08 October 2013
Royal Philharmonic Society: 200 Years of Grand Projects
Among the various musical bicentenaries this year, one of the most widely celebrated has been the Royal Philharmonic Society's. The manuscript of their most famous commission, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, will be on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York until 1 December 2013, reunited for the first time since 1824 with the other copyists' manuscript overseen by Beethoven, which is now part of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection. The British Library, which acquired the RPS archive in 2002, is proud to continue its association with the RPS. The entire archive has now been digitised, and is available (via subscription or in our reading rooms) as part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online.
The story of the foundation of the Philharmonic Society in 1813 to 'rekindle excellence in instrumental music' has been told many times - most usefully in Cyril Ehrlich's book First Philharmonic (Oxford, 1995). What has not been known until now is just how dedicated the founding directors were to the project, and how grand their original plans were. In an article just published in the Electronic British Library Journal, Leanne Langley tells a fascinating tale of the complex negotiations that led to the building of the New Argyll Rooms, where the Choral Symphony and many other great works were given their first London performances.
The building was devised as an integral part of John Nash's development of Regent Street under the name of the Regent's Harmonic Institution, renamed as Royal Harmonic Institution when it finally opened in 1820, following the Prince Regent's accession as King George IV). The rooms were to be used for a wide variety of concerts and other events, and the complex included a shop selling music published in-house. The plans were to create a Royal Academy of Music, by analogy with the Royal Academy of Arts. The considerable costs were largely underwritten by the directors of the Philharmonic Society, in a personal capacity and in the hope of recouping a profit in the longer term.
Sadly, most of their plans were thwarted. The building burnt down after only ten years, and although it was insured, the costs of replacing it were too great. Meanwhile, the Royal Academy of Music had been founded by other means elsewhere. The Philharmonic Society continued, as a promoter of concerts, commissioner of new works, and supporter of all aspects of the musical world - and continues to flourish in this role to this day. But, as Leanne Langley points out, one important legacy of the sad story of the rise and fall of the New Argyll Rooms is that the area around Oxford Circus quickly became a Mecca of the musical world, and has remained so ever since: first music publishers and instrument sellers placed their shops nearby, to be followed in the twentieth century by record shops. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the BBC built Broadcasting House at the top of the same development, to sit alongside the mass of cultural organisations which began with the Philharmonic Society.
Read Leanne Langley's article, 'A Place for Music: John Nash, Regent Street and the Philharmonic Society of London' by following this link.
03 October 2013
English folksong at the British Library
Saturday 21st September saw the London leg of The Full English’s tour of Folksong in England Study Days, which took place in the British Library.
Renowned folklorist Steve Roud led the study day with a guest talk from Julia Bishop, Steve’s co-author of the New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs who is also currently leading the project to produce the James Madison Carpenter Collection. See a full report by Scott Standing of the Full English's blogspot.
British Library curators, Nicolas Bell (Lead Curator Western Music) and Janet Topp Fargion (Lead Curator World and Traditional Music) organised a 'show and tell', bringing out items from the collections that now form part of the Full English's digital archive, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams folksong transcriptions, plus related items such as newly acquired photographs of Percy Grainger and selections of folksong recordings including wax cylinders recorded by Vaughan Williams, many of which are available for listening online at BL Sounds.
05 September 2013
Folk song in England study day
Learn more about England’s cultural heritage through folk song, from ballads to shanties. This study day - to be held at the British Library on Saturday 21 September - explores the history, development and purpose of folk songs collected in England.
The day will be led by renowned folklorist Steve Roud with Julia Bishop - a superb opportunity to share their knowledge and insights into folk song and music. Steve and Julia are co-editors of the acclaimed New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs.
Learn more about the day and how to book via the What's On.
The event forms part of The Full English, a project by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), and supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Folk Music Fund and The Folklore Society. The Full English includes the most comprehensive free searchable digital archive in the world. Ralph Vaughan Williams' manuscripts of folk songs and other works, which were deposited after the composer's death in 1958, have been digitised as part of the project.
Vaughan Williams didn't only note folk songs down on paper, he also recorded the performances. You can listen to 3 folk songs recorded on wax cylinders by Ralph Vaughan Williams on the British Library's Sounds website:
Turtle Dove, sung by David Penfold, recorded 1907
The Trees They Do Grow High, sung by David Penfold, recorded 1907
Fare Ye Well, Lovely Nancy, sung by George Lovett, recorded 1909 (only a few years after George Gardiner noted it down on paper as in the image above)
The cylinders are owned by the EFDSS but housed at the British Library on their behalf.
25 August 2013
Britten's Serenade
At the heart of our exhibition ‘Poetry in Sound: The Music of Benjamin Britten’ is the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, Op. 31. Arguably more than any other work in Britten’s output, the Serenade demonstrates his acutely sensitive response to the written word, to the extent that words and music often cohere with a natural simplicity that seems to encapsulate and transform the poetic intention. The Serenade encompasses poetry by Keats, Tennyson, Blake, Cotton, and Jonson, together with an anonymous fifteenth-century text – each poem selected to fit an overall poetic conception that reflects on the approach of darkness as a metaphor for the journey from life into death. It was composed in 1943, shortly after Britten returned to England from the US, and dedicated to the critic and novelist Edward Sackville-West (1901-65). The work was first performed at the Wigmore Hall on 15 October 1943 by the great horn player Dennis Brain and the tenor Peter Pears.
The Serenade opens with a prologue for solo horn, which at once sets a haunting tone for the work and introduces the instrument as an unspoken commentator on the sung text that follows. For the first sung movement Britten selected four stanzas from the The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton (1630-87), which itself forms part of a cycle describing each part of the day: morning, noon, evening and night. Cotton’s words appear in the 1689 edition of his Poems on Several Occasions, published in London by Hensman and Fox, a copy of which is on display in the exhibition. The opening verse ‘The day’s grown old; the fainting sun / has but a little way to run’ sets the tone for Britten’s reflective setting, which is dominated by a descending musical theme echoed by the solo horn.
In the second movement Britten’s music conveys the rapid shifts of emotion in Tennyson’s ‘Blow, bugle, blow’ from the narrative poem The Princess. Here the sung text is punctuated by horn fanfares evoking the sound of a bugle echoing over an Arcadian landscape, an allegory for the inevitability of death followed by after-life. The evidence of Britten’s manuscript demonstrates that he changed his mind about the title of the first and second movements: the original titles were ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Ballad’, but these were crossed through in red crayon and replaced with ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Nocturne’ respectively. There were apparently no second thoughts concerning the title of the third movement, an ‘Elegy’ on William Blake’s famous ‘O Rose, thou art sick!’. In this setting, which is dominated by the simple and unsettling motif of a descending semitone, the sung text is delivered to a sustained string accompaniment. A lengthy introduction for horn and pulsating strings returns to form a suitably mournful postlude.
Britten’s inspiration for the fourth movement was an anonymous fifthteenth-century poem, the Lyke-Wake Dirge, which continues the underlying theme of the Serenade by charting the journey undertaken by the soul from earth to purgatory. Written in an old form of the Yorkshire dialect, the repetitive structure of the poem gave Britten the opportunity to create a setting that contrasts the jaunty rhythms of the vocal lines with an increasingly complex orchestral accompaniment – rather like a set of variations on a given theme.
For the fifth movement Britten chose words from Cynthia’s Revels by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), a play first performed in 1600 which depicts Queen Elizabeth I as the virgin huntress Cynthia (elsewhere known as Diana). Britten selected the hymn, ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’, from Act V (shown on the right in the edition published in London in 1601), allowing him to deploy the solo horn in hunting style, thus providing the work with a lively scherzo movement. The final movement, however, marks a return to the reflective and intensely lyrical tone that pervades much of the work, with a setting of John Keats’s sonnet To Sleep. Britten’s masterpiece ends with the strains of the solo horn, now off stage, its melancholy fanfare gradually disappearing into silence.
17 July 2013
Music and Monarchy
'Music and Monarchy' is the theme of a new four-part television series, presented by Dr David Starkey, which 'reveals how British kings and queens shaped the story of the nation's music: as patrons and tastemakers, and even as composers and performers'. The series promises a refreshing approach, looking at the role played by music in some of the great moments of British history - but always primarily from a historian's point of view.
As with many of his earlier series, Dr Starkey draws heavily on the British Library's collections when telling his 'history of England written in music'. This post draws attention to some of the British Library manuscripts which feature in the first programme, all of which are freely available online.
Two pieces of music in the Old Hall Manuscript are attributed to 'Roy Henry': they are settings of the 'Gloria' and 'Sanctus' of the Mass, both composed in three parts. There has been a great deal of discussion about the true identity of this King Henry, much of it taking place while the manuscript was owned by St Edmund's College at Old Hall Green in Hertfordshire, from where the manuscript gained its modern name before entering the British Library's collections in 1973. Earlier scholars identified the composer as Henry VI or Henry IV, but the consensus is now firmly in favour of Henry V. The manuscript was compiled between about 1415 and 1421, but it is quite possible that Henry composed these pieces before acceding to the throne in 1413.
Images of the complete Old Hall Manuscript are available to view on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (diamm.ac.uk), together with a detailed description, list of contents and extensive bibliography about the manuscript. (This link leads directly to the Old Hall page.) DIAMM requires users to set up a user account before accessing high-resolution images, for reasons of copyright licensing, but this is a simple process.
A later king whose musical predilections are more widely known is Henry VIII. As with 'Roy Henry', music survives which is apparently composed by the king himself: the Henry VIII Songbook was probably compiled around 1518, and includes twenty songs and thirteen instrumental pieces ascribed to ‘The Kynge H. viij’, as well as 76 pieces by other musicians associated with the court. It is most likely that Henry composed this music while still a prince, though some pieces may date from the early years of his reign. The manuscript is not written by Henry himself, and was never part of the royal library: it appears to have been compiled for Sir Henry Guildford (1489-1532), controller of the royal household. It is now numbered as Add. MS 31922, and a description and images are available on DIAMM at this link.
Two other important music manuscripts presented to Henry VIII survived in the king's own library, which now forms part of the British Library's collections. One of them is a magnificent choirbook produced in the workshop of Petrus Alamire, a famous Flemish music scribe who made several similar choirbooks for other European courts. He also acted as a spy, informing Henry of the movements of Richard de la Pole, exiled pretender to the English crown. The opening pages are the most richly decorated, with various Tudor symbols as well as Catherine of Aragon’s pomegranate. This manuscript, Royal MS 8 G VII, is available on DIAMM at this link.
The other grand manuscript was prepared for Henry VIII in 1516 by a successful Flemish merchant named Petrus de Opitiis. It includes a canon (or round) for four voices: two voices sing the music as written and another two sing the same melody a perfect fourth higher, beginning when the first singers reach the points marked with a sign. The words praise the root that has brought forth the scarlet rose of the Tudor dynasty, and it may have been composed to commemorate the reunion of Henry and his two sisters for the first time in 13 years. Royal MS 11 E XI is available on DIAMM at this link, as well as on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website here.
David Starkey's series will be screened on BBC 2 starting on Saturday 20 July 2013. Future posts will feature some recent discoveries that shed light on the relationship between music and monarchy in later periods.
28 June 2013
Library acquires George Lloyd's music manuscripts
The British composer George Lloyd was born one hundred years ago today. On his centenary - and at a time when his music is experiencing something of a renaissance - we’re very pleased to announce that the British Library has just acquired all of George Lloyd’s autograph music manuscripts.
Lloyd studied at Trinity College of Music in London, and before the outbreak of World War II had already composed three symphonies and two operas, Iernin and The Serf. During the war Lloyd served as a bandsman in the Royal Marines.
On the notoriously dangerous Arctic convoys, Lloyd’s ship HMS Trinidad was struck by one of its own torpedoes, which had veered off course and returned to strike the ship. Lloyd was one of just a handful of survivors.
George Lloyd composed his Fourth Symphony in 1946 as he struggled to come to terms with his experience, describing it on the title-page as “A world of darkness, storms, strange colours and a far-away peacefulness”. You can now see the autograph manuscript of this symphony on display in the British Library’s Treasures Gallery.
Despite the physical and mental scars, Lloyd went on to complete 12 symphonies, 7 concertos, three operas and many other vocal and instrumental works. Although for some years his music was little played - it was considered too tuneful by some - the last 20 years of Lloyd's life saw a revival of interest in his music, and this has continued in the years since his death in 1998. This week, he has been featured as BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week, and there are two performances of his music at the BBC Proms: his Requiem and, on the Last Night of the Proms, the orchestral version of his HMS Trinidad March, which only turned up while the collection was being sorted prior to its arrival at the British Library.
The George Lloyd Collection, now available for researchers and musicians to consult at the British Library, includes early sketches and drafts of many of Lloyd's compositions, as well as the autograph ‘final versions’. For researchers, such sketches and drafts are invaluable, as they shed light on a composer’s approach to writing and creative processes. Even what appear to be the final versions of a work are not always that: like many other composers, Lloyd sometimes made changes to his works after they had been copied by a professional copyist in preparation for performances of the music, or even during rehearsals. Copyists' scores with autograph annotations can therefore contain important information on the composer's afterthoughts. A number of copyists' scores with Lloyd's annotations are included in the collection. Many of the scores were used by George Lloyd when conducting concerts or recordings of his music, and they frequently contain markings that provide valuable information on the performance.
You can find out more about George Lloyd and his music on the webpages of the George Lloyd Society and Lloyd Music Ltd.
04 June 2013
Benjamin Britten exhibition launched at the British Library
On Friday we launched a new exhibition on Benjamin Britten in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Library. This free exhibition runs until 15 September 2013 and is part of the international Britten 100 festivities marking the centenary of the composer's birth.
In the exhibition, Poetry in Sound: the music of Benjamin Britten, we explore the literary influences on Britten's music, from William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, as well as some of the political and musical influences that shaped his work.
In addition to several of Britten's own draft manuscripts, including The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and War Requiem, we've included photographs, rare literary and historical printed material and unpublished sound recordings. Over the coming days, I shall be blogging about some of the key exhibits on display.
To mark Britten's centenary, we have also digitised all 42 of the autograph manuscripts of Britten in the British Library's collection. The manuscripts are now freely available for everyone to see and study on our Digitised Manuscripts website. (You just need to type 'Britten' in the search box to find them.) We are very grateful to all the copyright holders for allowing us to make the manuscripts available online.
The Library is also staging a series of related Britten events and performances. For more details of the exhibition and events, please see www.bl.uk/britten.
22 May 2013
Wagner goes online at 200
22 May 2013 is the 200th birthday of probably the most influential composer ever to have lived, Wilhelm Richard Wagner. The British Library is celebrating this anniversary with a study day on Wagner the Writer as well as a complete performance of the Ring cycle – without music! We have also taken the opportunity to publish those of Wagner’s original manuscripts which happen to reside in the Library on our Digitised Manuscripts website. Since many of them are extremely fragile and cannot normally be issued in our Reading Rooms, we are delighted to make high-resolution digital images of them freely available on the internet. They include some pivotal works in the development of Wagner’s career, and shed fascinating light on the working practices of the master of the music drama.
The British Library’s collection of printed editions of Wagner’s music is near comprehensive, with more than 2000 publications at the last count. Put together with a similar number of books about him, and perhaps 20,000 recordings, this makes the Library a major research resource for anyone with a serious interest in Wagner.
In this context, the Library holds only a minute amount of original material written in Wagner’s own hand, and most of it comes from early in his career. Nevertheless, it sheds much light on the way in which Wagner composed, and the means by which he honed his genius as a writer and a composer.
The earliest manuscript in the Library’s collections is a draft piano score of an orchestral Overture in E minor, composed when Wagner was 18 years old. It is one of his very first surviving compositions: although it is number 24 in the chronological catalogue ‘WWV’, many of the earlier pieces (from the age of 13 onwards) are now lost. It was performed in the Hoftheater in Leipzig on 17 February 1832 as the overture to King Enzio, a play by Ernst Raupach.
Other very early works include an Entr’acte tragique in D major (WWV 25 no.1), for which there is a draft in short score as well as a fragmentary full score. In November 1832, Wagner’s first symphony was performed in Prague. His full score of the work is lost (though a copyist’s score survives at Bayreuth, and the work was published after his death), but Wagner made a piano duet version of the first movement. Incidental music for a festival play to welcome in the new year of 1835 was performed in Magdeburg and provides further evidence of Wagner’s early involvement with the stage.
Wagner’s three early forays into the medium of opera show us the starting points of the process which was to develop into the masterworks of his maturity. Die Feen (The Fairies) is based on a play by Carlo Gozzi and fits very much into the German Romantic tradition of Weber and his contemporary Heinrich Marschner. Already we see the composer working on drafts of the text separately from the music. Das Liebesverbot (The Love-Ban) derives from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and is modelled much more closely on French and Italian opera, especially Auber and Bellini. The opera was first performed in Magdeburg on 29 March 1836, and Wagner subsequently revised his German libretto in a densely-written French translation, in the hope of securing a production in Paris: this manuscript includes the draft of a letter to Meyerbeer (now lost) asking for his help in doing so. As well as the almost complete libretti in both languages, there is a draft score of the Overture and sketches for several later sections, some in pencil and others in ink, usually conceived on one or two staves. These initial ideas were later worked into a draft score, which in turn led to the complete full score. For his next stage work, Wagner turned more directly to Meyerbeer for inspiration: Rienzi is grand opera writ large. Although intended for the Paris stage, it eventually received its first performance in Dresden on 20 October 1842. The staging requirements were too onerous for the Hoftheater, and this detailed memorandum suggests means of coping with a smaller chorus. Unfortunately the full scores of all three of these operas are now lost: they were among the manuscripts acquired by Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday.
Wagner’s compositional journey towards the Gesamtkunstwerk was gradual, and these early operas were followed by other occasional pieces, including his Overture ‘Polonia’, written in 1836 as a reminiscence of his time as a student in Leipzig when he befriended Polish soldiers fleeing from the fall of Warsaw to the Russians in September 1831, who passed through Leipzig to exile in France.
Another nationalist overture was written in 1837, this time for the Philharmonic Society in London, which declined to perform the work on grounds of its ‘being written on a Theme which is here considered common place’: Rule Britannia. Other curiosities include settings of poems by Victor Hugo, a chorus for a vaudeville and an instrumental arrangement of a popular number from an opera by Halévy.
The only work of Wagner’s maturity for which manuscripts are kept in the British Library is The Flying Dutchman. One consequence of the revolutionary principle of organic unity which Wagner first displayed in this work was that the overture continues straight into the music of Act I, as the curtain rises. In order to make the overture performable as a separate concert piece, Wagner therefore wrote an alternative ending, which he attached to this copy score of the overture. He also planned French translations of some of the work.
Finally, there are various letters by Wagner in the Library’s collections. Among these one stands out in particular: it is a letter written in January 1849 to Baron Ferdinand von Biedenfeld. Wagner outlines his belief in the interdependence of poetry and music, the natural consequence of which is that music drama is the highest possible form of art. These ideas were to find more extended exposure in his famous treatise on The Artwork of the Future — and of course would be manifested in the great works of his final years.
Almost all of these manuscripts were apparently collected by Leopold, Graf von Thun und Hohenstein (1811–88), Austrian minister for culture and a keen musical amateur. In 1887 they were acquired by the collector Albert Cohn, and in 1937 were sold to the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. His magnificent collection of musical, literary and historical autographs was presented to the British Library by his heirs in 1986, and this is the first stage in a project supported by the Derek Butler Trust to make all of the manuscripts in this remarkable collection freely available online.
To see a full list of all the digitised Wagner manuscripts, search for "Wagner" on www.bl.uk/manuscripts. For more information on other bicentenary events, including the British Library Study Day and complete reading of the Ring cycle, visit www.wagner200.co.uk.
Music blog recent posts
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- Beethoven and Zweig
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- Conserving creativity – the case of Beethoven’s ‘Kafka’ sketch miscellany
- Digitised Manuscripts from the Royal Music Library
- Celebrating Beethoven: a new online exhibition on Discovering Music
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- Digitising Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at the Birmingham Oratory
- Digitised Music Manuscripts
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