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MR. E. J. MOERAN
A
MODERNIST WITH HIS ROOTS IN THE PAST
Mr. E. J. Moeran, whose body was found in the River
Kenmare, County Kerry, on Saturday, was a composer who, if a nationalist
school had arisen in England after our musical emancipation from
the Continent, would have been one of its prominent members, since
his style is basically founded, like that of Vaughan
Williams, on English folk song.
There is, however, an Irish element in his work derived
partly from heredity - his father came from Cork - and partly from
consequent gravitation of taste to Ireland, which took him here
for visits, got him an Irish wife in Miss Peers Coetmore, the 'cellist,
and sometimes flavoured his music with the idiom of Irish folk song.
Other influences had a fertilizing effect on his development, the
English Elizabethans and Delius. His
individuality was sufficiently sturdy to absorb them all and to
allow him, when he so wished, as in the choral suites "Songs
of Springtime" and "Phillis
[sic] and Corydon,"* to use his predecessors consciously
as starting points for his own work without fear of compromising
his originality. He was thus a traditionalist without being academic
and a modernist, freely using twentieth-century harmony, with his
roots securely grounded in the past.
Ernest John Moeran was born on December 31st,1894,
at Osterley, near London, the son of a clergyman who held a living
in Norfolk, and was educated at Uppingham and the Royal College
of Music. He served in the 1914-18 war and afterwards discarded
most of what he had previously composed and went to John Ireland
for some teaching. He began to collect folk-songs in East Anglia
in 1920: subsequently he lived in London, in Herefordshire, and
more recently, since his marriage in 1945, in Ireland. Here, too,
he collected folk-songs and only last week a selection from a larger
collection garnered intermittently from County Kerry between 1934
and 1948 was published.
When he settled down to composition he began modestly
with small forms for orchestra
(two rhapsodies and the small pieces "Whythorne's
Shadow" and "Lonely
Waters") and chamber music
(a string quartet, a
sonata for two violins, and an engaging string
trio, which has been recorded). He also wrote a number of piano
pieces and songs (notably two
cycles to words of Housman and James Joyce). But in the thirties
he turned to the larger forms of instrumental composition, producing
his G minor symphony in
1937 and following it with concertos for violin,
cello and piano
(this last strictly a rhapsody in one movement) during the next
10 years. The Sinfonietta,
perhaps his most approachable work, though there is nothing forbidding
in any of it, belongs to the same decade, as does an Overture
for a Masque commissioned by Ensa.
A sonata for
cello and piano, like the cello
concerto, was a product of his marriage in 1945 and serves to
summarize his place in the English renaissance: he was a composer
who nourished himself on the various vocal traditions and was able
to transform his natural vocal idiom into instrumental terms to
the great profit of his orchestral and chamber music: he wrote congenially
for piano: he was a miniaturist who could, and did, handle the larger
forms successfully.
(4/12/50)
*The work is actually entitled "Phyllida and
Corydon"
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