spontaneous, the two tend occasionally
to coalesce in a manner which no composer would consciously seek to contrive.
It might seem incongruous to find sometimes a Celtic bloom upon a melody rooted
in East Anglian soil, were the blend not the result of complete assimilation
into the musical system and the true expression of the man.
[Ernest John Smeed] Moeran was
born on the last day of 1894 at Osterley, near London. [1] The name is Irish,
and shows the family origin, but from his eighth year to the outbreak of war
his home was in Norfolk. From early boyhood he had musical leanings, and when
he went to Uppingham in 1908 [2] he was fortunate in finding conditions more
encouraging than was at that time the rule in public schools. He learned to
play the piano well and the violin tolerably, took part in chamber music,
listened and read a great deal, and presently began to try his hand at composition.
[3]
His guide, philosopher and friend
was Robert Sterndale Bennett, [4] to whom he confessedly owes much. He left
Uppingham in [July] 1912, and the following year entered the Royal College of
Music.
Eighteen months later war broke
out. He joined up, fought on the Western front, was wounded, and afterwards
served in Ireland until demobilized in 1919. During the latter part of his
war-time service his pen had not remained idle, but most of the work that
resulted - chiefly chamber music - was afterwards discarded as immature. He
was, in fact, little satisfied at that time with his technical equipment.
Having conceived a warm admiration for the works of John Ireland, he addressed
himself to that composer for further guidance.
From him he absorbed much that was
craftsmanship and also something that was John Ireland, as is clearly shown in
the Violin Sonata and elsewhere. His own enthusiasm would have made that
practically inevitable, however much John Ireland as teacher might contend
against it. However, these spells of hero-worship rarely harm a young composer
if he has the material in him. About this time Moeran made a clean sweep of the
works of his nonage [immaturity], relegating to the ‘might have been’ string
quartets, trios, and sonatas galore, with some orchestral music, and settled
down to produce in real earnest. Meanwhile he had frequently revisited Norfolk
and laid the foundation of his collection of folksongs of the region.
There are some young composers
who produce just as much as agrees with their musical constitution - but they
are rare. The majority write far too much. There remain a few who write less
than their musicality warrants. Moeran is of these. Among the generation of
composers to which he belongs he stands out by the genuinely musical quality of
his temperament. He feels musically. Music is a form of natural speech with
him, and it should be his habitual mode of expression, instead of which
surprisingly little has come from him during the ten years or so that he has
been on the active list.
Notes:
[1] Actually, Moeran was born in
the village of Heston, in the former county of Middlesex. At this time his
father was vicar of St. Mary’s, Spring Grove in Middlesex. After a series of
short incumbencies, Moeran’s father took up the living at Salhouse with Wroxham
in the county of Norfolk.
[2] Moeran went to Suffield Park Preparatory School aged
ten, and then to Uppingham School at the age of thirteen.
[3] Ian Maxwell (The
Importance of Being Ernest John: Challenging the Misconceptions about the Life
and Works of E. J. Moeran, Durham theses, Durham University, 2014) suggests
that ‘it is more probable that Moeran’s first exposure to music and playing –
the piano in particular – took place when he was no more than about five or
six.’ This contradicts Evans’ assertion that it was at Uppingham.
[4] Robert Sterndale Bennett, grandson of the
composer William Sterndale Bennett was in fact the director of music at
Uppingham School. Evans seems to imply that he was a contemporary of Moeran. To be continued...
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