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Guided By Jack
My love of English music started
in childhood Hertfordshire with the Tallis Fantasia and Enigma
on an old record, aged about 13. Then
a friend's records of VW's Oxford Elegy, Dives and Lazarus,
Flos Campi, Five Tudor Portraits, VW teeny boppers we were
in those early 70's. Big names soon led to a growing fascination
with the 'lesser', forgotten ones. 'Why do you waste money
on scores by Robin Milford and Havergal Brian?' some of my
sneering Royal College of Music contemporaries asked, those
who attended smokey, interminable composers' workshops in
the basement. Even my teacher, Bernard Stevens, who I hugely
respected, had a go at me for refusing to attend workshops.
Hearing Adrian Jack scoffing at English music in his lectures
on 20th C music caused me to provoke him by visibly reading
the score of Delius's 'Mass of
Life' throughout future sessions. But I did try and be open
to all kinds of music; upon borrowing Stockhausen's Kontacte
on disc from college, I secretly listened at home on headphones
but screamed for several minutes afterwards to the alarm of
my parents. I went almost as an ascetic to the Society for
the Promotion of New Music composers' courses at York, but
after just one day of hot air (once blowing up balloons with
David Bedford) I usually escaped to the Yorkshire Wolds on
my bike, damned but happy, ears ringing with 'songs of the
high hills'.
View of the Yorkshire Wolds, east of
York |
During this burgeoning of my love of English music
I remember seeing the name 'Moeran' on big Metropolitan line billboards,
performances of a 'Symphony
in G minor' at the Festival Hall. The name didn't suggest my
sort of little world, even less a G minor symphony, and so I stupidly
ignored it.... I can't remember how I eventually discovered Moeran
- it might have been the record of Bax's
November Woods and Holst's Fugal overture
on which Moeran's Sinfonietta
took the B side.
Or was it that mysterious Cello
Concerto and Overture
to a Masque? (Ah, such thanks we owe to 'Lyrita Recorded Edition,
Slough, England') Come to think it might have been a radio broadcast
of that G minor Symphony, was it under Neville Dilkes?
I remember saying to my friend and mentor the late
John Russell at the RCM that I was born about 50 years too late.
I so wished I had known those greats who were around and working
in the 20's or 30's. Russell often shared memories of his great
friend Gerald Finzi. I was nostalgic,
almost by nature it seemed, about a time I didn't know. It seems
that Jack Moeran was the same in his day - also 50 years out of
his time!
At school I was much influenced by the musical tastes
of my friend Nick, who first introduced me to lesser-known Vaughan
Williams, John Ireland, Herbert
Howells and others. Not only that, but also by he and his parents'
interest in lesser-known parts of Britain, their country exploration
holidays instead of the holiday-camp-and-hotel type holidays I went
on with my parents. Nick's father was a railwayman and not a mean
engineer, and he built an 'O'-guage railway around their garden
which we spent happy hours playing with. Additionally Nick introduced
me to the pastime he'd indulged in for years already, walking old
railways. In my teens, instead of doing school homework I listened
to English music and pored over maps, drawing a gigantic railway
map which covered my entire bedroom wall; whenever I walked along
an old railway, I marked it off on the map. Maybe 1000 miles of
old railway were covered over the years. I once heard a radio programme
about Jack Moeran where parts of his symphony were likened to one
of the fine Great Eastern steam locos pounding 'up Brentwood Bank'....indeed
one of my greatest walks was the Midland and Great Northern Railway,
from Yarmouth to Kings Lynn, in about six days, summer 1976....in
my head as I lazed in poppy fields or on old bridge abutments in
silent mid-Norfolk reverie, the slow movement from the Symphony
in G minor, especially those glorious last few pages, gentle wind
through East Anglian reeds, such special poignancy, such an unmistakable
composer.
The landscape around New Radnor |
One of the places Nick and his parents started visiting
regularly from about 1970 was a holiday cottage at Bullock's Mill
near Kington in Herefordshire, at one time a crossing-keeper's cottage
on the railway from Leominster to New Radnor.
So influenced was I by their colour
slides of these holidays, it became inevitable that I would visit
there too. The first time was a cold, wet New Year, 1974-5. My two
friends and I were 18.
We had heard about 'the Fred Jones' - a small pub
also known as the Tavern or even The Railway Tavern in the years
when the railway was open. On New Year's Eve we ended up there,
it's tiny bar crammed with red-faced locals, unaccompanied singing
of wartime ballads, folksongs.
It was a revelation, here was the living past, a place
untouched by the juke-boxes and space-invaders machines which were
inescapable from anywhere else at the time. Copious scotch on the
house, hunks of bread, cheese and pickled onions, a sense of reverence
for the two elderly ladies who owned the pub, one of whom made a
speech. Someone drinks a toast. The big old yellow-faced clock reaches
midnight, all of us in a confusion of crossed hands, Alde Lang Syne
going on and on, laughter, kissing and hugging, then the first footing....
Ever since, the borderland of Wales has been my spiritual
home, even if for long periods I was to live elsewhere. Almost without
exception, groups of friends from the RCM and school - and even
one I met,
surprisingly, at the SPNM in York, Peter Thompson, a composer who
I discovered also to be a Jack
Moeran fan - we all went to the Tavern every New Year, and on many
other occasions too. Several of these 'Fred Jones' evenings I caught
on cassette tape for posterity. Though I've not been back for some
years now, I gather a similar atmosphere exists today. One of the
elderly ladies, Miss May E Jones (ALCM....'I wanted to take my LRAM
but the first world war broke out') gave me her piano when I moved
to the area in 1982. She died about 10 years ago, aged 93 I believe.
Gravel Hill, August 2000
Moeran's study is on the far left with pink shutters (in shadow) |
What we Moeran devotees didn't realise until long
after we had started to go there was that this very pub had been
Jack's local! Here we were, sharing this timeless atmosphere, not
knowing that he himself had lived at Gravel Hill, barely half a
mile from where we were drinking. We discovered this just by chatting
to locals one day, one of whom even remembered what he regularly
drank.! Miss Jones remembered him too. We were amazed. We went excitedly
round to the house - but the current owners seemed to know nothing
of their great predecessor, which seemed to us to be fairly typical.
Suddenly there seemed to be an eerie connection with
that Eynsford house party with Moeran
and his friends - maybe not the same level of drunken debauchery,
but an alcoholic connection certainly. On a New Year's Eve or other
social night at the Tavern, we friends would stagger the two miles
back to the cottage at Bullock's Mill, over the old railway bridge
by the station where Jack loved to chat to the station master. Sometimes
we'd end up sprawled in a hedge or a ditch.....cue tune from the
Cello Concerto, last
movement.
In 1977 I came to know the Violin
Concerto and have adored it ever since. Its opening chords transport
me straight to Ireland, where that year I spent my first holiday,
staying with friends on their farm on the Sligo coast, inlaws of
college friend, composer Adrian Vernon Fish. I took the exquisite
BBC performance by the late Ralph Holmes on cassette, and played
it over and over whilst there. It was truly one of the most special
holidays. I went back again for the next three years, one time with
my old friend Nick, walking some disused railways in County Cork.
Unfortunately we never got to Kenmare. Always whilst in Ireland
Moeran's music was never far from my first thoughts.
Kington High Street, August 2000
The Oxford Arms, right, is where Lionel Hill stayed in 1945 |
Then later the same year it was back to Kington again,
autumn holiday and New Year of course.
Many years later I discovered and bought the Lionel
Hill biography of Moeran, and found therein wuzzy (our word
for nostalgic) photographs of Jack, one in the hills above the Radnor
Valley. Probably (certainly) he'd puffed his way there on the so-called
'withered arm' branch line, the extension to New Radnor from Kington.
How I wish I had known that time, been born when my father was born
(1905), to have trundled along that railway with Jack, felt musical
kinship, shared ideas, talked of places and people. And of course
ended up at the Tavern.
I sometimes wonder if some of us are guided by the
spirits of those who have gone before, to foster their memory and
keep the old ways alive in this world. The internet has hidden blessings.
Hopefully Jack's music and memory will benefit from this great website.
Adrian Williams
August 2000
Adrian
Williams - Composer - website
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