Statues have been in the news quite a bit over the last year or so. In Bristol, the figure of slave-trader Edward Colston was toppled and plunged into a nearby dock. A memorial to the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in a London park, and attracted widespread criticism for using a nude female form. Meanwhile in the Guardian, Gary Younge made an excellent and very thought-provoking case for getting rid of statues altogether.

I found many of Younge’s arguments convincing. But I can’t quite give up my fascination with statues – for what they tell us about civic priorities, the way they can date so terribly, and how often they are simply ignored. That said, I don’t believe all statues are worth preserving. Colston taking a long-overdue swim was a powerful act of remembrance for his wretched trade, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed watching the footage of it.

Since I’m staying in London for a few weeks and getting around by bike, I thought it would be interesting to do a cycle tour of statues in the capital dedicated to composers. By this I mean statues in open public spaces, standalone works dedicated to a composer’s memory – rather than the composers in the frieze on the Albert Memorial, for example, who are subsumed into a larger scheme.

If you wanted to guess which composers would have their own statue in London, you might think of someone like Elgar. But the statues I’ve been able to find – and there may be some that I’ve missed – are often more unexpected characters. They show various approaches to problem of how to depict creators of an essentially invisible art, and one for which the typical composing instrument – the piano – is inconveniently bulky.

I started on the South Bank, at the Festival Hall – an obvious place for a composer statue, you’d think. Locking my bike, I made my way down its quiet eastern side, untrodden by most of the people heading to the river. Goods were being unloaded here from vans for a street food market.

By an unassuming side entrance, in between two potted olive trees, is a statue to Chopin. A vaguely human form is merged into what might be leaves of paper, one of which bears some notation of his music – impressively realised, on close inspection. An inscription tells us that this statue, by Bronislaw Kubica, was a gift from the Polish nation in 1975 to thank Britain for its role in defeating Nazi Germany. Having been put into storage for several decades, it was unveiled again in 2011.

Chopin’s face looks like a death mask. If this were music, it would be marked Grave, and from a purely visual point of view, I think it makes an intriguing impression. But for several reasons its context feels odd.

For a start, Chopin is hardly the first composer you associate with an orchestral hall, and his placement out of the way down here suggests that nobody quite knows what to do with him. In this regard it compares poorly to the statue of Laurence Olivier that stands proud in front of the nearby National Theatre, firmly connected to its setting.

And honestly, I’m also not sure how I feel about Chopin being dragged into a conflict that happened a century after his death. While I appreciate the underlying sentiment of gratitude, it doesn’t seem to do much for his musical legacy. Altogether, it seems a bit muddled.

After a quick Pret coffee, and a pain au raisin shoved in my face, I got back on my bike to head across Waterloo Bridge. On the other side of the the Thames is Victoria Embankment Gardens, and after carrying my bike down a long flight of steps, I arrived almost immediately at my next statue.

This park is a strange shape, tapering away from the busy Embankment tube station. Very much at its fag-end is a memorial to Arthur Sullivan, made by William Goscombe John in 1903.

This spot is behind the Savoy Theatre, synonymous with Gilbert and Sullivan’s shows. A bust of Sullivan sits atop a tall plinth, gazing towards it – though like Chopin, he’s shunted away from its busy side.

But the most extraordinary part of this is not Sullivan at all. Beneath his bust, a life-sized woman flings herself against his pedestal, apparently inconsolable at his death. Such is her grief that her own bust has carelessly flopped out of her garment. So here we have Sullivan immortalised, classical and imperious, while this semi-naked woman wilts emotionally beneath him. It’s quite something.

A dramatic mask, sheet music and mandolin lie beside the plinth, a tribute to Sullivan’s sphere of fame, but looking like an afterthought. On one side of the pedestal are words from his collaborator Gilbert:

Is life a boon?
If so, it must befall
That death, whene’er he call,
Must call too soon.

This statue is a bit sentimental and ridiculous, and for that reason I…kind of love it? Its pretensions are popped beautifully by the addition of a children’s playground beside it. Meanwhile Sullivan gazes unperturbed, stiff upper lip intact. As a relic of overwrought Edwardiana, it’s fabulous.

I got on the Embankment cycle lane and made my way around Parliament Square, then on to Victoria Street. A short way down here is Christchurch Gardens, one of those obscure patches of green space in central London mostly untroubled by tourists, and used by office workers as a spot to eat lunch.

Here is the first statue on my tour with real dramatic positioning. A large face guards the entrance to the gardens, with flowery emanations billowing out from its hair. A plaque in the ground reveals this is The Flowering Of The English Baroque, a tribute to Purcell by Glynn Williams.

I quite like the boldness of this – it gives a surreal jolt as you enter the space. The extension of the period wig motif into floral variations makes Purcell look a bit like a catwalk model of an outlandish fashion show. Cool and self-possessed, he stares over to the branch of Itsu across the road – perhaps after several centuries of death, he’s feeling peckish.

But if you didn’t know who Purcell was, or why he matters, you would not glean much from this. An information panel in the far corner reminds us he was organist at nearby Westminster Abbey, which is a bit tenuous. It’s a fun and whimsical piece, but the floral metaphor does not make up for a lack of strong musical storytelling, and it feels like a missed opportunity.From here I made my way around the busy road system encircling Victoria station – never a pleasant experience by bike – and managed to get myself onto the quieter Ebury Street, and to its far end, Orange Square.

Here, surrounded by a few benches, is the first full-body composer of my tour. He’s in period dress, and holds a violin to his chin – unmistakably a musician. But he’s only a young boy.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited London while touring Europe as a child prodigy, and for several weeks he lodged with his family near this spot. He commands the space over this little paved square – you can imagine an audience assembled below, ready to listen. On the day I visited, an impolite spider had spun a web between his face and the violin. But little Wolfgang nonetheless looks down confidently, ready to impress.

A panel tells us that Mozart is thought to have composed his first two symphonies while in London, but I like the fact that this statue, by Philip Jackson, doesn’t make any claim on his more celebrated later works. It tells us a specific story of this back-street location, and of Mozart’s extraordinary childhood. Definitely the Ronseal sculpture of the tour – I found it refreshing.

I was now in Kensington and Chelsea, a borough not exactly known for cycle-friendly infrastructure, but I found my way through a maze of small streets to King’s Road, and from there to South Kensington tube station.

A little way outside the station stands a tall, thin man. His hands are in his long coat pockets, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. He could be straight out of film noir, and he seems to have disembarked from the tube on some mysterious private business. But he is standing on metal leaves, with a small bird attached. His plinth tells us that this is Béla Bartók, made by Imre Varga. Peter Warlock first brought Bartók to London, and the Hungarian stayed at a nearby house whenever he visited.

Truth be told, I’ve never really warmed to Bartók’s music, but as with Purcell, there is little in this statue to tell you about it anyway. Still, I like the strangeness of this figure, caught in a moment of making his way to his lodgings. I noticed that his plinth was garnished by a slice of red onion and olives, spilled from someone’s recent takeaway. Welcome to London, Béla.

From here it’s easy to head up Exhibition Road to see the facade of the Royal College of Organists, which includes busts of several composers, and the frieze on the Albert Memorial. But there was one last statue I wanted to visit near here, and in a departure from my own rules, it was in the V&A Museum.

It’s by far the oldest statue of the lot, and it originally stood across the Thames in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. This was a fashionable destination in 18th-century London, a place for festivities on summer evenings, with a reputation for less wholesome goings-on in its gloomy corners.

In 1738, the Garden’s proprietor Jonathan Tyers installed a life-size statue of Handel, made by the French sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac. And it was extraordinary for several reasons. Firstly, Handel was very much alive at the time – to get some sense of it, imagine a marble Andrew Lloyd-Webber being erected in Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland.

Secondly, he is depicted with remarkable informality – unwigged, crossed-legged, in slippers. He plays an Apollonian lyre, symbol of Orpheus, which provides an elegant symbolic solution to the keyboard problem. A little putto sits at his feet among instruments and scores.

Thus hewn, Handel squatted for some time near the Gardens’ orchestra stand, underneath an ornate arch representing Harmony. The statue caused something of a sensation. An alarming number of poetic odes were composed in tribute.

Seeing this sculpture in the more sober surroundings of the V&A, I got the eerie feeling of really being in the presence of Handel from the 1730s. There’s undoubtedly a classiness to carved marble too, that shames the duller metals on my tour.

As Werner Busch notes in a fascinating article on the statue, Handel’s music was seen as a civilising, harmonising force in his own lifetime, and this monument may have been intended as a way to counter the Gardens’ reputation for vice. But recent research into Handel’s investment in the slave trade has cast a more uncomfortable cloud over our understanding of him. Beautiful marble cannot hide the fact that his civilising sheen has dimmed now.

So what do London’s composer statues tell us? Those who had short stays in the capital feature alongside those who were active here for decades. Home-grown composers are better served by their links to provincial England: Elgar stands in Worcester, Holst in Cheltenham, Britten has his sea-shell on Aldeburgh beach. A new Ethel Smyth statue has been made for Woking – and unlike Wollstonecraft, she is fully clothed. But London tells a more global story, of its ability to attract talent from overseas, which seems to chime with how the city still sees itself today.

As Younge notes in his piece, statues tend to emphasise the problematic ‘great man’ lens of history, and minimise collective efforts. That is undoubtedly true. But I nonetheless get some enjoyment from their hubris; their vain attempts to maintain dignity and relevance in the face of their changing environments, widespread public indifference, and the accumulated excretions of pigeons. Quite often, I like their sheer oddness too. Perhaps one day they will all be torn down, or put in museums. But for now, they have a lot of tales to tell.

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By Sarah Lister

Funeral organists are interlopers, strangers in the heart of family grief. We are privileged to celebrate in music the life of a loved person we have usually not met (though commonly on hearing a eulogy we wish it were otherwise). Sometimes it’s different – a man once approached me at the organ console after Evensong and handed over a list comprising three hymns, J S Bach’s St Anne fugue, and Percy Whitlock’s Fidelis. That’s what I want, he said. I’m ninety-three. You have to think about these things.

Whitlock (1903-1946) is a composer who deserves to be better known. Fidelis is one of his Four Extemporizations for organ, written in 1932 when he was Director of Music at St Stephen’s Church, Bournemouth and dedicated to his faithful (fidelis) head chorister Charles Keel. It was gratifying to hear Salix from The Plymouth Suite at the recent service for HRH the Duke of Edinburgh (of whom more later). A good introduction to Whitlock is his Complete Shorter Organ Music (OUP), the many delights of which include a hymn prelude on Darwall’s 148^th and the resplendent Exultemus on Psalm 81:1-3.

Certain pieces of music endure as funeral favourites. Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Sheep May Safely Graze (despite the latter being secular), Fauré’s Pie Jesu, and Vaughan Williams’ Rhosymedre are examples; all major key, tranquil, and consolatory. Pachelbel’s oft-requested Canon in D is one to be wary of – some of the arrangements in anthologies are over-simplified and congregations don’t hear what they are expecting. More faithful renderings are available on IMSLP (but are not easy).

The Marche funèbre is decidedly out of fashion these days, and perhaps it is too sombre a beast in an age of celebration funerals. Music lovers will think of the third movement of Chopin’s Sonata op.35 in this context, which, even if chosen, would need a very good pianist indeed to pull off (unthinkable to transfer it to organ). Alexandre Guilmant’s op. 17 Marche funèbre et chant séraphique, sparkling triumph though it is, does not capture the right tone in an era where Sinatra’s My Way was recently voted the most popular funeral song. But equally we no longer have female mourners wailing and rending their hair as they did in Ancient Greece.

When choosing processional voluntaries length is critical; in some smaller churches the aisle is so short that even Liebster Jesu must be cut. The nature of the recessional offers more flexibility, and Handel’s Dead March from Saul, if I may mention a funeral march, works well in organ arrangement and is major key and uplifting.

Perhaps more of a shame is that Purcell’s Funeral Sentences Z.860, composed for the funeral of Queen Mary II in 1695, are likelier to be heard in a concert setting than at local funeral services. These settings of the Burial Service from the Book of Common Prayer 1662 are some of the finest funeral music ever written. The unaccompanied, largely homophonic anthem Thou Knowest, Lord is simple and approachable by even small amateur choirs.

One of the challenges facing the itinerant organist is the variety of instruments found in parishes, cemetery chapels, crematoria, college chapels, and tiny village churches in the depths of the countryside. Adapting pieces to suit different instruments is part of the joy of being an organist; one comes across one-manual Frescobaldi organs, big Romantic monsters, Clavinovas, Hammond organs (on very bad days), well-loved instruments and some in terrible states of disrepair. Recently I was asked for an arrangement (no singer) of Bach’s aria Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen to be played on an organ whose entire pedal division was broken. And transferring The Lark Ascending to an instrument with no string stops was interesting – another time I will bring a violinist and split the fee.

Turning to funeral hymns, the choice is understandably difficult for families if no instructions have been left, particularly if they are not regular churchgoers. Decisions relayed between minister, undertaker, and organist can result in painful crossed wires, so funeral directors’ websites offer lists of traditional hymns that combine appropriate words and dignified melodies. Settings of psalm 23 such as The Lord’s my Shepherd and The King of Love my Shepherd is come up repeatedly, as do Abide with me and The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended.

Hymns familiar from school days are regularly requested, like Morning has broken, Make me a channel of your peace (the prayer of St Francis of Assisi), or All things bright and beautiful. This last highlights another challenge for organists: which tune to use when the words are regularly sung to more than one? Not everyone is aware (again understandably) that hymn tunes themselves have names, and one hardly wants to ask a grieving family member to sing something down the phone. I remember once bringing Thornbury, Wolvercote, and Hatherop Castle to a service because no-one had been able to establish which setting of O Jesus, I have promised the family preferred. All things bright and beautiful is a case in point: its two melodies tend to generate strong feelings, and it doesn’t help that one of them is itself called All things bright and beautiful (the other being Royal Oak).

With certain hymns there is also a question of harmony. The tune New Britain (William Walker) is invariably used for Amazing Grace, but standard harmonisations are a mixed bag. It is not in NEH at all, and Robert Gower’s version in Common Praise is too fanciful for use at funeral services (indeed I have never heard it used anywhere). John Bell’s simple effort from The Church Hymnal is probably best, distracting least from the stirring tune. But the melody works just as well unharmonised, as recently demonstrated by Barack Obama at the funeral of Senator Clementa Pinckney.

Music chosen thematically can be particularly meaningful. I have been asked to play harvest hymns for a farmer’s funeral and campanological hymns for a bellringer – both beautiful services. Families of sports fans regularly ask for Jerusalem or You’ll never walk alone. The most stylistically eclectic service of my experience was for a sailor, whose family chose My heart will go on (from Titanic), Rod Stewart’s Sailing – both on piano, thankfully – and the hymn Eternal Father, strong to save to John Bacchus Dykes’ tune Melita. This last is a great funeral favourite. The Duke of Edinburgh, a former commander in the Royal Navy, chose this for his service, and it was sung at the funerals of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, John F Kennedy, and George H W Bush, all of whom had naval connections.

Congregational singing has been one of many sad losses due to the COVID pandemic. Singing hymns at funerals brings the congregation together and gives comfort to those who mourn. There is nothing like the thrill of a 150-strong Welsh congregation belting out Cwm Rhondda (Guide me, O thou great redeemer) or Blaenwern (Love divine, all loves excelling). Joining in with hymns is also a chance to sing some cracking lyrics: when else, apart from at a rugby match, do you get to sing Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! (Jerusalem)? Who doesn’t enjoy the crystal fountain and the fiery cloudy pillar in Cwm Rhondda, the verdant pastures and food celestial of The King of love, and the still, small voice of calm of Repton? Not to mention And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, and her ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths of peace (I vow to thee my country).

Over recent years the role of the organ in funeral services has become increasingly marginalised. It is not unusual to find that all that is required is one hymn, usually Crimond, and that the rest of the music is on CD or mp3 – unfortunate for those of us markedly better at playing the organ than working the CD player. In certain situations – cemetery chapels where the Clavinova’s organ sound is not loud enough to support hymn singing – it is perhaps understandable that My Way or Time To Say Goodbye are preferred.

Despite this we cling to a small clutch of twenty or so hymns that, whether through television or through singing at funerals and weddings, almost everybody knows. How Great Thou Art, Lord of all hopefulness, Dear Lord and Father of mankind and others continue to provide us with a nationally unifying body of song. It would be a great shame to lose it.

Sarah Lister is an organist living and working in Oxford. As Harriet Lister she moonlights as a writer on subjects as diverse as music, miracles, poetry, and paper clips.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, I was driving my car behind a slow tractor which took up the entire width of a very narrow country track. It’s not an uncommon experience in the North Hampshire Downs. This is Finzi country: I was just a few miles from the village of Ashmansworth where that composer lived for many years. But it wasn’t for Finzi that I was here today. I was headed to St. Martin’s church, in the village of East Woodhay.

The church sits among fields, with only a few houses dotted around. Rebuilt on the site of an older church in 1823, it has a red brick and flint exterior, and is pleasingly nestled in the landscape – framed by mature trees, while further behind rises the imposing flank of Pilot Hill, one of the highest points in Hampshire.

I had been inside the church once before: in 2016 I heard a Newbury Spring Festival concert here given by the choir Stile Antico. Back then, it seemed a magical spot to come to listen to madrigals, among the budding greenery in the lingering twilight of a May evening.

But St. Martin’s also has a reputation for excellent acoustics, and with this asset it has developed a remarkable musical double life – one which goes beyond hosting concerts, as happens in churches up and down the land.

While most people have never set foot in East Woodhay, if you regularly listen to classical records there’s a good chance your ears have spent time in this church. Having grown up locally, I first noticed its name on the back of my Naxos CD of the Purcell viol fantasias. The website Discogs shows well over a hundred albums linked to the place.

I arranged to meet with Hugh and Kate Cobbe, who kindly agreed to show me around. Hugh has been organist here for about thirty years, and Kate recently took over managing its artist bookings. But I wasn’t expecting the rest of Hugh’s impressive CV: a former head of music at the British Library and president of the Royal Musical Association, and now chairman of the RVW Trust.

We entered the interior, which is open and airy – white walls, wooden beams on the ceiling, stained glass windows. In the chancel at the far end, the organ loomed in front of the altar.

As Hugh told me, the decision to hire out the church for music recording was initially made to help fund a rebuild of this instrument, which was in very bad shape. His musical connections were useful to find artists to record here in the late 1980s. And by the time the organ was repaired in 1991 – at a cost of about £25,000 – the extra income proved so useful for the church that it was decided to continue the recordings as a sideline.

It’s not only the acoustics that gives the church an advantage as a recording space. There’s also its quiet setting, far removed from anything resembling a main road. This makes it particularly favourable for capturing the nuances of intimate music making. St. Martin’s has been called ‘ideal for chamber music’, and looking through the albums recorded here, you find pianos, solo voice and string quartets are well represented: one of the earlier recordings was part of the excellent Elizabeth Maconchy quartet cycle released by Regis records.

Still, as Kate explained, neighbourly co-operation is important. ‘There are people living around here […] one relies on their good will not to do major building works. In winter it’s a bit tricky as there’s a lot of shooting that goes on on Saturdays, but on the whole recordings happen Monday to Friday.’

Sadly, the same remoteness among narrow lanes also prevents St. Martin’s from having a bigger concert schedule. The annual Newbury Spring Festival date is a popular social event – ‘they’re always absolutely sold out’, Kate said – but an adjacent field has to be used for overflow parking. What works for one night in May would become hopelessly churned up in winters months. ‘We’d be sued for broken ankles’.

The reverberation in the space was much in evidence as we spoke. But I know very little about acoustics, and the way experts talk about it seems a bit like the flowery language of wine connoisseurs to me. I wanted to know: what made this church particularly good?

‘It’s much larger than most churches in a single space,’ Hugh ventured. ‘We’re not all pillars up and down.’ It’s certainly true that the nave is very open, and likewise, there are no transepts for sound to escape into (the areas going off to the side which make a church cruciform). Meanwhile, the room under its tower is separated by doors, and can serve as a sound control centre.

I suppose this rectangular space is not so dissimilar to the classic ‘shoebox’ shape of concert hall design, albeit on a smaller scale. When the church was rebuilt, it must have emphasised the effect of preaching – one can imagine whiskery Victorian sermons  bouncing resoundingly off these walls.

In a spot where it’s easy to imagine the industrial revolution never happened, it’s perhaps no surprise that early music makes a strong showing among the recordings. Kate Macoboy and Robert Meunier are a lute-song duo who recorded their album Michelangelo’s Madrigal here, and a piece on their website praises its ‘relatively short reverberation time, similar to the rooms where our music was performed historically’. This, they argue, provides ‘a more natural evocation of the historical experience than would have been possible to recreate in the deliberately neutral acoustics of today’s recording studio’.

In an email to me, the pianist James Lisney kindly shared his experiences of recording in the church. He described the acoustics as ‘beautifully natural and unobtrusive […] the piano textures were revealed in great clarity but also with warmth’. There are of course practical considerations to getting a recording team, gear and instruments as large as a grand piano to a church in a small rural village. But as Lisney told me, silent heating units make the space comfortable, and ‘the only issue in recording was finding a flat area of stone for the piano stool to sit without wobbling’. He certainly finds that the tranquil location makes for pleasant working:

One morning I rose early to get to the church to enjoy some time at the piano. It was a classic ‘first day of spring’, with a pronounced weather change inspiring a huge range of animals to greet the day in front of me as I made my way through the country lanes. A majestic owl, rabbits, deer, a badger – the morning was truly wonderful and a unique way to prepare for the day to come.

As it happens, St. Martin’s is not even the only building in East Woodhay with a history of recording music. Just down the road is the grand 19th-century Baronial chateau Stargove House, which was once owned by Mick Jagger and became the location of the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording studio. This was apparently used by Bob Marley and Deep Purple, among others. (Later on, Stargrove House was also briefly owned by Rod Stewart).

Perhaps there is something musical in the air up here in the North Hampshire Downs. Hugh and Kate told me bookings have slightly tapered off in recent years – even before the disruption of the pandemic. And ironically, Hugh said, the one instrument that recording musicians don’t seem interested in using is the one that started it all off: the organ. But St. Martin’s continues to be a valued recording venue, lending its secluded Hampshire sound-world to the homes of listeners near and far.

Visit the St. Martin’s Church website here. 

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Elizabeth Maconchy is probably best known today for her remarkable set of thirteen string quartets. But another work of hers has recently appeared on an album of British clarinet concertos, and it very much shares the terse drama of her chamber music.

Rediscovered is a fascinating release from clarinetist Peter Cigleris, with the BBC NOW and conductor Ben Palmer. It brings together four clarinet rarities from the first half of the 20th century, including works by Susan Spain-Dunk, Rudolph Dolmetsch, and Peter Wishart. But Maconchy’s Concertino for clarinet and string orchestra, from 1945, is in many ways a stylistic outlier on this disc.

This pithy, punchy drama is built from small motivic cells. Its three short movements are full of compelling intelligence, but there’s a hunched guardedness to this tightly-packed music too. It’s as if it’s afraid of stretching out too comfortably, and revealing a vulnerability.

The string writing here emphasises the darker low registers, and it’s not exactly full of sweet harmony. More often the orchestra stabs in furious unison, brow firmly furrowed. Her lines love the austere shapes of flattened intervals, the morbid tug of a minor second. But against all this, the piercing warmth of the clarinet makes for a fascinating foil – like a bright chalk highlight on a charcoal sketch. It’s particularly effective when she allows it to unfurl indulgently across its wide register.

At the beginning, the clarinet seems like a fly that the orchestra are trying to swat: it darts around on high above their short, pinching phrases. This soon gives way to one of Maconchy’s most characteristic passages. Few composers make their string writing creep so compellingly. Quiet, sinuous lines overlap with the suspense of a slowly emerging horror, like an ant’s nest waking up.

The second movement brings no light relief either. The strings start off in a sulk – short jerking phrases over a funeral beat. A desolate clarinet solo seems to toy indecisively between major and minor thirds. But when the strings gather strength in a tense climax, it flies into a series of high trills, a hunted animal turned frantic. Only when the music dies down does it finally come to rest on the bleaker minor thirds, panting soft and low.

The third movement is given a lift with a sprightlier triplet feel, and there are even folky touches in some leaping string figurations – perhaps a nod to Maconchy’s Irish roots. But the rhythms of jollity are soon hammered out of it, and the strings find a new source of unstable energy in a series of swelling chords.

For a while we veer between agitation and despondent slumps, but eventually, crunch time comes. Over a laser-focussed tremolo string note, the clarinet leaps up with several dramatic pleas, a last-ditch defendant in the dock.

The strings deliberate their response in a furiously condensed reprise of the movement’s themes. But the verdict, as it turns out, is one of surprise reprieve. In the final flourish, the clarinet reaches up high and finds that bright major third.

Rediscovered is available from Signum Records. Visit Peter Cigleris’s website here.

My blogs are powered by caffeine. If you enjoyed this one, a cheap but meaningful way to support my writing is to buy me a coffee on PayPal.  Subscribe to my Patreon for £1/$1 a month and get access to more blog posts there. 

I’ve recently been exploring music of the Persian classical tradition. There’s a lot of it available on YouTube, but I wanted to share one of my favourite discoveries in particular, an album by the santur player Faramarz Payvar (1933-2009).

If you’ve never listened to Persian music before, then a bit of context may help. As musicologist Hormoz Farhat describes, the classical tradition is fundamentally monophonic and modal. It’s related to (but distinct from) the Arabian and Turkish traditions, and it includes improvisation alongside composed pieces.

Farhat’s study is fascinating for its description of the specific dynamics that have shaped Persian music in recent centuries, which include religious censure and flawed attempts to apply Western theoretical models. (He also argues the case for preferring ‘Persian’ over ‘Iranian’, which I won’t try to repeat here but will simply go along with him).

The santur is a type of hammered dulcimer, an instrumental family that doesn’t enjoy huge prestige in Western classical music. But in the hands of a master like Payvar, it is undeniably capable of real poetry. It has a crisp sound, ranging from sweet delicacy to nasal harshness, that is carried in a bloom of decaying notes like a cloud of smoke.

On this record, Payvar shows that monophony need not mean monotony. Rapidly alternating hammers can give the impression of several parts at once, as well as a tremolando effect on a single note that allows for dynamic swells. One instant he makes a driving gallop, the next softly drumming rain. The scope for expressive melodic ornamentation, so important to this tradition, is immense.

Cithare En Iran, Santur was released by the French label Pathé Marconi EMI in 1979, one of their Arabesques series which featured Middle Eastern musicians. Running to 43 minutes, Payvar’s recital showcases a Dastgāh. The Dastgāh is a Persian system for structuring a performance. As Farhat puts is, there are twelve Dastgāhs, but each one:

identifies a set of pieces, traditionally grouped together, most of which have their own individual modes. It also stands for the modal identity of the initial piece in the group. This mode has a position of dominance as it is brought back frequently, throughout the performance of the group of pieces, in the guise of cadential melodic patterns.

In this case the performance is of Nava, one of the less commonly heard Dastgāhs. But being unfamiliar with Persian modes should be no major barrier, as some aspects of the music are very intuitive to grasp.

The introductory Darāmad passages, for instance, unfold in the manner of ruminative preludes, while the Čahārmezrāb facilitates virtuoso display, much like an étude. The cadential patterns that Farhat mentions – Forud – are not hard to discern either. One that occurs here is rather charmingly known as the ‘pigeon’s wing’, a stately drop of the interval of a fourth.

Payvar’s elegant sculpting of lines through pacing, dynamics, and ornamentation makes this album a blissful listen. If you can read French, the impressively detailed sleevenotes by Jean-Claude Chabrier can be found here (and if you can’t, you can still admire their extremely 1970s brown and cream colour scheme).

If you’d like to listen to more Persian classical music, I highly recommend the Hafdang YouTube channel, which is both a fantastic resource and an exemplar of slick music video presentation.

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An album by Manchester Collective was recently released with the intriguing title The Centre Is Everywhere. It features a work of the same name by Edmund Finnis, alongside music by Philip Glass and Schoenberg.

Finnis’s piece is for twelve string players. It drew me in gently on the first listen – I found it both absorbing and enigmatic. But I was surprised that its mystical-sounding title was not explained in any of the record’s marketing, as far as I could see.

Curious to find out more, I got in touch with the Manchester Collective’s co-founder Adam Szabo, who kindly put me in touch with the composer.

As Finnis explained by email, the work owes its title to The Book Of The Twenty-Four Philosophers – a Medieval text which contains different definitions of God. The second of these definitions became quite influential in the following centuries:

An infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.

As one interesting paper describes, this idea of God as a sphere whose centre is everywhere has informed thinkers such as Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. It was also taken up by the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan for his concept of ‘acoustic space’ in media – the idea that information comes at us from all sides at once (like sound) and does not have a fixed boundary, whereas written information is sequential and closed off, an extension of the eye.

As Finnis described to me, he borrowed from this theological phrase because it seemed to fit the ideas he was thinking about – of foregrounds and backgrounds in music, and shapes and patterns passing between groups of instruments. And scoring The Centre Is Everywhere for twelve players – a highly divisible number – certainly gives plenty of room for playing with layers.

This music creates its own acoustic space. It uses a framing effect, in that it emerges out of (and back into) a void of whispering, pitchless bowed sounds. The piece does not so much begin as come into focus – at first tentatively, and then more fully. As if we’re tuning in to something beyond normal perception.

A bundle of lines shifts fitfully, trying to find a coherent shape. But it begins to build into longer breaths, as more layers intertwine. Many of the parts rise and fall in scales, others sound like broken-chord figurations – elements which in another work might be accompaniment material, supporting a main theme.

But there is no clear foreground, no main theme. Nothing seems to assert itself over and above the rest: instead the overall effect is of an exquisitely wrought kaleidoscope, in which our attention is everywhere. And that is where the principal fascination comes.

Finnis certainly knows how to exploit the resonance of strings, creating compelling ghostly shades and ethereal shimmers. And while he makes expressive use of dissonance, this piece falls very easily on the ear as it unfolds, expands, and recedes.

But if the centre of our attention is everywhere, then it is also nowhere. A natural consequence is that the piece doesn’t create memorable themes as such – instead it creates a memorably spatial impression. In that sense it seems to mirror the condition of deep contemplation, in which the structures of perception dissolve.

The Centre Is Everywhere is available on Bandcamp. Read more about Manchester Collective at Gramophone and Vents Magazine.

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New on Patreon: the charming songs by a composer of the French Renaissance who ‘pulled back suffering rhythm from the tomb where it lay for so long prostrate’. Subscribers can read more about the music of Claude Le Jeune here.

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First, one of those embarrassing small musical world admissions: the pianist Clare Hammond was a contemporary of mine at university. Although I didn’t know her well, I won’t forget the day I heard her give a solo recital in a college chapel. Many of my fellow undergraduates were excellent musicians, but I was blown away by her playing. It was immediately clear that Hammond was a pianist of the highest standard, with a potential career as a solo artist shining brightly before her. 

As I recall, her programme that day included a piece by the Australian composer Carl Vine. Evidently she was someone who cared about venturing beyond the core classical repertoire and into the world of contemporary music – very much my kind of musician.

That exploratory curiosity has certainly been borne out in the intervening years, as is demonstrated by Hammond’s discography. Her latest album, Variations, brings together pieces by Symanowski, Birtwistle and Hindemith, among others. But the stand-out piece for me is the final track: Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne, an early work from 1962, coming in at just under ten minutes.

This is a ferocious piece – one I didn’t know before, but which gripped me immediately. It announces itself with broad fortissimo chords like granite blocks, a brutal equivalent to the stately opening you might expect from the title’s Baroque form. Soon we hear the era’s pompous dotted rhythms too. But this is the Baroque recast in a modern mould: dissonances crunch, chords tug mysteriously in parallel movements. 

The first few iterations of the theme keep fairly steady, but soon the music starts to disintegrate, exploding into passages of virtuosity as Gubaidulina furiously reinvents her material, including some terrifying thundering octaves. I love how she toys with the familiar textures of old music – its balanced, intuitive patterns – but then keeps tearing these elements apart. At times it’s as though Bach were reconstructed for the industrial age: resurrected into a world of clanging steel girders and roaring traffic.

And as it happens, this Chaccone is having a bit of a moment in the limelight right now, as it featured in the recent Wigmore Hall livestream by rising star Isata Kanneh-Mason, part of a programme of works for International Women’s Day. Watching Kanneh-Mason’s performance makes an equally strong impression, and I can’t help but feel that if someone like Stravinsky had written this piece it would be revered as a masterpiece of 20th-century piano repertoire.

I highly recommend exploring Hammond’s discography, and in particular I draw your attention to her recording of Unsuk Chin’s formidable Etudes. Hammond wrote an admirably candid article about the effort it took to learn these works, spending ‘months pounding away in a practice room underground’, but eventually finding her own way to make them speak. I wouldn’t trust many musicians to succeed in that aim, but she certainly does.

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Classical music can be a good route to discover poetry. In songs and choral works, composers have set words on all sorts of subjects. And just occasionally, one of those subjects is music itself.

For a composer to set words about music might seem like self-indulgence. There’s certainly no shortage of source material: writers have long been drawn to the ineffable qualities of ‘the mosaic of the air’, as Andrew Marvell put it. But, since composers naturally share a love of music, perhaps it’s no surprise if these words don’t always bring about the most emotionally complex responses.

Take Schubert’s song An Die Musik. It’s in a straightforward melodic vein, and its message of sincere gratitude for the comfort music provides – it literally ends with a ‘thank you’ – brings to mind a much later song by ABBA.

Alternatively, Purcell’s Music For A While uses a mesmerising ground bass pattern, which lulls us into the very suspension of cares its lyrics describe. Other composers turn to sonic opulence – Vaughan Williams’s Serenade To Music calls on 16 singers, with a rich and serene orchestral sound, while Parry’s Blest Pair Of Sirens pulls out all the stops to celebrate music glorifying God.

Much less straightforward, however, is one of my recent discoveries. Kenneth Leighton’s symphony no. 3 is scored for orchestra with tenor soloist, and its subtitle, Laudes Musicae, is a name for the genre of writing in praise of music, of which there are examples as far back as Classical times.

But from the first notes, it’s clear we’re a long way from Schubert’s easy eloquence. Soft, luminous fragments conjure a sense of mystery, and a tight tussle of string lines leads to a fraught climax. Then the tenor begins, with a few lines of the composer’s own hand:

Oh yes I must sing
And so you must sing also
For all music is singing
And in music is there praise of life

The sentiment seems straightforward, but Leighton’s exaggeratedly florid melismas on ‘sing’ and ‘praise’ add an almost perverse sense that this won’t be so simple.

Leighton also gathers an unusual set of texts for this piece. Most of the first movement draws on Religio Medici, a 1643 spiritual work by the Renaissance polymath Thomas Browne. Written at a time of Puritan censure, Browne makes an essentially Pythagorean defence of music: that it represents cosmic order and harmony. The tenor sings these convoluted old sentences in a mostly declamatory style, with the orchestra shifting and erupting in illustration.

But I think a key point comes at the end, when Browne argues that even the ‘vulgar’ music of taverns has value:

there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers. It is an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and Creatures of God, such a melody to the eare, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding.

‘Shadowed’ and ‘hieroglyphical’ immediately make sense of Leighton’s music. This symphony is less in praise of the art than it is spellbound by its mystery. And on its final word, the first movement evaporates into thin air.

As it happens, the text of the second movement only complicates matters further. It’s not a poem I was aware of before, but it has a wonderful musicality all of its own:

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Musical Instrument tells the story of Pan, who cuts a reed from a river bank and makes it into a flute. Leighton represents this mischievous character with a wonky scherzo – nimble pizzicato strings and woodwind flourishes.

But the story is no simple creation myth for music. The subtext here is that the reed is the nymph Syrinx, who has transformed herself to hide from Pan’s lusty pursuit. Consequently, this poem has been interpreted as a feminist retelling of Pan, as a figure of rampant male power who laughingly cuts Syrinx up and plays her for his own enjoyment.

Browning describes him trimming the nymph-reed, pulling out its pith like a human heart, and notching ‘the poor dry empty thing’. Here Leighton creates a compelling sense of mounting horror in a long crescendo.

And yet Browning’s point is not so simple either. The note Pan plays on the butchered Syrinx is ‘blinding sweet’, ‘piercing sweet’. Here Leighton’s music grows heady and languid, the tenor duetting with flute arabesques in intoxication.

Browning uses music to suggest something primeval but complicated – both alluring and appalling – and Leighton responds enthusiastically and vividly to this dramatic mixture.

Another poem that I was only vaguely aware features in the final movement – Shelley’s Music When Soft Voices Die. The work began with the praise of life, and now it foreshadows death:

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

After a brooding introduction, the tenor sings Shelley’s lines in a suitably pensive mood, rising to anguish in its final couplet. But far from slumbering on, this unleashes the most magnificent passages of the whole work, the orchestra gathering strength in a series of broad, expressive paragraphs.

Having dwelt so long on ephemeral illustrations of music’s power, Leighton’s turn to purely musical logic feels like a culmination. And there is a sense of catharsis when the movement eventually fades to the soft voices of woodwinds, before dying away on a faint string chord.

This symphony is a very singular work, but in my opinion all the better for it. Much like the mischievous Pan, Leighton splashes about in the Laudes Musicae genre, and gloriously muddies its crystal waters. The result is certainly one that vibrates in the memory.

Last Sunday was a beautiful spring day, so I decided to go for a walk. I had a route in mind, and drove a few miles to the large, flat expanse of Greenham Common. This former military site – synonymous with anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s – once contained one of the longest runways in Europe. Happily, it was converted back to grazing and recreation land about 20 years ago. It’s now a fantastic community resource, and I walk and cycle there a lot. But it was only my starting point this time.

I headed off on a path leaving the common. It follows a wooded gulley which runs down into the Kennet valley below. I love this path – with huge mature trees looming either side of you, and a small stream winding down, it’s like entering a little pocket of another world.

This area is unusually rich in history, even by British standards. Nearby is a site where Palaeolithic hand axes were discovered – the tools of nomadic hunters who camped here as early as 13,000 years ago. Other evidence suggests the possibility of continuous habitation in this part of the valley for the last 10,000 years, though it’s difficult to prove conclusively.

My plan was to get to the canalised river Kennet, then turn west along the towpath, eventually coming back up the hillside on a different footpath which I’d noticed on my OS map, but had never walked before.

A pool beside the Kennet and Avon canal.

Following the river, I started to hum a tune that I’d heard on Radio 3 that morning. It was the folk song Green Bushes, from Percy Grainger’s orchestral setting.

I already knew (and loved) a slightly different version of this tune in The New Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs. The lyrics start with the narrator going for a walk in May, and having a chance encounter with a young girl. He then proposes she forsake her true love and marry him – somewhat hastily, it must be said, but that’s folksong for you.

When I had first seen the tune in my book, I imagined it as a gently flowing melody. But the Grainger version on the radio treated it so energetically, that at first I didn’t recognise it. It sounds slightly demented: a psychedelic spring, bursting with life and libido.

In fact, if you look through an English folksong collection, you’ll find that a remarkable number of them begin with a variation on this theme: walking out in the spring and having a chance encounter. What is it about that scenario? I suppose spring is a metaphor for youth – one reason why poets idealise it. A fine spring day is like discovering life afresh. The land is awakening. No wonder it seems ripe with possibility, romantic or otherwise.

But while instant marriage proposals are mostly the stuff of fiction, spring is certainly a good time to find nature. Last year I heard a cuckoo calling along this stretch of towpath. It was tantalisingly close, and I stood for several minutes trying to spot it among the trees – all in vain. It’s still too early for their arrival this year, so on Sunday I had to make do with the laughing ‘yaffle’ of a green woodpecker, wafting mockingly on the breeze. Meanwhile a wren flitted among the dry reeds, firing its bullet notes beside the sparkling water, a tiny ball of cock-tailed aggression.

When I found the footpath heading back up the hill, I was surprised by a startlingly long perspective: the far end of Newbury Racecourse, its length extremely foreshortened behind a wire fence. On my other side, an enclosed field was bedecked with signs warning me it was ‘not a play area’ (it hardly looked like a plausible candidate for one).

Such sights only remind you how much of Britain’s countryside is enclosed for one private use or another – whether military, agricultural, or moneyed recreation. The colonisation of south-east England by golf courses, for example, is one particularly rampant and much-discussed phenomenon.

This makes the rare instances of public reclamation, like Greenham Common, especially precious. Because in the English countryside you’re always under suspicion of over-stepping a boundary. Any spring walk will almost certainly include chance encounters with the signage of paranoid landowners: Keep Out. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. At least we can deceive ourselves that birdsong is joyful – this ugly human territoriality only sings a sour note.

Thankfully, a happier discovery awaited me further up the path. It was the entrance to a nature reserve I never knew existed before: Bowdown Woods. Here was a more welcoming sign, showing several nature trails that dip through the wooded gullies carved by streams flowing down to the Kennet.

It was clear that this was a more scenic route back to my car, so I took the diversion. The gamble of trying out a new path paid off, and the ramble up and down the surprisingly steep gulley sides, with glimpses of valley views through the tall trees, was delightful.

I look forward to coming back here again as the months progress. As it happens, I made a firm new year’s resolution to finally spot a cuckoo. If I’m successful, perhaps I will see the same one I heard last year – returning to the Kennet’s side from his African winter, singing in hope of his own romantic liaison.

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