NATIONALISM IN MUSIC

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXV, Issue 160, 22 June 1935, Page 14

NATIONALISM IN MUSIC

A Plea for the Home-made

“ART OF THE HUMBLE”

The signature, “Clause Debussy, Musician Francais,” stirred the composer's biographer tn Grove’s Dictionary —an English Doctor of Marie-to talk of “outbursts of a sort of posing ireskishness” and “the childish nationality, plus eighteenthcentury typography, of the late sonatas.” Tnat was eight or nine years ago. To-day we have another and more famous Doctor of Music, Ralph Vaughan Williams, proclaiming nationalism as the only root from which great music can spring, in his book "National Music.” L'sing the material of some lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, be has now written a book in which young composers are warned that music, like charity, begins at home and that if they want to be universal they must first oi all learn to be local.

Debussy wa* so proud of the musical tradition of his country that Gabriele d’Annunzio called him “Claude de France.” No one has thought of calling Vaughan Williams “Ralph of England” but no less than Debussy he deserve# such a title. “We are laughed at in England,’’ he tells his readers, “for our bourgeoisie—-I am proud to be described as a bourgeois. 1 remember a young exquisite saying to me that he didn’t like Bach ‘because he was so bourgeois.’ I am not at all sure that is not a true criticism and that is why Bach appeals especially to me and my fellow bourgeois.”

Again, when told that foreign critics find English music “smug” be reptiea that he is delighted to hear ”... it suggested to me that our English composers had some secret which is at present for our care only. That it is not also for others does not distress me. One day perhaps our ‘native woodnotes wild’ may cross the frontier hand in hand with Shakespeare, but they will not do so unless they are true to the land of their birth.” STRAW IN HIS BOOTS. The highly critical Peter Warlock once pointed out Vaughan William#, whom he greatly admired, to Cecil Gray at a Promenade concert: ‘‘That big ntan there, standing by himself, who looks as if bo ought to have straw in his boots.” And on another occasion, after a performance of Vaughan Williams’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Warlock exclaimed; "A truly splendid work I You know I’ve only one thing to say against this composer’s music: it is all just a little too much like * cow looking over a gate.” One is quit# sure that the composer takes both straw and cow as tremendous compliments. He would never hesitate in a choice between the pastoral and th# cosmopolitan. But Vaughan Williams emphatically disclaims artistic chauvinism. Music, to him, is abov# all others the art of the bumble. T%# best way of serving the common cause is to be most ourselves. Buch, whom he believe* to be the greatest of all composers, is taken as the supreme example. And indeed who could be at once more universal and more local than the man who## work was built on the solid foundation# of the organ music of his Teutonic predecessors and lhe popular hymn tunes of his own people ? To use again the author’s words, Bach was to outward appearance no more than one of a fraternity of town organists whose business it was to provide the necessary music for the great occasions in church and city. And incidentally we are reminded that it takes generations of smaller men to prepare the way for th# genius who comes alway s at the end and never at the beginning of a period. Without the “unknown musician” where would the art of music be? THE FOLK SONG. As every musician knows, Vaughan Williams has always practised that which he preaches. Just as in th# works of Bach we hear the singing oi generations of Lutheran congregation# echoing among Gothic arches, so in the music of the Englishman we catch the lilt and cadences of countless forgotten singers of the English countryside. Nationalism finds its voice and its simplest musical expression in the folk song and of ah English composers none is better fitted than Vaughan Williams to discuss this fascinating and debatable subject. “Debatable” becau»e nationality will out, even with composers tn whose music there is no echo of folk song—Debussy, Elgar and Doline, for examples. Again, oa the English sdie of the Channel people are generally astonished to hear that Continental listeners like the English flavour of, say, Lord Berner and Eugene Goossens. And we have one of the younger English composers proclaiming that the “particular type of celf-eonscious Englishry practiced by the folk-song composers is itsell curiously un-English.”

Vaughan Williams, however, is convinced that the root of a nation’# music is its folk song and that the supreme composer can come only out of a musical nation. Too much stress, he thinks, is laid on originality end personality in music. Thus the critical judgments are independent of the ordinary conventional criteria. For instance, ho prefers Stravinsky the nationalist, “turning homeward to h>« native Russia,” to Stravinsky the cosmopolitan out to ’Shock the bourgeois. “I believe.” he says, “that it is in ‘Les Noccs’ and the 'Sinfonie des Psaumes' that we find the real and great Stravinsky which will remain fresh and alive when all the clevernesses of his instrumental works have become stale from familiarity.” One fears, however, that in spite of thetr home address, these two works will continue to shock the bourgeois for a lone time yet. This book is :m arresting and illuminating confession of musical faith, the keynotes of winch are sincerity, simplicity and serenity—the three watchwords. :><■ the author tells us, of al! great music itself.