The Sweet Sounds of Strings

I have spoken once or twice before about the special affinity which so many British composers have found with the string instruments of the orchestra.  Indeed, there's not just an affinity but an uncommon level of skill in handling the strings, and a really uncommon attention to writing works for the string orchestra alone -- something that few other post-Baroque composers have done more than once or twice.

The three examples in today's post were all written in a short period of time spanning the dawn of the twentieth century, but two of them hark back to an earlier time -- a time when suites of dances were a favoured means of musical expression in all the major countries of Europe.  

I've certainly discussed before this the music of Sir Hubert Parry, an English composer who has for too long been undervalued.  If nothing else, consider the level of skill and polish in Lady Radnor's Suite, a collection of six movements for string orchestra written in 1895 and published in 1902.  The model is the Baroque dance suite.  The music throughout is melodious, harmonious -- and deceptively simple in sound.

Don't be fooled by the apparently lightweight nature of this work!  Parry was unconventional by nature, and his musical style was an amalgam of many influences.  Loudest of all, though, was his own unmistakable voice.  In the first movement of Lady Radnor's Suite, the melody begins with a falling major fourth, and then continues on into a series of running passages, a most typical Baroque procedure.  But Parry's melody never turns the way you think it's going to, and the apparent repeats of the opening melody -- and of the gentler second theme -- are definitely not literal repetitions but new streams of melody originating with the same figures.  There are also some quirky modulations.  And yet the entire movement arrives at its end with what seems to be astronomical punctuality.

It's obvious to me that this is neither burlesque nor clumsiness but a definitely original conception clothed in 18th-century period dress.  I have the same feeling all the way through the six movements of the Suite -- the gentler second movement, the slow minuet in third place, the solemn processional of the fourth movement, the lively bourree fifth movement, and the fast jig of the finale.

Around fifteen years after Parry composed Lady Radnor's Suite, Frank Bridge produced a Suite for String Orchestra.  This is an excellent example to highlight my thesis about English composers and string music.  Bridge's set of four movements have no outward theme, no connection to musical history.  They are music, pure and simple.  Well, pure -- in the sense of being music with no outward connections.  Simple, not so.  This is melodious music, conservative by the standards of the day, but it's not simplistic.  The second movement in particular has some intriguing rhythmic play and some unconventional modulations, and unexpectedly vanishes into thin air just at the point where Bridge seems to be introducing a second theme.  The third movement, a sombre nocturne, is also more harmonically adventurous than its fellows.  The fourth movement has an upbeat rhythmic character which caps the work with a lively, but not extravagant finale.

From Parry and Bridge, we turn to the music of Philip Heseltine, better known by the compositional pseudonym Peter Warlock (he adopted this name because of his fascination with the occult).  He spent a number of years editing early music for performance, and in the process of that work discovered a manual of Renaissance dancing, Orchesographie, by Thoinot Arbeau (the name is an anagram of the real name of the author).  This manual includes dialogues about dance styles, techniques, and steps between Arbeau and another speaker named Capriol.

From this volume Warlock extracted six dance tunes and worked them into a full-scale harmonized setting, which he entitled Capriol Suite.  He placed the dances in a sequence which nicely contrasts the style of music from one piece to the next.  Unlike the typical Baroque practice of writing contrasting pairs of tunes, each dance here consists of one melody only.  Since the complete suite only takes 10-12 minutes to perform, the six dances are undoubted miniatures.  The work exists in three different versions, for piano 4-hands, for strings, and for full orchestra, all arranged by Warlock.

Since the Arbeau volume provides only a melody for each dance, Warlock's approach to arranging them was all his own, and is particularly intriguing.  Although he harmonized the dances primarily in Renaissance terms, he had no hesitation in peppering the score with a fair number of discordant added notes and chords.  These undoubtedly add considerable spice to the harmony.  In the 4-hands version the discords are so abrasive that they sound as if the pianists are making mistakes!  But in the string version, the smoother sound of the instruments reduces awareness of the discordant intrusions, and they simply add extra dimension and depth to the music without necessarily shocking the hearer.

It's not surprising, then, that the charm of the melodies and the skill of the string writing have made this version of the Capriol Suite the most often heard and recorded of these three works.  That still doesn't make it a frequent entry in concert programmes anywhere outside of England.  However, with the more recent revival of older music, the original Arbeau tunes have cropped up in a wide variety of recordings of one sort or another -- and fans of early music will undoubtedly recognize at least some of Warlock's source material when they turn to this early 20th-century piece of pseudo-antiquarian music in a more modern harmonic idiom.