Caroline Shaw’s new album Orange, performed by Attacca Quartet, is full of surprises. 

The album cover shows an orange with leaves still attached, sitting in a beautifully composed shot on a grey background – an emoji brought to life. You almost expect to see ‘ce n’est pas une orange’ neatly painted underneath. And Magritte might well have approved of the playfulness in Shaw’s music, which revels in sudden juxtapositions and draws on surprising canonic references and reconstructions. In ‘Punctum’, a chorale tune steps in like a beautiful sad ghost. 

The condensed freedom of these pieces puts them in the realm of the chamber music ‘Phantasy’ ideal, once espoused by Walter Willson Cobbett – though even he might have baulked at Shaw’s daring.

In her notes, Shaw uses the metaphor of a ‘garden’, tended to by herself and the quartet, and writes that the album is ‘a celebration of the simple, immediate, unadorned beauty of a natural, everyday, familiar thing’. Which is lovely – I like gardens – but that might make it sound a bit zen and meditative, when this music bursts with vitality. If this is a garden, it might be one experienced through a child’s eyes – unburdened by expectations and endlessly imaginative in its responses.  

There is certainly an appealing directness and woody wholesomeness to many of Shaw’s ideas, which seem to grow from a deeply-bedded understanding of the colours of the string quartet, the grainy physicality of bowing and its sympathetic vibrations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the arcing rainbow of rich, widely spaced chords which unfold magnificently in The Beech Tree, the final movement of ‘Plan And Elevation’. 

In such moments, the zesty naturalness of the orange is an apt symbol. This is music with a bright zing that can’t be ignored. And it’s hard to imagine that the album could ever be performed by anything other than a string quartet, so surely is it crafted for its chosen tools, and so resolutely is it all executed by Attacca. 

Orange is a release that, whatever you make of it, is certainly never boring.

Listen on Youtube here, other streaming options are here.

A concert at the Basingstoke Anvil, copyright Anvil Arts, shared here with their permission.

    Simon Brackenborough

On the 3rd May 1994, Richard Hickox conducted the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra for the opening night of a brand new concert hall. Elgar led the bill, with his Enigma Variations and cello concerto, and the celebration of new beginnings was marked with a world premiere – John Tavener’s Theophany.

Top classical venues – designed to optimise orchestral sound – are usually found in big cities, but this 1400-seat hall was built in the centre of Basingstoke. The Hampshire market town had been used as a byword for provincial irrelevance in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore. Expanded into a ‘London Overspill’ town in the 1960s, its name is still often evoked as an example of soulless modern living – a suburban pointlessness.

The new hall was named ‘the Anvil’. While that sort-of described its bulky exterior, it also promised to put fiery creativity into the heart of this community – and a lot of noise. On that first night, the town’s Choral Society gave a rendition of Verdi’s Anvil Chorus.

This unlikely venue has since gained remarkable accolades from the likes of Sir Simon Rattle, who dubbed it ‘one of the finest concert halls in the country’. And this week, the Philharmonia will celebrate its 25th birthday, reprising the Elgar concerto with star cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and a new commission by Samantha Fernando.

As someone who grew up in the area, concerts at the Anvil were part of my musical education, and its anniversary has made me reflect on how lucky Basingstoke is to have it. Could the Anvil, I thought, be a useful example of what first-rate classical music can – or cannot – do for a town with a low cultural profile?

Basingstoke towers seen from the train station.

In the 1940s, George Orwell wrote that ‘the place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads’. And if you haven’t lived somewhere like Basingstoke, you may not appreciate the weirdness of this existence.

While pleasant enough and with decent employment, its massive 60s expansion left it with little sense of identity. The post-war influx means many families have no ancestral ties to the area – mine included. There’s an unquestioned sense that, circumstances permitting, you could just as easily live elsewhere.

The overspill development also bulldozed much of its historic centre and rural character. It feels surreal to think of Basingstoke with a cattle market and stables – but it existed within living memory, where now there’s a heaving mall, multi-story car park, and office buildings.

A headline from 1962 hailed Basingstoke as the south’s ‘first town of the motor-car age’. And with its immense ‘Ringway’ road dotted with roundabouts, housing estates and retail parks, driving lessons are an essential rite of passage around here.

I remember practicing in the quiet suburbs. I was amused to find that, lacking any local history to draw on, the estate roads had been named with themes. I had fun spotting authors, painters, and composers. It’s a fascinating idea – that you can just knit the arts into the fabric of a blank community. Somehow, Gershwin Road and Ravel Close just seemed to emphasise the artificiality of it all.

In a piece for Prospect last year, Owen Hatherley said a visit to Basingstoke had once disturbed him – there was ‘no there there’. But half a century on from its transformation, he looked at its bizarre mix of office architecture and asked if overspill towns now have ‘their own story to tell’.

Similarly, I was intrigued to find out how the Anvil, as a 90s civic project, fitted into the bigger story of Basingstoke’s modernity.

Vue cinema and the Dallas-esque Churchill Plaza.

In the town library, I trawled the microfilm archive of the Basingstoke Gazette. The idea of a ‘civic hall’ to replace the old town hall (now a museum) had been brewing for some time, but the big question with such projects is funding.

The Anvil’s case is peculiar, emerging from complex details of local authority finance. The Gazette cited the borough council’s early repayment of a loan, ‘reinvestment interest’ and ‘future capital financing resources’ as bringing a windfall to cover over half the £12m cost. Another source has since claimed that this arrangement exploited a loophole with the Public Works Loan Board – one the government closed soon afterwards.

However it worked out, the council decided to build a hall to reflect the modern town, and which could boast world-class acoustics. The design they eventually revealed was a combined effort of RHWL Architects and Arup – the acousticians for Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall.

When announcing the plans, council leader Stephen Reid declared the building would foster a much-needed sense of pride:

For some time we have been the butt of jokes from people saying there is nothing to do in Basingstoke. People must never be allowed to say that again. The hall will be in use by day and evening and will be a magnet to draw people into the borough, promoting businesses and trade. 

In 1992, a scale model was put on display. But then, audaciously, the Gazette published a drawing by a local architect the council had turned down. His alternative sketch outlined an elegant neo-classical front, and a square with a statue of Winston Churchill. Depicted beside the council’s angular design, the aesthetic contrast couldn’t have been greater, and readers were asked to write in and say which they preferred.

Across the letters page, all hell broke loose.

‘Please go with the ancient design and spare us any more monstrosities’, pleaded one reader. ‘Another eyesore for the town’ raged another. The council’s plan was ‘visual torture bordering on the inhumane’. It was a ‘gun-boat’, a ‘battleship’, ‘something out of a space film’. Perhaps inevitably, one sought help from the carbuncle crusader himself: Prince Charles.

Part of the sketch published by the Gazette.

When it came to being the butt of jokes, it seems many felt a barrage of insensitive architecture was precisely the problem. One reader compared the hall to a recently-installed ‘triumphal gateway’: ‘what are the decision makers of this town up to? As a long-standing ‘native’ of this area I resent our town being ridiculed in this way’.

Others worried about parking, or whether Basingstoke even needed such a venue – ‘it is unlikely we shall get the Berlin Phil (or Jason Donovan) more than once a year!’

But the objections came to nothing. The council robustly defended their plan. A Labour councillor sent the Gazette a withering response: ‘there is no comparison between the two schemes; one is properly thought through […] the other is a cartoon. It is like comparing The Laughing Cavalier and Captain Pugwash’.

Having nailed its colours to the mast of modernity, Basingstoke was not going back. But it seems the furore of the neo-classical sketch had shown residents a glimmer of something longed for. Perhaps the more traditional town they had lost; perhaps a more respected town that might have been.

The plant tower ‘beak’ at the rear of the Anvil, one of its most criticised features.

There will always be people who loathe modern buildings. But what’s it like to run concerts in a place like Basingstoke? I met up with Matthew Cleaver, who manages the Anvil’s classical series. He’s worked there from the very beginning.

‘It was a really bold decision to build an international-standard concert hall’, he told me over coffee. ‘And at that time Basingstoke was even smaller, so from that point of view it was a massive leap of faith, and full marks to them for doing it.’

There was personal enthusiasm for classical music in the council, but they also saw a gap in the market. ‘There were various preliminary studies…which pointed out that actually, between London and Poole or Bristol or Brighton, there is nothing, there’s no large-scale classical music’.

In that case, I asked him, what percentage of the classical audience actually live in the borough? He estimated just under half. ‘The majority is from outside…but not by much. We know, for instance, that we get people who will buy the entire concert series from Bristol, from Oxford, from Kingston, from Southampton’. These most loyal fans snap the dates up as soon as details are released. ‘They will arrange their holidays around when the brochure is coming out’.

But if the Anvil caters to an appetite for orchestral music in the affluent wider region, Basingstoke still benefits from their additional spending. A 2010 economic assessment calculated that the borough gains a net benefit of £5m from the Anvil – the report has even been translated into Chinese, for that booming market in concert halls.

‘We used to have regular visits from delegations from other towns like Norwich…from all over the place people used to come down to see what we were doing, how it could operate in a town of that size’. This ended after the 2008 financial crash, which caused a dip in classical ticket sales across the country, though since then ‘things have been slowly building back up’.

Now that government austerity has slashed many council budgets, the Anvil’s success would be harder than ever for equivalent towns to duplicate, although the geographic impacts are notoriously unequal. While the Anvil continues to be funded by a combination of borough, county and Arts Council money, just a few miles away in Newbury an arts centre is asking for donations of £150,000 a year, after West Berkshire withdrew funding.

Clearly Basingstoke is fortunate to have this standard of venue. And yet I realised that, for all the anger about the design, the hall is surprisingly easy to overlook. Step out of the train station and you’re confronted with the gaping maw of The Malls, writ large in hideous nightclub lettering. But the Anvil, built years afterwards, is shoe-horned off to the side with nothing like the same visual impact.

Its south side reveals the bar and a concert billboard, but here there’s a whizzing underpass, beyond which the shopping centre looms like a fortress, funnelling its enclosed visitors through the town. Consumerism came first in Basingstoke – a concert hall was an afterthought. And it shows.

The Anvil seen from the south.

Similarly underwhelming is how the Gazette covered the opening night in 1994. Perhaps naively, I was expecting a front-page spread, or at least a big-picture feature to celebrate this new £12m amenity. But no. The concert only got a modest write-up a few pages in. Controversy sells, but classical music? Not so much.

My chat with Matthew moved on to my frustrations with Basingstoke’s civic limitations. I described how the town felt atomised – you go from your little house, get into your car, and drive to town. He agreed. ‘This fragmentation is really endemic I think…between the different estates and the people who’ve been here all the time, and then the commuters and the people who work in Basingstoke…the Anvil is one of the few places in the town where people from all the different areas come together as a single unified public’.

The Malls.

It’s important not to become too jaded – Basingstoke is still a relatively prosperous and comfortable place to live. But like the Anvil’s visual presence, the town seems to be held back by big decisions taken decades ago.

Historian Rupert Willoughby has described promised footbridges across the Ringway that were never built. A popular swimming baths found itself cut off by the new road, and fell into disuse. As a keen cyclist, I know it’s like a giant moat you have to work out how to cross. Having failed to move on from its utopian vision of the motor age, Basingstoke seems disastrously ill-equipped for a low-carbon future, unless big changes happen soon.

But when it comes to the overhaul of the town’s historic centre, Willoughby positively seethes. ‘Basingstoke had all the charm and individuality of a Farnham or a Wallingford’, he writes. ‘It needed investment, and a certain amount of sympathetic development. It did not need to have its heart cut out.’

The shopping centre on Church Street. A Wesleyan chapel was demolished for its construction.

In 2002, a shiny new mall was built – its Newspeak name of ‘Festival Place’ demanding an excitement it doesn’t justify. Willoughby calls it ‘an unabashed shrine to consumerism, tending only to reinforce the view that Basingstoke is rampantly philistine’. And yet, amazingly, his book doesn’t even mention the Anvil at all. You can build a first-rate concert hall, it seems, but you can’t make people care.

Orwell’s prophecy went on to describe ‘a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine’. And it’s certainly no surprise that lots of young people leave Basingstoke for more exciting prospects.

Like many graduates, for me that meant London. When you arrive there, you discover streets dense with overlapping histories. You find walkable communities, exotic markets, frequent public transport, a bewildering arts scene, and neck-craning infrastructure that speaks of possibilities.

Public art under a bridge beside Festival Place.

And yet for all this, the Anvil shows that high-quality classical music can thrive anywhere, if there is an opportunity and a will. But it also needs institutional support.

For decades, an organisation called Basingstoke Concert Club brought brilliant chamber musicians to the town – thanks to them, I was able to hear artists like the Takács Quartet and Chloë Hanslip in a local church. But in 2012 they announced they were folding, after 57 years. Their sad demise was explained by ‘a slow decline in audience numbers, rising costs and the inability to recruit more help on the committee’.

The Waitrose/John Lewis.

Thankfully, the Anvil continues to be a valued community asset – showcasing touring comedians, bands, pantomime, youth orchestras and local choirs. It may be easy to overlook, but Matthew praises it as a neutral space – ‘almost anything can fit in there, and almost any audience can feel comfortable in there.’

Nonetheless, as it was designed to be a concert hall, I’m pleased to see that the anniversary night is sold out. And I’m also grateful that, before I left to study music at university, I had the privilege of being able to hear top-level orchestras here – something that most other towns of this size can’t offer.

It’s the small details I remember most. Long, drawn-out horn chords in Mahler’s sixth. Ghostly muted trumpets in The Rite of Spring. Off-beat pizzicato strings in Brahms. The gleaming sound of Crispian Steele-Perkins. A continuo player who should have practiced more, a pianist performing Mendelssohn with his leg in a cast. Sitting with my first girlfriend in the front row and hearing Richard Goode singing to himself as he played a Beethoven concerto. The Wagnerian opening of Christopher Rouse’s Der Gerettete Alberich. Esa-Pekka Salonen winding up the final crescendo of Turangalîla like a man possessed.

At the Basingstoke Anvil, I was taught classical music as a live – and lived – experience. With all its thrills, contingencies and imperfections. As a respected art-form, and as a social occasion. As simply a thing you do – even in a joke town.

With special thanks to Matthew Cleaver, and Anvil Arts. Details of the Anvil’s current concert series can be found here.

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The sun has come out in the south of England, just in time for the Easter weekend. While temperatures climb, Britain basks in the delay of its Brexit nightmare (long may it last!), and the newly-announced 2019 Proms season foretells warm musical nights to come. But Brexit’s woes have been replaced by a new focus on our climate crisis (thank you Extinction Rebellion), and if that leaves you feeling conflicted about the summery weather, you may share my mixed feelings about the Proms too. My response to the new season – in which I ask what the BBC thinks the whole thing is for – seems to have struck a chord with a few people.

A similarly hot topic in the music world right now is Michael Tippett, thanks to Oliver Soden’s new biography, published to wide acclaim and a surprising level of buzz for a book about a composer. This is reassuring, and Soden took to Twitter to thank the agent and publisher that gambled on him, when some fifty others had determined that classical music wasn’t a sell outside of its biggest names. And as it happens, I found myself at the Barbican this week to hear Tippett’s The Rose Lake performed by the BBCSO and Andrew Davis. This late work was also programmed by Rattle and the LSO last year, and certainly seems ripe for revival: a fascinating and mysterious score, it evokes the play of light on a pink-tinged body of water in Senegal. It boasts an impressive percussion section (including 36 rototoms!) and some haunting passages for unison strings. You can listen to it here.

Also new out this week is the latest Notes On Notes podcast, featuring Dr. Leah Broad and my (very much un-doctored) self. This time we discuss Amanda Maier – a highly gifted Swedish violinist and composer whose promising life was cut tragically short. Brave listeners will be treated to the sound of me reading some astonishingly sexist 19th-century reviews of her work! It’s early days on the podcast, but we’re both enjoying the experience, and any feedback is gratefully received. For our next episode, we recently went to ENO to see Jack The Ripper: The Women Of Whitechapel, so watch this space for our thoughts on it. (Even better, follow the podcast on Twitter or subscribe on iTunes).

Busy woman that she is, Leah has also been tweeting a fifty concertos thread, and it has introduced me (and various incredulous others) to this delightfully bonkers piece by Germaine Taillefaire, uploaded to YouTube from an obsolete recording. Among the other gems on that platform, there are new additions to the LSO’s Soundhub Showcase series. I particularly enjoyed Robyn Haigh’s fun ‘Aesop’, which features recorders aplenty (you may also spot a sneaky reference to a famous chorale). Meanwhile over in the Netherlands, Nachtmuziek by the Mathilde Wantenaar is an impressive new piece for strings, a single-movement ode to Béla Bartók with a real nocturnal intensity.

If you’ve ever wished you could pause an opera for a toilet break? Or to grab a bag of Mini Cheddars? If so, then OperaVision is for you! I highly recommend their video of a new Finnish opera, Ice by Jaakko Kuusisto and Juhani Koivisto. It’s a stage adaptation of a 2012 novel, in which a young Finnish pastor and his family move to a remote island community, who are connected by sea ice every winter in a temporary (and treacherous) crossing. The score is full of atmosphere and suspense, reminiscent at times of Kuusisto’s fellow Finn Rautavaara, and the story is touching, with some appealingly gothic moments featuring ethereal sea spirits. Ice is available for six months – watch it now before sea ice becomes a thing of the past. 

(On a similar theme, Stuart MacRae’s arctic chiller Anthropocene – his latest collaboration with librettist Louise Welsh – will be appearing on OperaVision in May. I’m particularly looking forward to this, as I very much enjoyed their previous venture The Devil Inside.) 

Finally, for no apparent reason, I’ve been exploring Sally Beamish’s two viola concertos this week (who else can claim multiple viola concertos? There’s a question for you). But as it happens, the first has a Holy Week tie-in – it’s inspired by the denials of Peter. I am always intrigued by how composers use the viola’s middling timbre when it’s brought out from its normal supporting role – one of my first ever classical CD purchases was Telemann’s lovely viola concerto in G. But, unsurprisingly given the dramatic implications of the Biblical story, Beamish’s approach is a much more taught and angular affair. Listen to no.1 here. 

Wherever you are, I hope you have a Happy Easter!

In a new podcast, I join Dr. Leah Broad to discuss the 19th-century Swedish violinist and composer Amanda Maier, whose promising life was tragically cut short. 

Pity the management of the BBC Proms. It’s a festival with such an outsized role in the UK’s classical music life that it must withstand everyone’s ideas of what the art form should be doing. It has weeks and weeks of high-quality concerts, and yet it still cannot match the abundance of a musical tradition centuries in the making, and ever-growing. However well planned, no Proms season will ever do justice to every neglected composer, or respected ‘masterwork’, that the maddening mob known as British classical music fans want to hear. 

Pity the management, because as much as I love the festival, if you were going to design it from scratch, this is hardly how you’d do it. It’s held in London, when we’re all painfully aware of the city’s over-privileged status. In a hall from a long-gone era of embarrassing imperial earnestness, designed for pompous spectacle rather than acoustic quality. Its schedule is too large to pin down to any overall theme, however much the BBC try to run meaningful threads through it.

And yet, here it is: a treasure. Still a way-in for many to experience live classical music in an informal atmosphere (a few snobs excepted). Still unbelievably good value-for-money to ‘Prom’, right up close to the stage for just £6. And it does a reliable job of serving up a level of variety – with so many concerts, it would be hard not to – but it’s a balancing act. There are those who value freshness and diversity, and those who would like a pageant of familiar classics, and a whole spectrum in between.

At this year’s launch, self-described ‘Prom Queen’ Katie Derham announced that the BBC’s goal was to reach the ‘widest possible audience’ – a remark one music journalist derided as meaningless. I get a sense the BBC don’t quite know how to sell the Proms. It’s too big, too bound up in tradition, to define exactly what it’s for. One of the strangest aspects of recent years has been that the most buzz has been generated by inserted non-classical events. The Ibiza Prom, Grime Prom, a David Bowie Prom, (a tribute to the late musician notably not paid to Peter Maxwell Davies, who died two months later). These were all successful events, and I have no problem with them being part of it all, but equally, they could all have plausibly taken place elsewhere. Again the question arises: what is the Proms for?

It’s interesting to see how the BBC news website frames the new season. First of all we’re told it will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. Ok. Well, I’m sure that would have blown Henry Wood’s mind. We all know the BBC loves an anniversary, and this one gives us a fresh excuse for the Planets Suite to make its annual orbit through South Kensington. It provides themes for new commissions, and there’s a concert of Sci-Fi film scores – all good stuff. But commemorating an event that happened 50 years ago…is that what the Proms is for? Then look at who else features in the article, and the highlights go in heavy on names from outside the classical music world, like Nina Simone and Robert MacFarlane. This gives a strange impression for the world’s biggest classical music festival.

Of course, the BBC knows that dedicated Prommers will peruse the full programme of their own volition. So let’s look at what we’ve got. Pleasingly, the recent trend towards a full Mahler cycle every year has been reined in – his fans will have to make do with only two works this time (and the wailing of my tiny violin). Other recent traditions are continued – John Wilson doing what he does so well, the Aurora Orchestra playing another piece from memory (though all the fuss about this continues to elude me). Among the usual classics, there’s a chance to hear some rarities by Weinberg and Glazunov. I am very intrigued by Messiaen’s immense ‘Des canyons aux étoiles’.

There’s so much that’s of such reliable quality. Perhaps, a bit too reliable. Where are the events that make you think ‘wow, that’s brave’? Or ‘that could be a car crash, but also maybe amazing’? A few years ago, the performance of Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony was one event that you knew was both a genuine rarity, and logistical spectacle. I’m excited by the prospect of John Luther Adams’s ‘In the Name of the Earth’ for 600 singers, which really suggests a true ‘event’ that speaks of our time.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? In an ideal classical festival, you would want new classical music to make the big headlines. Contemporary composers would loom larger than astronauts in the marketing material. We’d be told their stories, their interests, their ideas, in big letters. I accept there’s a challenge in building an audience for contemporary music, of course, but the BBC is better resourced than anyone to try and do it. 

Since the Albert Hall is at its best with large-scale works, I would love the Proms to hard-sell us big new pieces with big aims, and big risks of failure. Events that really try to ask questions of our time, rather than commemorate events 50 years ago. What risks do we have in this season? The BBC News article speaks of a ‘Will It Go Wrong Prom’. In which…the music collective Solomon’s Knot perform Bach Cantatas from memory. (Seriously though, when did this memorisation schtick become such a big deal? If I wanted Bach with the risk of mistakes I’d stay home and sight-read through the 48. You bet there’d be lots of them!)

Then, of course, there is the hot topic of diversity. The BBC trumpets that the first night is conducted by a woman for the first time – Karina Canellakis – and starts with a new commission by the Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri. Her piece is called Long Is The Journey – Short Is The Memory. And it seems a long journey is sadly what we have until the whole season looks anything like it’s fit for the 21st century. The new commissions by women are all relatively short, and so are the works by historic women. We have tone poems by Sofia Gubaidulina and Dorothy Howell, and at the longer end Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto. Size isn’t everything, of course, and yes, there is a concert dedicated to Barbara Strozzi in the (smaller) Cadogan Hall, while Bacewicz gets a Piano Quintet performed in the same venue. All good steps. But where are the pieces to make a big statement? To say that THESE VOICES ARE IMPORTANT? Where are the symphonies by Louise Ferranc, Florence Price, or Ruth Gipps (recently recorded by BBC NOW to great acclaim)? Where is the opera or oratorio by a woman, or composer of colour? With so many concerts to programme, why does this still need asking?

Likewise, there is little this year to show that the Proms will take up an increased role in supporting Britain’s classical music heritage, by establishing performance traditions – and crucially, listening traditions – for our many neglected composers. Nobody else is going to look after our music for us, and so many distinctive British voices continue to be ignored by the festival best placed to nurture their legacies, year after year after year.

Still, looking through the programme gave me one moment of light relief. In a move that is excruciatingly #PeakProms, a musical banquet will be laid out for Queen Victoria’s 200th birthday (admittedly I did not see this coming at all, the old girl scurried right under my radar). It will feature Victoria’s very own wince-inducing gold piano, and songs by none other than HRH Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha himself. (Nope! Neither did I!). I fear this event will reach such a critical mass of pure Promitude that it tears a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum and swallows us all.

Not one for my diary, perhaps. But I’m not surprised that the BBC feels the need to try and please everyone. What is such an unwieldy beast as the BBC Proms for? Pity the management – their job is harder than anything NASA have ever attempted.

A few months ago, I was honoured when Dr. Leah Broad of Oxford University invited me to join her on a new podcast, Notes On Notes. Leah has written twice for Corymbus, on Shakespeare In Scandinavia and, more provocatively, Music History Minus Beethoven. She’s also a BBC New Generation Thinker, though in all honesty she may now be better known for her viral twitter thread about composers as biscuits.

Notes On Notes has two types of episode. In the first type, Leah interviews people from the music world. The other (mercifully shorter) episodes are co-hosted with me, and feature discussions about music history. For its first year, all the podcasts will focus on women in music. 

Our first history episode is already available, and it explores music in the time of Elizabeth I. Our second podcast, which is out this Friday, will look at the 19th-century Swedish composer Amanda Maier, whose very promising career was tragically cut short. Leah has also interviewed Tess Tyler on video game composing, Professor Sarah Hibberd on theatrical melodrama, and conductor Simone Menezes, who founded the Camerata Latino Americana. 

You can subscribe to Notes On Notes on iTunes, listen on the website, and follow us on Twitter.  

Leah and I are both new to making podcasts so the whole thing is very low-tech – it has production values which I hope could be described as ‘endearingly amateurish’. But so far it’s been a lot of fun to make, and I hope we will increasingly get a feel for it as we go!

Hubert Parry. Wikimedia Commons.

      By Simon Brackenborough

At a concert in 1887, London’s Bach Choir amassed in St. James’ Hall to perform Berlioz’s immense Te Deum. But sharing the bill was a much shorter work. It was the choir’s first commission: a setting of John Milton’s poem At A Solemn Musick, by Hubert Parry.

‘Solemn’ did not have the downbeat implication in Milton’s day it does now, and his poem was fit for a grand occasion. It celebrates singing, and its power to elevate us towards God. Although it dates from the poet’s youth in the early 1630s, Milton used the same language of divine music-making, both lofty and loud, that he later developed in Paradise Lost. 

Perhaps wisely, Parry replaced the poem’s rather pedestrian title for the verbal trumpet-blast of its opening line: Blest Pair Of Sirens. The ‘blest pair’ here are words and music, and this new work showed the ability of one to ignite the other, even across the centuries.

Sadly, Parry’s instrumental works – including five symphonies – are now mostly overlooked. But Blest Pair Of Sirens has remained popular, and his flair for setting poetry of an exalted spirit would later culminate in his widely-loved hymn Jerusalem.

Blest Pair is also sometimes cited as a landmark work in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ – a period of renewed creativity from the latter decades of the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth, in which Parry was influential as both composer and teacher.

It’s easy to identify a Renaissance in hindsight, of course. But whether consciously or not, Parry was setting a text that represented a former golden age of both English literature and music – a time in the country when, as Diane Kelsey McColley puts it, ‘music was most consciously linked to words’. 

After all, Milton was born into the England of Shakespeare, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons. Music was in the intellectual water; not only was Milton musically educated, his father was a composer. And so in Blest Pair we hear theoretical concepts such as ‘diapason’ (the octave), ‘phantasy’ (an instrumental genre), and ‘concent’ (to be in tune and in harmony).  

But music’s brasher side not overlooked. ‘Saintly shout’, ‘angel-trumpets blow’, and ‘thousand quires’ provided Parry with the perfect excuse to raise the roof for the music of heaven. Crucially, Milton contrasts this ‘melodious noise’ with fallen mankind, whose ‘disproportioned sin’:

Jarred against nature’s chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made 

However, the poem’s hopeful conclusion is that we may ‘soon again renew that song / and keep in tune with Heav’n’. By Parry’s time, England’s musical reputation had lagged behind its literary one, so the narrative of music charting a rise from a fallen state might also have resonated for artistic reasons.

Straight away in Blest Pair’s orchestral introduction, we hear a dual sense of joy and yearning. Compare it to Handel’s Zadok The Priest, which patiently builds its way to a magnificent choral entry: in contrast, Parry seems to have so much to get off his chest he doesn’t know where to start. There are fanfare ascents and sighing plunges while chromatic harmonies tug us along, as if this energy has to run itself out before the choir can join in with something more settled. It’s the very sound of pent-up creativity needing to be satisfied. Or, perhaps, needing a guide.

And so we come to Milton’s opening lines, which could inspire any composer. The first verbs are the imperatives ‘wed’ and ‘employ’ in the third line. The poem is not just about the music as Milton knew it, but a motivational document for creating music anew:

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav’n’s joy,
Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixed pow’r employ,
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce 

Parry’s sensitivity to these words drives the music forward. At ‘pierce’ he makes a striking modulation onto a loud D major chord. This leads to the fugal entries of ‘phantasy present’ – imitating that polyphonic instrumental form. At ‘saintly shout’ the choir thunders together like an opera chorus, while ‘singing everlastingly’ is stretched into an extensive eight-part contrapuntal climax, much as Bach or Byrd might have set it.

But when this heavenly singing passes, jubilation becomes reflection. There is a repeat of the orchestral introduction in a new key, only now the choir join in – at first in unison, then simple harmony – as Milton considers mankind, flawed but ever-hopeful:

That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise

Parry’s tentative expansiveness at these crucial lines, so soon after the dazzling music of heaven, is exquisitely poignant. It sinks to a quiet nadir at ‘disproportioned sin’, but lovely too is how he plots our way back to the triumphant ending. After an orchestral interlude, a soprano line sings:

O may we soon again renew that Song,
And keep in tune with Heav’n, till God ere long
To his celestial consort us unite

This sounds like a charming melody in its own right. But as it climbs to an expressive high G at ‘God’, it’s joined by the tenors in canonic imitation. Parry has lulled us back to divine counterpoint, and before we know it there are four choral parts gathering momentum. The tempo ramps up a notch for Milton’s final line, with new overlapping fugal entries in eight parts: ‘To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light.’ 

What follows is a gloriously spun-out conclusion, with a broad and magnificent climax. In the final bars, the opening of the orchestral introduction returns once more, now disrobed of its chromatic harmonies. In the purity of an endless morn of light, the choir unites with it for a blazing diatonic close.

In Parry’s words, Blest Pair Of Sirens was received ‘quite uproariously’ at that first performance. It won him new commissions, and helped to establish his name as a composer. His love of Brahms, Wagner, and knotty Baroque counterpoint are all here, but it is Milton’s electrifying words that fuse these influences into something with a confident English voice. That alchemical moment, when diverse sources of learning suddenly combine to illuminate a path ahead, shows what we could call a ‘Renaissance’ spirit.

But artistic renewal does not just arrive with big events on stage. It takes place in the dull committee meetings of institutions, many of which were being established at this time. Parry was a contributor to the early Grove Dictionary, first published in 1879. He later taught at the Royal College of Music, which was founded in 1882. The Bach Choir was first formed in 1876.

And if it’s easy to identify a Renaissance in retrospect, it’s also easy to make backwards miscalculations about Parry. Blest Pair received a worldwide audience at the UK’s royal wedding of 2011. Parry’s closeness to such pageantry – including the fixture of Jerusalem at every last night of the Proms – can give a misleading impression that he represents adherence to tradition above all else. In Milton’s case a royal wedding is especially ironic, as he supported the overthrow of the monarchy in the English Revolution, but for Parry we can simply defer to his daughter Dorothea, who described him as ‘the most naturally unconventional man I have known. He was a Radical, with a very strong bias against Conservatism’.

We should also not forget the sheer strangeness of Blake’s stirring words that we hear in Jerusalem, which come from the preface of an epic poem about none other than Milton himself, who was one of his literary heroes. Here Blake combines his own esoteric Biblical mythology and colourful illustrations in a typically idiosyncratic way.

One of Blake’s illustration for his epic poem ‘Milton’, William Blake Archive.

Such free-thinking idiosyncrasy can also be seen in Parry’s unique series of ‘ethical cantatas’, which draw on secular poetry instead of religious texts. Likewise, he withdrew his support from the wartime ‘Fight For Right’ campaign that Jerusalem had originally been composed for, and was happy when the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies took it up as their own anthem.

So while Parry’s musical language was not in itself ground-breaking, in Blest Pair and Jerusalem we can see him as part of a network of English free-thinkers who defy simplistic readings, and who were willing to construct their own visions of a better world.

The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, Wikimedia Commons.

One of Parry’s pupils at the Royal College was a young Vaughan Williams, who would play a leading role in the English Musical Renaissance, adding to its ‘mixed power’ the fruits of the folksong revival. He fondly remembered his teacher’s ‘broad-minded sympathy’, and later quoted his advice to compose choral music, ‘as befits an Englishman and a democrat’.

Even after the Second World War, a much older Vaughan Williams was still able to say: ‘I fully believe – and keeping the achievements of Byrd, Purcell and Elgar firmly before my eyes – Blest Pair Of Sirens is the finest musical work that has come out of these islands’. Perhaps more than anyone, he was able to understand what the legacy of his former teacher really meant.

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In my latest article, I look at musical settings of the medieval recluse and mystic Julian of Norwich, including beautiful works by William Mathias, Roxanna Panufnik and Stephanie Martin.

On Saturday I went to the Jane Austen House Museum in the village of Chawton, where Hampshire’s most celebrated author lived from 1809. It’s a stout 17thC brick house, with a pleasant garden and a modern learning centre. I was in the latter, taking part in a workshop with Professor Jeanice Brooks of Southampton University on music-making in Jane Austen’s time.

Brooks ran a really interesting session, even though I haven’t read any of Austen’s novels yet. Yes I know, it’s a blow to my Hampshire credentials, but in defence I have at least have seen the 90s BBC adaption of Pride And Prejudice.

Fans of the books will know that Austen included various scenes of domestic music-making, which give some insight into the importance of music in English society in her time. 

This was especially true for women. There was view that music was one of ‘the accomplishments’ – a form of suitably feminine education, and Austen began lessons as a child. Music would be an attractive skill to a potential marriage partner, and desirable for family life – if just one person was musically trained, the whole the family then had access to music in the home. Pictures by James Gillray from the time satirised amateur music-making – here’s one complete with howling family dog. 

Happily, some of the Austen family’s music books survive. There are lots of juvenile songs, suggesting that music-making with children was important. We know that Jane herself played piano, and having access to one was important to her – during an itinerant phase before she settled in Chawton, she rented instruments.

We were shown a copy of a manuscript owned by Ann Cawley, who taught Jane and her sister in Oxford when they were young girls. This simple song had lyrics, appropriately enough, about being nervous when asked to sing – it’s quite possible that Jane would have sung it in a lesson.

When you aske me to sing,

Then you raise all my doubt,

How to sound out a thing

I want art to make out…

Crucially, at this time a pupil would learn to write out music as well as play it. Even in the age of printing, manual copying still had an important role. Amateur musicians like Austen would create ‘binders volumes’ of pieces that they liked, out of individual printed pieces, but also their own handwritten copies of pieces they had borrowed – perhaps from friends, or from a lending library, of which there was one nearby at Winchester. Austen herself was known for being able to copy by hand in a way that was almost as neat as print.

There’s a fantastic online resource that allows you to browse through various of the Austen family binders volumes for free – you can find it here.

We looked at a copy of a Robert Burns song Their groves o’ sweet myrtle, thought to be in Austen’s hand. The composer of the music is unknown, and it’s interesting as the words have been Anglicised away from the Burns poem – and the poet’s love ‘Jean’ has become ‘Jane’(!)

It seems that for Austen, piano playing was often a solitary pleasure, and she would go downstairs and practice before breakfast. The house features a lovely Clementi ‘square’ piano of the period, with just over five octaves range. We were given a small performance on this by one of Brooks’ Southampton students, and we had a go at singing the Burns song alongside it, for which I can only offer my personal apologies.

The house museum is interesting and certainly worth looking around – find out about visiting here – though Austen geeks certainly won’t need any of my Persuasion. (For the less hardcore fan I should warn it’s not to be confused with the bigger Chawton House nearby, though you can visit that too). 

I must say, as someone who frequents both Hampshire and London, how surreal it is to hear the kind of international tourist accents in this quiet village that you’d expect in Piccadilly Circus. On which point I can only doff my cap to Jane – the vicar’s daughter with a wooden donkey carriage who conquered the world.

Find out more about Jeanice Brooks work, and read her article In Search of Austen’s ‘Missing Songs’. See events listings in the house museum here. 

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a renaissance in British nature writing. On Thursday I went to Writing The Rural, a seminar series held at The Museum Of English Rural Life in Reading, run in combination with the Department for English Literature at Reading University.

The ‘MERL’ (as it’s often abbreviated) is perhaps best known now for their extraordinary social media reach. But the museum itself is charming and well worth a visit – more modern than I remember from a school trip many years ago, and no doubt long since refurbished.

The seminar was themed ‘writing in a time of environmental crisis’, and the chair was author Suzy Joinson, joined by writers Hugh Dunkerley and Tim Dee.

I’ve written several times on climate change, including my most recent piece, so this was of particular interest. In the end, the conversation veered somewhat toward more general nature writing issues, though was no less interesting for it.

A strong theme that emerged was how we look at and relate to (or don’t relate to) nature. Dee revealed he was initially drawn to bird-watching – his ‘curse and calling’ – because of their indifference. ‘They couldn’t be bought or sold’, he said. ‘It shrank me’. 

In a similar way, Dunkerley talked about how the ‘poetic attention’ in the works of Canadian poet Don McKay had influenced him. A kind of attention that doesn’t try to grasp nature, change it or utilise it, but is aware of its ‘otherness’. He quoted a poem title: ‘A song for the song of a raven’, as an example keeping ourselves at a distance, like the watcher in the hide. Likewise, a woman in the audience spoke touchingly about her experience of swimming with seals, and how profoundly affected she was by being completely out of her depth, but in their element.

An interesting counterpoint is animals who have adapted to human environments and behaviours, and the conversation dwelt for a while on seagulls, who thrive off of our wastefulness and swarm at places we consider unsightly travesties, such as landfill sites. There was a very interesting anecdote about WH Hudson’s book Birds In London – how in winter in the late Victorian age, poor men and boys in London would share their lunch with gulls, almost a cross-species worker’s solidarity. And strangely, there’s a chance that if we become less wasteful as a society, gulls may decline in Britain. Perhaps it’s precisely by reminding us of our wastefulness that such scavenging species (and those we call ‘vermin’) attract so much antipathy.

Dee came out with the lovely line ‘attention to detail is a species of love’. The average person may not see the difference between similar species of plant or animal, but once you discover those details, it multiplies your conception of the world. And yet he also pointed out that species have to have a common name before people really care about them – a Latin one won’t do.

Dunkerley is a poet and an activist, who has been involved in divestment campaigns. But the discussion left it uncertain how far poetry can really do the job of activism -it’s been said that ‘we we don’t like poetry that has designs on us’. It was suggested that the best way to write poetry about climate change was to write about a blackbird – to let it be expressed as a natural outcome of something else.

I’m not a poet, so I certainly can’t speak for poetry. But in terms of my own writing, I love making connections between diverse topics. Readers can decide whether I do so successfully or incongruently, but when it comes to the magnitude of our planetary crisis, I feel obliged to shoehorn it in wherever I can. It is unclear to me whether we really have the luxury elliptical approaches – these issues need to be a part of our mental backdrop.

Dee also spoke about his travels to research the movement of spring, as it progresses from North Africa to the Arctic Circle, and the strangeness of seeing our migratory birds in Africa, ’away from home’ as it were. It is another moment that shrinks you, and Joinson described how children’s minds are blown when you first explain to them the scale of these migrations. But in Africa Dee also saw the current crisis of human migration to Europe, and how many were tracing similar routes to those these birds make year in, year out. In all of this, it is worth remembering how much a privilege it is to be able to spend your days writing about nature at all.

It was a very stimulating session. The next one is this Thursday and features folk signer Martin Simpson, who will discuss songwriting and landscape. It starts at noon, and I’ll be there with bells on. Register your place here.

Find out more about the work of Suzy Joinson, Tim Dee, and Hugh Dunkerley. 

My most recent piece on climate change is The Dance Of Death. I explored how arts organisations might respond to a planetary in Butterfly Effects, and wrote about rewilding and George Monbiot’s book Feral in The Call Of The Wild.