Oxford

 

Magic flutes

A few weeks ago I found myself talking to another author about the demise of second hand bookshops (victims of internet sales and the now-common shops that sell used books for charity) and the similar disappearance of music shops. Since we were near Oxford at the time, we spoke of a couple of music shops in the city that had disappeared. As I’d forgotten their names, my interlocutor put me right. ‘There was Taphouse’s in Magdalen street, and Russell Acott in the High Street,’ he reminded me. ‘And even a stall selling second hand records in the covered market,’ I added.

Later, I remembered that I’d actually taken some photographs of the shop front of Russell Acott’s in the High Street, because of its charming carved decoration.* How could one not taken a second, or third, look at carved musical putti blowing flutes† and playing other instruments such as the horn or the lyre? Especially when some of them are accompanied by tiny scrolls inscribed with the date of the frontage: 1912. And when they are surrounded by crisply carved foliage. And when the carver has made the putti more animated and distinctive by giving them a strong three-dimensional quality – look how the knees are set forward, the hands stick out from the surface of the carving, and the feet break out of the space between the arches.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll get the impression that I really like this kind of thing. I particularly admire the quality of the craftsmanship, the way in which the carvings fit the kind of business, the fact that this sort of thing is strictly unnecessary but the shop owner wanted their facade to be especially elegant, and the way in which the carving combines advertising with a kind of generosity – the public street was enhanced by this bit of whimsy. In my opinion, it still is.

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* This shopfront was created by Acott’s, who merged with another music business, Russell’s, in 1950. The company traded from this shop until 1998, when they moved to an out-of-town location. Russell Acott finally ceased trading in 2011, competition from online sellers meaning that when the owners retired, the business closed for good.

† Or are they piccolos?

Launceston, Cornwall

Music for a long while

On several occasions when exploring English buildings I’ve come across ancient carvings of musicians. Blog posts from years ago have featured a bagpiper in Cornwall and a player of a medieval woodwind instrument called a rackett in Gloucestershire. Some years ago in Cornwall again, visiting St Mary Magdalene’s church at Launceston, I found a whole band of musicians carved into the stone of the outside walls.

Launceston church, like many in Cornwall, is built of local granite, one of the hardest of all stones and difficult, for that reason, to carve. Yet the stonemasons of Launceston, rebuilding the church in around 1511, were determined to decorate it as ornately as any other. In fact I can’t think of another English parish church so richly encrusted with carvings – Pevsner says that the building is decorated with ‘barbarous profuseness’. I’d not use such loaded language. I find the carvings fascinating, and I’m awed by the masons who could carve this intractable material, even though the granite’s hard surface means that they could not carve with the depth or detail that they might have achieved in, for example, limestone.

Amongst the decorative profusion – leaves, ferns, roses, thistles, pomegranates, heraldry – are several relief carvings showing musicians (in the upper left part of my photograph: click it for an enlargement). In the photograph are a fiddler, a lutenist, and a harpist, forming a kind of procession led by an official or cleric with a chain around his neck. Other panels show a bagpiper and a shawm player. Some or all the musicians are probably members of a group called the Confratrie Ministralorum Beate Marie Magdalene (the Brotherhood of Minstrels of Blessed Mary Magdalene), and so were almost certain to have played in St Mary Magdalene’s church.* Some scholars believe that, this being the case, the carvings of the instruments would have been quite realistic, unlike carvings of instrumentalists on gargoyles, for example, which were more likely to have been caricatures, and unlike angels carved in roofs, where ‘realism’ has to be aided by imagination and where the instruments may be generic. Alas! the wear and tear of time, together with the granite’s toughness, have scuppered our chances of making out much detail today.

Nevertheless, one of the joys of visiting old churches is the evidence they give of the activities of the past generations who built and used them. It’s good to find these musicians here and to think about the kinds of sounds they might have made in a market town in Cornwall some 500 years ago.

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* St Mary herself, resting with her pot of ointment, is visible to the right of the musicians.

Chaceley, Gloucestershire

Worse things than serpents, or, Odd things in churches (17)

Finding this drum in a corner of St John’s church, Chaceley, made me wonder: was it some military relic,. put in the church for lack of anywhere else to keep it? Such an explanation seemed unlikely, in spite of the patriotic Hanoverian royal arms painted on the side of the instrument. The information available in the church offered a more likely story: that the drum was simply one of the instruments used in church music – it would have been played as part of an instrumental band that accompanied the singing of psalms, hymns, and the occasional anthem. Such bands were common between c. 1750 and c. 1850, before organs, harmoniums, and barrel organs started to become popular in parish churches. A common ensemble would consist mainly of stringed instruments (mainly violins and cellos), plus one or two woodwind – a clarinet, flute, and bassoon, perhaps. But such combinations were not fixed. In a small village especially, the church would get by with whatever and whoever was available.

This kind of instrumental accompaniment is sometimes called West gallery music, because the instrumentalists often played in the gallery at the west end of the church. The most famous literary evocation of such music is in Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree, in which the singers and musicians of Mellstock church (Mellstock is Hardy’s name for the real Dorset village of Stinsford) decry the coming fashion for harmoniums and barrel organs. Most of them agree that strings are best for church music, and some will admit that woodwinds have their place, even the unwieldy-looking bass instrument called the serpent (‘Yet there’s worse things than serpents’ as Mr Penny says). And drums? ‘Your drum-man is a rare bowel-shaker – good again,’ as another of Hardy’s characters puts it.

So if drum was available, a keen ‘bowel-shaker’ might well have been welcomed into the band. Even someone making a martial noise was better to the traditionalists of the 19th century than an organist or a player of the harmonium (‘that you blow wi’ your foot’). Bang on!

Oxford

‘Not in stone temples made with hands’  

At this time of year, as we approach Christmas and wonder this of all years how we cope with it, there’s usually the chance to listen to a variety of Christmas music, not just the endless advertising sound track of tunes such as ‘White Christmas’ (it first caught my ears on television in October this year, just after mince pies were spotted in a prominent place in the cake aisle of a local supermarket) but also the abundance of special music in English churches. This is the time of year when the organist makes sure the pedal light and foot heater are working, brushes the hoar frost off the altos and gets out music that’s been at the bottom of the heap for almost a year. Britain has a strong choral tradition, and some of the cathedral and large church choirs are amazingly good. And then there are the professional groups who make recordings, tour the world (when they can), and elicit enthusiastic and sometimes awed responses wherever people sing. There’s a choral sound – born of musicianship, pin-sharp precision, and clarity of pronunciation – that’s summed up in words like ‘purity’ or simply ‘Englishness’. Perhaps it’s the sound we think of when we think of the English (or indeed Scottish) choral masters like Tallis, Byrd or Gibbons.

A favourite of mine is Orlando Gibbons, who in a short life produced some of the masterpieces of English music for keyboard, as well as a lot of superlative vocal music. Much of his music was small-scale – wonderful short keyboard pieces and madrigals (including one of my favourites, ‘The Silver Swan’), but he also wrote some terrific church music, much of it no doubt sung in the Chapel Royal in London, where the composer worked. He was born in Oxford, and was baptized on Christmas Day 1585 at St Martin’s church, Oxford. Only the tower of St Martin’s now stands, at Carfax, the crossroads right in the middle of the city, where the clock in the photograph tells the hours. This is a modern clock in a surround designed by Victorian architect Thomas Jackson. But Gibbons might well have seen some figures, the two ‘quarter boys’ who banged the bells that mark the hours. Even today’s quarter boys are not the originals, which are now safely preserved in the city museum, but accurate replicas.

Such is the march of time, of which Gibbons, as a musician, was no doubt well aware. I want to link to a YouTube video of one of his anthems, a piece I know in this recording by the wonderfully named English group Red Byrd, who combine musical precision and verve with their best shot at ‘historically informed’ pronunciation of English. I find this anthem, ‘Glorious and powerful God’, a joy – spirited, uplifting, and (in this performance anyway) slightly earthy and not quite up there in the remote heavens, as some religious music can be. Not typical either, then, of that ultra-pure ‘English’ choral sound, but the reprise of the words ‘Arise O Lord’, especially, makes me want to stand up and cheer.

As if all that weren’t enough, the words (Who wrote them? Gibbons himself? I wish I knew.) use an architectural metaphor. The text expresses that difficult concept, the presence of Jesus on earth, in this way. Christ does not does not dwell ‘in stone temples made with hands’ but ‘in the flesh hearts of the sons of men’, a vivid way of getting at the idea of God made flesh, and of expressing his continued presence in our hearts. Whatever your belief system, however you react to this, may your heart be light this season, and may it be warmed by Gibbons’s music.

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Photograph shared under Creative Commons licence.   

Elkstone, Gloucestershire

Making a rackett?

Many medieval churches have gargoyles or grotesques along the parapet and at the top of the tower. Elkstone, a Norman church with a later medieval (Perpendicular Gothic) tower has these, but there are also grotesques halfway up the corner buttresses, adding an extra element to this building’s varied adornment.* Two of these grotesques are musicians and one of these in particular provoked my curiosity. What, exactly, is the instrument that this figure is playing?

I know a little bit about medieval instruments, but not enough. One source describes the instrument as a shawm, which is an early reed instrument and ancestor of the oboe. This seems unlikely. A shawm, like most wind instruments, has a single row of holes along the body. This instrument has a double row of holes, which puzzled me. Two rows of holes in a single tube? How would that work? I asked some musician friends and various suggestions emerged. One idea was that there were actually two tubes, and that this is some kind of double flute or pipe – but the sculpture seems to have only one tube. The other was that this could be an instrument like the rackett.¶ Racketts are fat woodwind instruments with an internal tube that doubles and redoubles back on itself, allowing for a long column of air in a short space. A rackett is a reed instrument, and on some racketts the reed is visible from the outside – but not necessarily when it is being played. So I think what we have here is a depiction of a rackett.

The carving may not be totally accurate but, as one of my musician friends put it, it was probably carved by someone with poor knowledge of musical instruments. Or perhaps by someone for whom literal accuracy was not the main aim. After all, the people in medieval carvings aren’t always very realistic – literal realism was not always the goal. For example, many medieval carved musicians are angels, in which case any talk of realism has to be on a very different level. Some provincial medieval carvers probably couldn’t achieve precise accuracy anyway; others were after something else – qualities of vigour, humour, piety, whatever. If an orchestra of angels playing among the timbers of a church roof stands for harmony among the company of heaven, a human musician or two on the exterior of a church might be seen to extend that harmony into the earthly realm outside the building; or they may simply be caricatures, designed as much as anything to make the beholder smile.

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* For more on Elkstone, see this post.

¶ Or racket: the second ’t’ is optional. There are pictures of rackets here (the text is in German, but the images alone are informative) and a video clip of racketts being played here. 

Lincoln

An old favourite

I’m sometimes asked which is my favourite among England’s fine group of cathedrals. I start by giving an evasive answer that goes a bit like this: I like Durham for the majestic Norman architecture of its interior, York for its stained glass, Southwell for the dazzling carving in the chapter house, Ely for the unprecedented ‘lantern’ crossing, Gloucester for the vaulting, Wells for the west front, Salisbury for the spire. But I also add that more than any of these* my favourite is Lincoln cathedral. It has so much: a hilltop setting that makes is visible for miles,† three towers of surpassing elegance, a masterful interior in which different stones are combined effectively, good misericords, and excellent carving in the Angel Choir and elsewhere. And, well, I was born in Lincolnshire, and I just like it.

It’s one of those cathedrals that’s also linked in my mind to music, partly because I’ve had some cherished visits when the choir has been singing. The accidental experience of a musical performance can be one of the best kinds of musical experience there can be and I’ve been bowled over by impromptu organ recitals and orchestral rehearsals in Gloucester cathedral and a mesmerising piano trio in Oxford’s small secretive cathedral tucked away within the vast college of Christchurch. Lincoln is also linked in my mind with William Byrd, one of England’s greatest composers, who was organist and master of the choristers in the 1650s and 70s.

So I’m not going to go on about the magnificent architecture of Lincoln cathedral, which deserves a whole book to itself, never mind a blog post. I’ll limit my comments to saying simply, if you’ve not been: go; if you’ve been: go again. Without further ado, I’ll offer below some music by the great William Byrd, with my very best wishes to all my readers.


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*And more indeed that the sometimes surprising architecture of Canterbury, than Lichfield with its three graceful spires, than Peterborough with its dramatic front, than Norwich, than Winchester, than domed St Paul’s, all wonderful, but…

† Almost as good as the setting of Durham.

William Byrd, Ave Verum Corpus, sung by the Tallis Scholars 

Walpole St Peter, Norfolk

It does something to me

A regular reader of the English Buildings blog, or someone glancing at the tag cloud in the right-hand column, would realise quickly that churches are a major interest of mine. I visit churches a lot, and I seem to blog about a church at least once a month. Many things draw me to churches – sometimes it’s their long history, sometimes their architecture, sometimes specific objects or works of art they contain, sometimes what I can only call their atmosphere.

The atmosphere I most eagerly savour is the kind that is summoned up by centuries of accumulated history. It’s what I find, typically, in small isolated country churches that have not been over-restored – churches like Inglesham in Wiltshire, to give just one favourite example. There’s something else I get from churches like that, and it’s signalled perhaps by the world ‘isolated’. In a world that contains, in my opinion, far too much noise, a church can be an almost silent place. I find quietude helpful, even restorative, and value the combination of quiet and atmosphere* found in some old churches enough make a special journey to find it.

But there’s another thing that sometimes happens in churches that is the opposite of silence, and can be equally nourishing: the sudden unexpected performance of music. I have been surprised by music in churches quite a few times, and it has always made my visit memorable. This is not, or not usually, run of the mill organ practice – though I have been captivated by that too (one organ piece I heard, in Gloucester cathedral, stayed in my head for years before I discovered what it was). What I mean is rehearsals for special musical events. From time to time I have come across a trio playing Mendelssohn, a choir singing Handel, a bizarre duet for organ and violin, a Schubert impromptu on the piano, and an unidentified baroque cantata – all of these in old churches. All have given me pleasure, in part because these ad hoc performances have been a total surprise.

It’s not just about church acoustics, which can vary quite a bit. In one of our more beautiful cathedrals I can remember a choral rehearsal in which it took me a few minutes to grasp the fact that the words the choir were singing were English ones – the reverberation was playing havoc with the singers’ diction. After a while the conductor dropped her arms in despair, bringing everyone to a halt, and wailed desperately,’I need to hear the altos!’ Often, though, church acoustics are crystal clear. The setting, conducive to worship, is also likely to be apt for the kind of attention that good, unamplified music demands. And in a small church one can get very close to the performers, lending great immediacy to the proceedings.

At Walpole St Peter in Norfolk, the church offers many of the things I most enjoy – airy, late-medieval architecture with repeating patterns of window tracery, impressive woodwork including screens and pews with carved poppyheads and other details, clear glass that lets the sun bathe the interior with light and warmth. But it was music that was in my mind even before I walked past the notice reminding me to remove the pattens from my feet¶ and pushed open the door. I have a recording of a fine Bach concert by the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir under John Eliot Gardiner that was made in this glorious 15th-century church. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if someone’s playing Bach in here. Imagine my surprise as I opened the door to hear not ‘Wachet auf’ or ‘Jesu, meine Freude’ but a woman singing Cole Porter. There followed a long selection from the American songbook, most of it beautifully sung, a rehearsal for a concert later the same day. The person minding the singers was quite happy for me to wander around, so I tiptoed quietly, admiring the window tracery and the woodwork, and savouring the way the sunlight coming through the clear glass windows illuminated pews and carvings, to the accompaniment of ‘Night and Day’, ‘You’re the Top’, and ‘You Do Something to Me’.

And the whole experience did do something to me, and I was very grateful. I did not resent losing a few minutes’ silence for some good music-making. Music and silence, apparent opposites, are not so far apart after all. There have been whole books written about silence, but perhaps the best thing I’ve read about the subject is the shortest and most laconic, the exhortation of Alfred Brendel, master interpreter of the Viennese piano classics† and revelatory writer about music. He told us simply to remember the anagram: LISTEN = SILENT.§

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* Compare Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’: ‘It pleases me to stand in silence here’.

¶ A notice left over from the 19th century, at least: ‘It is requested that all persons will take off their Pattens at the Church Door’.

† Now retired from the concert platform, but his recordings remain.

§ Alfred Brendel, A Pianist’s A – Z (Faber & Faber, 2013)

Brockhampton-by-Ross, Herefordshire

More musicians

When my recent post on the medieval carvings at Adderbury provoked some interest, I found myself being rather apologetic about the lack of precision in some of those vigorous, if rustic, sculptures. One carving of a person playing a stringed instrument, probably a rebec, showed the musician holding it in a rather odd way. But how do you hold a rebec, anyway? As with skinning a cat, there's more than one way, apparently.

Questions such as these sent me rummaging in my archives for other images of medieval musicians – or musicians portrayed in a medieval style. Then I remembered Christopher Whall's windows in the wonderful Arts and Crafts church at Brockhampton-by-Ross, one of which shows angel musicians. I'm not going to apologise (again!) for the somewhat moppet-like faces of these young angels (the most recent Pevsner volume for Herefordshire calls them 'somewhat sentimental'). There's too much else to like – the beautiful drawing and rich colours for a start. And then the way one suddenly realises, having studied the details for a minute, that these angel musicians are perched in the branches of trees.

So I offer you a string player and an angel blowing at a woodwind instrument. I'll try not to get tied into too many knots trying to decipher what the instruments are. The stringed one has the indented waist and sideways-protruding pegs of the viol family; the wind instrument to me has the look of a shawm (an ancestor of the oboe). I expect Whall took them from earlier depictions of instruments in medieval art – from other stained glass windows or from carvings. I think they're worth celebrating for themselves.

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For readers who have not heard a shawm, and would like to know what it sounds like, there's a recording of a shawm here.

Adderbury, Oxfordshire

A medieval band

Among the dozens of carvings on the outside aisle walls of the church at Adderbury in Oxfordshire are several representing musicians. Although time-worn (they’re 14th-century, after all), they still bear some detail, and it’s possible to make out what instruments are being played. And I know I have at least one reader who knows plenty more about early instruments than i do, who’ll no doubt put me right if I slip up.

My first picture (above) shows a woman playing a small organ – the kind that you can carry around and that is therefore called a portative organ (it’s also sometimes referred to as an organetto). It has a rank of small pipes, plainly visible in the carving, and at the bottom, there would be a tiny keyboard, which you play with one hand. The other hand operates bellows, on the back of the instrument, to supply the pipes with wind. Most people today think of organs as church instruments, but portative organs were also used in secular music in the Middle Ages.*

Next is a man playing a hurdy-gurdy. There’s not much clear detail left in the carving, but the instrument has a crank-handle, which the player turns using his right hand. This turns a wheel, which rubs against strings that run along the top of the hurdy-gurdy. Some of the strings sound whenever the wheel turns, to provide a continuous note or drone; another string is controlled by a keyboard, to play the melody. None of this is clear in the carving, but there’s a video here of a hurdy-gurdy player explaining how his instrument works – as well as the derivation of its curious name.

Another carving shows a string player. I think the instrument is a rebec, which is played with a bow, like a violin. It has a pear-shaped body that tapers into the neck and was held in various ways – along the arm or at the shoulder or even resting on the player’s leg.

Finally, the rhythm section is represented by this drummer. He plays a pair of drums, which the carver has shown quite large – bigger than the drummer’s head, anyway. Pairs of drums (including the small copper-bowled drums called nakers) were often played in the Middle Ages. These seem to be snare drums – the thin gut snare is clearly visible on the left-hand drum and I think I can see a trace of one on the right-hand drum too.

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* Although in many cases we don't know exactly which instruments played which pieces – medieval music manuscripts often give the notes without allocating them to a specific instrument. 

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Ancient styles

Sometimes a few notes, or a particular quality of sound, can do it: a memory is summoned and I am somewhere else entirely. Listening on the radio to an extract from a new recording by British vocal group Stile Antico the other day, I was transported back a few years year to a concert given by the same group in the late-medieval church of St James in Chipping Campden. The building is one of the Cotswold “wool” churches, built, that is to say, using the proceeds of the wool trade in this part of England. These churches have tall bell towers (without spires), big windows, and spacious interiors with flattened arches and roofs not very steeply pitched. Campden church is a particularly graceful example of this style – known to architectural historians as Perpendicular, for its marked vertical emphasis. The bands of stone running right the way up the faces of the tower are an example of this trait, as are the windows with their long vertical glazing bars that extend from the top of the frame to the bottom.

The rather box-like proportions produced by the shallow pitch of the roof work well both visually and acoustically, in my opinion. Churches like this have clear acoustics that are not too echoey and this quality is put to good effect in Chipping Campden when the church hosts a summer music festival. And it was a concert in one of these festivals in which I remembered this group singing. Stile Antico is a small group – just twelve singers I think. They perform early vocal music – mostly written before the 18th century, and mostly the kind that interweaves several different lines: Italian masters such as Palestrina and Monteverdi, English stars like Tallis and Byrd, out of the way composers such as the Slovenian Jacob Handl, whose extraordinary harmonies caught my ear on the radio the other day. They sing this complex polyphony without a conductor.

For the English Buildings blog, some English music: here they are in a piece of music by William Byrd. It’s his setting of the Ave Maria, from a recording of English music for Advent and Christmas. This Ave Maria is two minutes of grace indeed. Renewed wishes for a Happy Christmas to all my readers.


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Stile's Antico's website is here.

The photograph at the top of this post shows the tower of St James’s church, Chipping Campden and the East Banqueting House (part of the largely vanished Old Campden House.
Image by Saffron Blaze, used used Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 unported license and attributed to: W. Lloyd MacKenzie, via Flickr @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/saffron_blaze/

Gloucester Cathedral

Tallis Fantasia

On A September evening in 1910 a few hundred people gathered at Gloucester Cathedral for a concert that formed part of the Three Choirs Festival, the longest-standing music festival in the world, which rotates between the three cathedrals of Worcester, Hereford, and Gloucester. The main work on the programme was Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, long enough to fill a programme in itself. But on this occasion it was accompanied by a new work, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composer was in his late-thirties but was not yet well known. The Tallis Fantasia must have come as a wake-up call for the audience that night: a major work by an English composer and a piece with a sound-world of its own, and very different from what most of its audience would have been used to. Two younger composers, locals Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, spent a long time after the concert wandering around the dark streets of Gloucester in a daze, mulling over what they’d heard.

Vaughan Williams wrote the Tallis Fantasia with the acoustic of the cathedral specifically in mind. It’s based on a tune by the English Tudor composer Thomas Tallis that was originally composed as a setting for a psalm and was recycled as a hymn tune by Vaughan Williams when he edited The English Hymnal. The composer clearly saw then that there was much more he could do with this theme.

The composer created the piece’s distinctive and striking sound by writing for strings alone (no woodwind, no brass, no percussion) and by using harmonies more often associated with folk or Renaissance music than with orchestral scores of his own time. Above all, he got the effect he wanted by dividing up his orchestra into groups and arranging them spatially in a particular way.

Vaughan Williams arranged his strings in three groups: orchestra 1 (a full band of first violins, second violins, cellos, and double basses); orchestra 2 (one desk from each group of strings, making up a group of nine players); and a string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello) whose members also play solos. Vaughan Williams specified that if possible orchestra 1 and orchestra 2 should sit apart from one another, their spatial separation emphasizing the dialogue between the two groups, with its developments of the Tallis theme, and its echoes, responses, and layers of sound. 

Space being at a premium in concert venues, conductors often have room for only a slight separation between  the groups of strings. Andrew Davies, in his 2010 centenary recording, had the luxury of an empty cathedral. This is not quite how Vaughan William could have imagined the first performance of course, with its large audience, but it does give a wonderful impression of the way the two groups work together, just as the video gives a visual impression of the cathedral’s architecture. Moving past the dizzyingly intricate lierne vault of the choir, with its network of stone ribs, past the choir screen and organ, to the empty nave, its rows of massive round Norman piers, the video reveals not only something of the diversity of Gloucester’s architecture, but also of the cavernous quality of the space. As the groups of strings converse across the Romanesque spaces and their sounds reverberate against the Gothic masonry, one can appreciate how well Vaughan Williams’s masterpiece fits the building for which it was written.

Launceston, Cornwall

Architectural notes

The volumes in the Buildings of England series, written originally by Nikolaus Pevsner and added to and revised  by later scholars, are invaluable, one of the greatest works of cultural history and commentary ever produced. The recent edition of the Cornwall volume (a revision and expansion by Peter Beacham of the very first volume in the series, issued originally in 1951) is exemplary: packed with information, building on the original work, fillings gaps in it, updating it, and adding something of its own: a real sense of Cornwall as a distinctive place. And yet sometimes, in towns especially, I like to wander without Pevsner in my hand, noticing things for myself, and occasionally missing things of course, and seeing what my own eyes lead me to.

So it was that I stood and admired this small stone plaque in High Street, Launceston, boggling that it was just plonked there, apparently (with a later bit of shop front plonked in turn over part of the left-hand scroll). An angel playing the lute while another helpfully holds a scroll bearing a stave. What religious purpose could this angel-adorned building have had? I looked, admired the carved faces and feathery wings, tried unsuccessfully to work out whether there was any actual music on the stave, photographed the curiosity and walked on.
 

Round the corner in Church Street, finding a full blown and very architectural shop front, I dug out Pevsner from my bag and read the details. A shop of c. 1870, designed by James Hine in a sophisticated Italianate style as – the inscription makes it clear – Hayman’s Pianoforte Warehouse. That inscription is a striking piece of work, as are the front’s arches, keystones, capitals, and other details, though I was prevented from taking satisfactory pictures by the presence of a large van that was parked there, very close to the facade, for the whole of my time in the town.

Pevsner, what’s more, explains that Hayman’s premises went right through to the High Street, where there’s a relief of angel musicians. Mystery solved. The angels don’t signpost a religious building at all. Like the wonderful lettering on the shop front, they advertise a business where the Victorians could buy pianos (grand or upright, depending on budget and available space) and no doubt harps too and perhaps even lutes (although 1870 is rather early for the early music revival). Advertising built to last.

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Postscript Having years ago written about another musical building adorned with angels – or with putti at least – I should have known.

Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and Oxford

A memory

On December 4, 1976, as the nights drew in after that memorable summer, E, a much-loved mentor, came to visit me in the room I was occupying in my last undergraduate year at university. She wanted to make sure I was settled, I think, in this important final year. Once we'd drunk the ritual tea and exchanged the expected gossip, the conversation turned to music, which had been at the centre of much of E's life. I wanted to play her a few tracks from a recording I'd just bought, of Britten's Les illuminations, and once E had got over the shock that the singer was a soprano and not the expected Peter Pears, we sat back and enjoyed the whole disc. It felt like a true connection between listeners, performers, and composer. As E pointed out, the work had been premiered by a female singer, after all, even if Pears had made the work his own in the subsequent decades. Further reflections followed. We recalled a performance of Les illuminations that we'd both attended in which the singer's pronunciation of Rimbaud's French text undermined the final bars – his parting 'Assez eu' sounded impure and guttural, more like 'assez eugh'. If we laughed about that, over our second cup of tea, I was also told that Britten was very ill now and it was likely that the stream of music that had been steadily flowing for so long would be stayed. Then E went home, and I turned back to whatever it was I was supposed to be reading.

And we would no doubt have forgotten our quiet listening to Britten's song cycle had it not been for the fact that a few days later we opened our respective newspapers and learned that Britten had died that very day. A coincidence of course, but coincidences are patterns, and they stick in the memory, and haunt us, rather like the patterns of music. The patterns mean that I remember that afternoon, that I have a clearer image in my mind than I would otherwise have of the rather dingy North Oxford room I was living in then, and that I recall a shared experience with someone who meant lot to me.

As far as the steady flow of music went, we learned that the tide was not quite out. The composer's third string quartet was premiered at Aldeburgh about two weeks after Britten's death. Its distinctive musical textures – often described as 'spare' because frequently only one or two instruments are playing at once – may in part be due to the composer's partly paralysed right hand. But however they got there, the sounds he produces are a distillation of his late style, deeply absorbing, and a profound example of creativity triumphant in the face of illness and death. The long last movement, entitled 'La serenissima', has been seen as death-defying. Taking a cue from its title I also see in its glittering sounds a reflection of Turner's late Venetian paintings, as if the composer, his inspiration illuminated one final time, is looking towards the light.

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'Assez vu….assez eu….assez connu….' Estonian soprano Aile Asszonyi in 'Départ', the final movement of Britten's Les illuminations.

Hollen Street and Wardour Street, London

Five early pieces: 3

Here is a further re-posting, part of my series to mark this blog’s fifth birthday. Perhaps my readers will forgive my for including another one relating to printing and publishing – after all, such businesses have been central to my life for a long time.

High above Hollen Street, in one of Soho’s unregarded corners, a group of putti are making music. It seems a strange decoration for this otherwise industrial-looking building in a Soho side street. But this plaque, and another up the street that depicts putti churning out pages on a printing press, are a clue to the building’s origins. This was the printing works of the music publishers Novello’s, just around the corner from their offices (now Chappell’s) in Wardour Street.

Both these buildings were designed by Frank L Pearson, who was the son-in-law of the company chairman and the obvious choice for the job. The printing works came first, in 1898, and were followed in 1906 by the offices, all in brick with stone dressings. The office building has a beautiful small concert room on the first floor, done out in the style of a 17th-century hall – the kind of oak-panelled room you find in a country house or Oxbridge college of the Commonwealth period or just after. It’s not normally open, but can be glimpsed, often lit up, from the comfort of the pub opposite in Wardour Street. Among the neon-lit media offices and restaurants of Soho, the concert hall and the charmingly decorated printing works form a throw-back to another time.

                                         The George, Wardour Street

Postscript 2012 Novello’s (now part of the Music Sales group) is a 200-year-old company that found success in the Victorian period by selling affordable editions of music, championing British music, and selling scores of work by European composers from Berlioz to Wagner. Although I’m no musician, I’d long been aware of their publications, but first noticed their building when drinking in the George, the pub opposite in Wardour Street, one evening. To commemorate this I add a photograph of the pub, with its plaster relief of the Prince of Wales and its stripy walls and elaborate window bays – very much in the late-19th century fashion and no doubt influenced by buildings designed by Norman Shaw and Ernest George. Here’s to it.