Arthur Bliss

Music and Literature

Stewart R. Craggs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138718494
• eBook ISBN: 9781351765053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This title was first published in 2002. This volume of essays seeks to reflect aspects of the life and work of Arthur Bliss, Master of the Queen's Music. Though each is self-contained, the editor has attempted to keep a theme running throughout. Looking beyond surface impressions is an attitude constantly expressed.

CHAPTER ONE

Metamorphic Variation:
The Orchestral Music

Robert Meikle

The singular noun is deliberate, for it proposes that the title of Bliss’s last large-scale composition is a metaphor for the compositional processes of all his music for orchestra. It is continually evolving, changing, moving on – in a word, metamorphosing – its themes once presented only rarely reappear unaltered, and any unmodified recapitulation of even the briefest statement is the exception rather than the rule. A single word in many titles suggests an avoidance – or evasion – of any commitment to a presupposed, given structure (despite, as we shall see, the composer’s own programme notes, which often promise quite straightforward procedures): we find Meditations on a Theme by John Blow, Discourse for Orchestra, the Metamorphic Variations themselves, while other titles tell us even less about what to expect: Studies, Music, Introduction and Allegro, Hymn: indeed, the appellation of the early Mêlée fantasque seems to adumbrate something central to the entire œuvre, for at times that is what it is. His works are in a continual process of growth during which the simplest of ideas, sometimes nothing more than part of a diatonic scale, as in the Introduction and Allegro, mutate almost under their own momentum, and it is even possible that these mutations can lead us so far from their originals that their lineage is scarcely discernible to the ear. Given that John Blow’s theme for his setting of Psalm 23, for example, is reserved until the end of the Meditations, only repeated hearings reveal its diverse manifestations earlier in the work; and since the material for the Metamorphic Variations consists not of one idea but of three – a melody, a chord progression and a semitonal cluster – their presence, as they ‘undergo a greater transformation… than the simple word “variations” implies’,¹ ranges between the self-evident and the imperceptible. Yet while on the one hand his music moves on by a kind of Fortspinnung, Bliss creates best not, paradoxically, on a scale analogous to large baroque structures, but by the accumulation or juxtaposition of small units. ‘ don’t feel that au fond I’m a symphonic composer,’ he somewhat hesitantly confessed; ‘I’m much happier with smaller forms.’² Nor was this any tentative defence of ‘smaller forms’, for he had vigorously advocated their virtues some years earlier: ‘If I taught composition, I would make my pupils write endless variations on the most unpromising beginnings. It teaches the possibilities of growth. That is why the Diabelli Variations of Beethoven are a course in composition themselves. With them on the piano, the pupil requires no further master.’³ Valuable as such application to ‘the most unpromising beginnings’ undoubtedly is, however, it did not ameliorate his potential discomfort in the larger forms where, most notably in the two symphonies⁴ and the concertos for piano, violin and cello, he sought, exploited, or patiently awaited the arrival of, some external stimulus – the colours of heraldry, a spoken text, the particular skills of instrumental soloists. ‘I like the stimulus of words, or a theatrical setting, a colourful occasion or the collaboration of a great player,’ he wrote in his autobiography, recalling the circumstances of A Colour Symphony’s composition.⁵ ‘There is only a little of the spider about me, spinning his own web from his inner being. I am more of a magpie type. I need what Henry James termed a “trouvaille” or a “donnée”.’ Yet to mix his two metaphors, the magpie in him often gets his spider started, and as I have hinted and as we shall see in some detail, he can spin the most intriguing and intricate of webs.

Tonality was for composers during the two hundred years before the twentieth century, and for a good many more during its course, one of the most significant factors in the organization of a large-scale musical argument, and it is no surprise, given his diffidence in this area, to find that Bliss’s treatment of tonality frequently removes it from its position close to the top of the structural hierarchy. While for the most part works follow the traditional tonal practice of beginning and ending in the same key, the subsidiary centres rarely comply with any customary pattern, or indeed any pattern of their own. Most striking in this respect is the first movement of the Music for Strings, whose themes could conceivably be articulating a sonata-form movement, yet whose keys deliberately shun any form-shaping purpose. ‘He may not begin and end in one and the same key or “in” a key at all,’ wrote Frank Howes of this work in 1936, ‘but there is just enough key to keep the texture free from tangle.’⁶ Much the same could be said of the first movement of a work such as the Violin Concerto, which begins in A minor and ends clearly enough in A major, but which en route presents some of its principal material in a farranging selection of keys including, among others, C♯ minor, B♭ major, G♭ major and E♭ minor. The Cello Concerto goes even further: its first movement begins in D minor but ends in E major, and its second movement moves from B♭ minor to C major; even the finale plays with tonal ambiguity at the beginning, with the timpani and lower strings tugging in the direction of F major before the arrival of the main theme confirms A,⁷ the key in which the movement will end. ‘Tangle’ can be close, however, in situations where a key turns out not to be what it seems. For example, the climax of the Hymn to Apollo is in D major (at 21), yet it ends in G minor; again, the last (and the first) complete statement of John Blow’s theme in the Meditations, just over 30 bars long, is in E major, and ends only 35 bars from the final cadence; but that cadence is in A, not E.⁸ The effect is to leave the final chords strangely inconclusive, as if we have been deposited in a key other than the one we could reasonably assume we were being prepared for.

A composer’s approach to tonality – its clarity, its ambiguity, even its absence – is inextricably involved with his treatment of harmony, dissonance, and so on. And Bliss’s approach to harmony throughout his career has been marked by two features: the first is consistent with twentieth-century trends – the addition of sixths, sevenths, ninths, the use of occasional simultaneous major and minor chords, and so on; I am thinking of passages such as the beginning of ‘Blue’ in A Colour Symphony, where a series of minor chords on D, B♭, F, E♭, D♭ and A♭ is coloured by the addition either of sixths, or of sevenths and ninths. Much the same colouring is found in No. V of the Blow Meditations, ‘In green pastures’, where woodwind, harp and celesta, lightly supported by lower strings, float through triadic arpeggios with added sevenths and ninths. Two later instances of the same effect are located in ‘Funeral Processions’, No. IX, and ‘Duet’, No. XII, of the Metamorphic Variations. The più tranquillo interlude in the allegro of the Introduction and Allegro is even more straightforward, moving at 27 to a moment of pure nineteenth-century Romanticism, with lush dominant ninths of E♭ minor that would be completely at home in Wagner. On the other hand, we find the presence of what might be called an abrasive, non-functional dissonance: by that I mean dissonance not necessarily related to counterpoint, nor to the addition of superimposed thirds, nor to such twentieth-century devices as bitonality, polymodality or even atonality. It is rather a dissonance that seeks out stridency with which to colour an otherwise fairly straightforward texture. The violent outburst in C minor in ‘Red’, the scherzo of A Colour Symphony (at 19⁶) is all the more disturbing for being flooded with F♯s, their stridency exacerbated by a passing F♮ in the melody.⁹ The first appearance of the jagged figure associated with ‘peril and lurking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Music Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Metamorphic Variation: The Orchestral Music
• 2 Chronicle of a Collaboration: The Olympians
• 3 The Piano Concerto in B Flat (1939)
• 4 The Songs of Bliss
• 5 An American Interlude
• 6 The Film Music
• 7 In Search of a Progressive Music Policy: Arthur Bliss at the BBC
• 8 The Recorded Works
• 9 ‘… if Poets mind thee well… ’: Bliss and Christopher Hassall
• Bibliography
• Index of Bliss’s Music
• General Index