We were very saddened to hear of the death of Steve Martland, one of the most innovative British composers of his generation. Born in Liverpool in 1959, he studied composition with Louis Andriessen in The Hague. In many of his works one can hear the influence of American minimalism refracted through Andriessen's lens, but with many new aspects thrown in for good measure: a relentless rhythmic drive, very often amplified wind instruments, elements of jazz and rock, and a disciplined concern for overall form which perhaps owes something to his friend Michael Tippett.

The British Library acquired all of Steve Martland's music manuscripts in 2009: he was determined at that time to continue composing only on screen, not on paper. They offer a fascinating glimpse into his compositional laboratory, with extensive correspondence, research notes, sketches, rhythmic plans and draft scores preceding the final score, always meticulously neat and precise. This rich archive should provide much food for thought for future generations of researchers and musicians seeking to draw new inspiration from his legacy.

Steve Martland's masterpiece is Babi Yar, for very large orchestra. It was first performed on 22 November 1983 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and a week later by the St Louis Symphony Orchestra. The score was extensively revised for a later performance in Glasgow. This page from the full score shows the extensive revisions - with a new bottle of correction fluid for every page! - as well as a characteristically abrasive, defiant instruction to the horns: 'VERY WILD! Bells in the air. Grace notes as fast as possible to create a wild, blurred, "wailing"'.

Steve Martland, Babi Yar, full score. Copyright Schott Music Ltd. BL MS Mus. 1783

As 1 May is May Day, we thought we would give you a glimpse of the Traditional Music in England collection available on BL Sounds. You can find many recordings of May Day celebrations such as this one recorded in the streets of Padstow on May Day in 1976.

Folklorist Peter Kennedy also recorded May Day celebrations. Here is an actuality recording of a May Day procession in Castleton, Derbyshire, England. You can hear the horses hooves march by to the tune of the brass band.

The Blue Ribbon 'Obby 'Oss: Market Square, Padstow, Cornwall, May Day (1 May), year not known (probably late 1940s); Photograph by Pictorial Press, London.

1 May is also a day for celebrating the international labour movement. Here are a few labour songs from around the world:

These women and girls, recorded in Uganda by Peter Cooke in 1964, are returning from doing their day’s work which would probably either consist of collecting grass or roofing.

The musicians and singers performing this song work in farming. In this recording, made by Rolf Killius in 2001, you can hear them describing the strains of the long agricultural year working in the barren fields in the mountains.

Our last recording was made by Peter Kennedy in 1953 at the Portland Stone Quarry in England. It was made for a film on the songs and work practices in the quarry entitled “Quarrymen’s Work Songs”. This is part of a group of work songs made by Kennedy, accompanied by the sounds of the work being carried out.

Identifying a musical instrument just from a recording can be quite problematic. A recently heard recording, soon to be available online, was one such example. The recording was made by South African composer, Kevin Volans, at a Zulu wedding on the 26th June, 1977, where a male vocalist was accompanied by some kind of bowed stringed instrument. Was it a bowed musical bow? The sound was reminiscent of some other Nguni musical bows we have in the collections but we'd not come across a Zulu instrument with this quite eerie - almost metallic - timbre and, besides, the pitch could be varied more than would be expected of a musical bow:

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Time to contact a fellow ethnomusicologist and expert in Zulu musical bows, Astrid Treffry-Goatley, who worked on our David Rycroft collection of South African music recordings. Astrid told us that the  instrument is probably a type of half tube zither, the Zulu name for which is the isicelekeshe. She checked this with a Zulu musical bow player based in Inkamana Abbey in Vryheid, Brother Clement Sithole, who confirmed the name. This instrument comprises a half tube of bamboo with a crushed paraffin can attached at one end. The paraffin can acts as a resonator (hence the eerie metallic sound). The string and bow are often both of oxtail hair and the pitch is altered by pressing the backs of the fingers against the string.

The name of this instrument varies from region to region - another name for it is the segaba. You can see it being played here:

 

The sound of this clip and our recording are a match - and we have an example of this instrument online already, because yet another word for segaba or isicelekeshe is segankuru. You can hear John Brearley's recording of the segankuru on our sounds website.

Detective work of this kind is a lot of fun, providing great opportunities for engaging with scholars and musicians all over the world.

Tweets by @BL_WorldTrad

You can now hear the recorded interviews of leading ethnomusicologists on the British Library “Sounds” website. These interviews were made by Dr Carolyn Landau from 2010 to 2012.

The interviews offer an insight into the researchers’ musical upbringing and education and what drew them to the field of ethnomusicology in the first place. The interviews also discuss the researchers’ perceptions of ethnomusicology as they began their careers and how the subject is viewed now.

Here’s a short clip of one of the interviews, from John Baily, originally a psychologist who studied under the late John Blacking at Queen's University Belfast.

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In this clip, Baily talks about the influence of Blacking on his research into the music of Afghanistan. Baily goes on to discuss whether, for example, ethnomusicologists need to have “big ears” – in other words, whether they need the transcribing skills of the composer Béla Bartók (pictured). If you're interested in seeing handwritten examples of Bartók’s transcriptions, some of them can be found in the Milman Parry Collection, Harvard University.

As well as hearing the interviews, you can also hear the recordings that some of these ethnomusicologists deposited with the British Library. For example, Peter Cooke made recordings of Ugandan music and Donald Tayler & Brian Moser made recordings in Columbia.Tweets by @BL_WorldTrad

In my last post, I offered a selection of three short recordings that form part of the ethnographic wax cylinder collections housed and available for listening at the British Library.

Coming towards the end of processing this 3500 strong collection, this follow-up post offers some further musical highlights that caught my ear whilst listening to thousands of recordings. I think they are of some significance, offering good examples of some of the earliest (and pioneering) music recordings taken from various locations around the world, and are therefore worth sharing.

Collection Samples

1) C37/1590, English Folk Dance and Song Society Collection. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) is one of the leading folk development organisations in the UK with a history dating back to 1898. This recording is one of 106 cylinders (on long-term loan to the British Library from the EFDSS) comprising several smaller British folk music collections (Welsh, Scottish and English) recorded by Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, and others. Recorded in Herefordshire, England, in 1908 by Cecil James Sharp (1859-1924), this recording is in two parts. The first part is a male vocal solo sung by an unknown performer. The performance is entitled ‘there is an ale house (died for love)’. The second part is a solo fiddle performance, possibly by John Locke, of a hornpipe: a music/dance form popular in Britain from the late 17^th century.

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2) C51/2611, Northcott Whitridge Thomas Collection. Thomas (1868–1936) was a British government anthropologist who conducted field research in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915, recording songs, music and the spoken word onto hundreds of wax cylinders. This example was recorded in the Kaba, Akoko region of Nigeria by Thomas on the 4 March 1910: a spirited male vocal group performance.

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3) C51/2853, Northcott Whitridge Thomas Collection. Another sample from the Thomas Collection recorded in the Ugwashi Uku, Ibo region of Nigeria on the 25 November 1912. This is a female vocal group with leader, accompanied by clapping.

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 4) C72/820, Fox Strangways Cylinder Collection. This collection of 101 high quality recordings were made in India between 1910 and 1911 by British ethnomusicologist, Arthur Fox Strangeways. This is a good example of Shahnai (double-reed conical woodwind instrument of North India) music with drum accompaniment that was recorded in India around 1910 by Fox Strangways. It features a performance of Rag Sarang, Rag Adachautal and four thekas (repeated patterns of rhythmic strokes played on the drums).

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5) C664/641, Berlin Demonstration Cylinder Collection. This collection is an early anthology of traditional music compiled by the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin. It contains 107 recordings made between 1903 and 1913 in various locations including China, Japan, Java, Borneo, Africa, Russia, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. This example was recorded in East Africa (date unknown) and is of a 'waNyamwezi drinking song' performed by an unaccompanied male vocalist. 

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Work Completed

The general approach taken to working on each wax cylinder collection was, firstly, to familiarise myself with previous work completed by a number of engineers and curators at the British Library. This involved delving into paper files, correspondences and technical reports that have amassed since work began on the collections in 1994. Secondly, this information was checked against existing catalogue entries and online sources for consistency and accuracy, and where necessary entries were updated. Thirdly, I listened to the majority of the 3500 previously digitised recordings and checked the contents against the catalogue entries and paper files. On occasion, I requested that the original cylinders were re-dubbed by engineers at the British Library as the files were missing, or they had been dubbed at the wrong playing speed. This work was done on a universal cylinder player build at the British Library for dubbing the ethnographic wax cylinder collections:

 

The British Library's Universal Cylinder Player

Fourthly, technical metadata (e.g. dubbing speeds, dubbing dates, filenames and engineer’s names) was added to catalogue entries. Lastly, after some final consistency and accuracy checks, the cylinder collections were uploaded onto the British Library catalogue where the documentation can be viewed and the recordings are available for listening by the public.

Further sample recordings taken from wax cylinder collections are also for public access at sounds.bl.uk.

 

 

The past weeks have been busy in the British Library’s music department, with negotiations taking place over the acquisition of several twentieth-century composers' music manuscripts. We’ll be providing news of these in future posts.

It’s our policy to acquire, preserve and make available to researchers the original manuscripts and papers of major British composers, as well as the papers of other pre-eminent musicians and musical organisations active in Britain. We also acquire, where the opportunity arises at a reasonable cost, representative manuscripts of important foreign composers.

Autograph sketch by Beethoven for his 'Egmont' overture, acquired as part of the Stefan Zweig Collection

Sometimes we acquire music manuscripts direct from a composer. In other cases we acquire his or her archive of manuscript scores, correspondence and other papers as a bequest on death, or as a result of a sale. In some fortunate instances, the archive will contain a complete or virtually complete collection of the composer’s original manuscripts.

But there are other composers’ archives for which the story is very different: their manuscripts may have been dispersed during their lifetime, given to dedicatees, friends or publishers, or sold, and some may have been lost altogether. One of the pleasures of working at the British Library is seeing some of these dispersed music collections reassembled – brought together for the first time since they left the hands of their creator, and made available for researchers and musicians to consult.

Sometimes this assembling of a corpus of a composer’s works takes place over many years. And, of course, it is not always possible to rebuild a single collection of an individual’s works. Some manuscripts may remain in private hands, or be owned by other libraries. This is where digital technology come into its own. The opportunity now exists for dispersed collections to be reunited virtually on the web. A pioneer in this field is Bach Digital, which brings together digitised versions of Bach's autograph manuscripts as well as copyists' manuscripts.

In some cases, however, it has been possible to reunite most of a creator’s original manuscripts physically.  Such is the case with the music manuscripts of Robert Simpson (1921-1997). Simpson was one of the most important composers of symphonies to emerge in Britain in the second half of the 20th century.  He was, in addition, a prolific writer on music and a BBC producer.  Simpson produced a wide variety of works (11 symphonies, 15 string quartets, numerous pieces for brass, and other chamber and keyboard works). With a deep interest in Scandinavian music, he also brought Carl Nielsen to public attention in Britain.

Carl Nielsen, whose music was promoted in Britain by Robert Simpson

After Robert Simpson’s death, his widow presented many of his music manuscripts to the British Library. Over the following decade, and thanks to the efforts of Mrs Simpson and of the Robert Simpson Society, almost all of Simpson’s other autograph manuscripts have now been deposited at the British Library.

Full description of the Robert Simpson Collection (PDF file)

The Robert Simpson Collection is now fully catalogued and is available to be consulted by researchers at the British Library. 

The cataloguing of the Malcolm Sargent Archive has now generated over 4,000 individual catalogue records of Sargent’s general correspondence. Since my last blog post, coverage has been extended to the year 1958, by which time Sargent had become one of the most celebrated public figures in Britain.

Correspondence from 1948-58 covers a number of significant landmarks in Sargent’s musical life, including the Opening Ceremony of the 1948 Olympic Games, the Festival of Britain, and Sargent’s appointment and tenure as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Researchers can benefit from the fact that the files of the 1950s contain significantly more carbon copies of Sargent’s own letters than are preserved in earlier years, providing a clearer view of his personal outlook.

This includes, for example, Sargent’s opinions on performance practice, which are often expressed in correspondence with music critics. Typical is an exchange with Frank Howes of The Times in May 1957 in which Sargent provides cogent arguments for his addition of several instruments to the score of Messiah, including horns (they were used once by Handel himself), clarinets and flutes (had they been available for Handel, he would have used them), and piano (‘it is difficult to understand people who really like the sound of the harpsichord’).

Whilst Howes is sympathetic to the co-existence of a practical ‘Victorian’ and more historically informed 20th-century performance practice, Peter Pears is less tolerant of Sargent’s practicality. ‘Surely it is not necessary to butcher it so?' he asks in dismay on seeing the cuts to be made in a forthcoming performance of the St Matthew Passion, believing them to destroy the dramatic narrative. Dismissive of such high-mindedness, Sargent sees nothing wrong with a version originally used by Walford Davies, and besides, ‘there is always the scramble for buses afterwards’.

If accounts of Sargent often imply vanity in his cultivation of a showman image and reputation as a social climber, the correspondence also reflects his benevolence as a patron, president or fund-raiser for a wide range of charities, and shows he often took a surprising personal interest in the fortunes of individuals unknown to him. Following his broadcast appeal for the RSPCA, for instance, he receives a letter from a Devonshire woman who has adopted a horse to save it from slaughter. On hearing she cannot afford to buy hay for ‘Gay Marion’ for the winter months, Sargent donates £5 for two consecutive years. On another occasion he responds to an appeal from a blind charity by funding private music lessons for the two sons of a blind man in Dorset.

Some requests are too presumptuous. There is no response from Sargent to a Falmouth mother who seeks a deposit to obtain a £2000 loan to build a bungalow for her family, necessary because she has no windows in her kitchen (‘I know a builder’, she reassures him). Likewise, he has no time to examine the work of a man who announces he has sacrificed his profession and devoted 14 years of his life to the composition of an oratorio (the benefit of which is ‘after years of constant attunement to this vibration of sound … I could quite easily compose four oratorios a year’).

Sargent’s sense of Christian duty is less sympathetic to appeals of a political nature. He refuses a request from Sir Steuart Wilson to sign a letter voicing opposition to the Communist-sympathetic Musicians Organisation for Peace. Likewise, he declines to become a member of the League of Empire Loyalists after they support his objection to changing the words of the second verse of the National Anthem: rather he believes it to be a mistake to shout aggressively one’s patriotism, especially as a frequent traveller. He also declines to support an appeal for African American singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, stating that, as he does not know why America has blacklisted Robeson, he has not the ‘slightest justification in taking part in any disturbance on the matter’ (only belied by the fact he has written and underlined the word ‘Communist’ on the letter.)

 

Over 1000 recordings of music recorded by John Brearley in Botswana, primarily among San or Bushmen people in the Kalahari, have been made available on the British Library Sounds website.

Oba plays the zhoma (pluriarc) while children look on.

Recording of Oba playing the zhoma and singing.

John Brearley’s collection began with his first trip to Botswana in July 1982 to investigate and record traditional music, and to observe the extent to which the influence of radio and recorded music had interrupted the use of traditional instruments. In particular he wanted to learn about the music of the Basarwa (San / Bushmen) and so the collection includes recordings from a range of Bushmen groups including the !Kung, Nharo and Makoko, and features performances of healing dances, games, and instrumental tunes on a range of indigenous instruments. John returned to the Kalahari many times from 1982 to 2007.

Women playing tandiri [dakateri] musical bow

Recording of women playing tandiri, 1989

During his travels in northern Botswana John came into contact with the anthropologist Hans-Joachim Heinz. Heinz had also made recordings of music and ceremonies, which he deposited at the British Library. These are also available online. Heinz also made films during his research in Botswana. Copies of these are in the British Library's collections as C312.

John wrote a report of his very first trip in 1982 which was published in Botswana Notes and Records (volume 16). This includes details of instrument tunings and musical transcriptions of brief extracts from the recordings.