Havergal Brian on Music Volume One: British Music Malcolm MacDonald, editor London: Toccata Press . 1986. 438 pp. Available directly from publisher. ISBN 0907689191 , 0907689205 (paperback) I suppose most people see the cultural landscape as a feudal one - a lone, high tower representing the great artist, dominating a plain inhabited by everybody else. We talk of the Age of Beethoven or perhaps of Brahms and Wagner or Haydn and Mozart and in so doing get a rather distorted view of what really went on. Britain for the longest time seemed peculiarly susceptible to the inability to hold more than one composer in its head at any one time. Elgar crowded out his contemporaries. Vaughan Williams overshadowed several interesting composers. Britten did the same, blotting out even such formidable figures as Walton and Tippett. Britain, of course, isn't alone in this. For some reason, people want to know the Absolute Best, rather than the merely wonderful. The concept of absolute best holds almost no aesthetic attraction or interest for me. Further, I find it without any valid practical consequence. If I listen to only the Absolute Best, I wind up listening to only one work, a dismal thought. I view good composers as individuals. In my ignorance, I hold Vorisek as a fabulous composer, whose music gives me something I like that's not what any other composer's music gives me. To call one better than another is like asking me which of my family I like best. Havergal Brian lived during one of the most vital periods of British music, the so-called British Renaissance, which scholars tend to date from Parry and Stanford. Fine composers cover the ground, and not just the big names: Delius, Ireland, Bridge, Holst, Leigh, Chagrin, Cooke, Goossens, Delius, Bax, Arnold, Alwyn, Addison, Leighton, Rubbra, Berners, Clarke, Joseph, Dyson, Sorabji, Smyth, Foulds, Scott, Maconchy, Grainger, Jacob, Frankel, Searle, Rawsthorne, Maw, Brian himself, and the list goes on. Brian heard a staggering amount of it, as well as composers from the continent. He recognized the genius of Mahler and Bruckner as soon as the early 1900s. On one side or the other of the edge of poverty all his life and with no substantial recognition of his music until near its end, he made his meager living as a musical journalist and copyist. The journalism got him free tickets to performances, and the reviews provide the proof that he went to as many as he could. | |
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