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CCA Composer of the Month – JANUARY 2014
The photographs top to bottom are: 1. Yvonne Howard and Roy Wightman, May 18th 2013 St Mary’s Collegiate Church, Stafford; 2. The composer and performers, RNCM, July 2013; 3. Yvonne Howard and Scott Mitchell at the RNCM.
YOUR FEATURED COMPOSITION(S) OF THE MONTH:
The long title is “Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 16 of the Sonnets set for Mezzo-Soprano and Pianoforte”
On the CD though, the title has a less daunting feel: “How do I love thee? - Sixteen of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets set by Kerry Milan”
INSTRUMENTAL AND/OR VOCAL RESOURCES USED:
The work is a song-cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano
FIRST PERFORMANCE DETAILS:
- at a concert at St Mary’s Collegiate Church, Stafford, on May 18th 2013 as part of Stafford Music Festival. The mezzo-soprano soloist was Yvonne Howard & her accompanist Roy Wightman. There is a splendid telerecording of the performance (about 43 minutes) on the vimeo site: (http://vimeo.com/74452615) - see below after the programme note; or for those in a hurry there is also a chance to see just the final sonnet ‘How do I love thee’ on YouTube:
PERFORMERS ON YOUR RECORDING:
Yvonne Howard needs no introduction, hailed recently by the press as ‘surely the finest singing actress this country has produced’. She has just finished an extended season with Opera North as part of their ‘Festival of Britten’ season, and is now looking forward to reprising her role as Caesonia in Detlev Glanert’s Caligula for ENO, when the production takes the long road from the Coliseum to Buenos Aires this Spring.
Scott Mitchell is a senior staff accompanist and accompaniment tutor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is one of the founding members of the Cantilena Festival each summer on Islay and a brilliant pianist/duetist, performing with the likes of Emma Johnson and Raphael Wallfisch, to name just two distinguished artists.
Rehearsals for the recording took place in Glasgow at the RCS. We all then moved down to Manchester for the recording itself, in the splendid acoustic of the Royal Northern College of Music concert hall, with their recording engineer Stephen Guy.
The recording is now available on the Ardross House label from the classical music site tutti.co.uk, from where track downloads are also available.
OF THE WORK SELECTED, WHAT WAS THE SOURCE/INSPIRATION/COMMISSION WHICH SET THIS PIECE IN MOTION?
One of the first people my wife Patricia and I met when we moved to Stafford in March 1964 was Reginald Browning, local solicitor and hugely knowledgeable amateur musician who also wrote arts criticisms in the Rugeley Times under the nom de plume “Brave Galuppi”, showing even then his Robert Browning colours! Many years later Reg. asked if I would set some Browning for him and his wife Veronica and the result was Pippa Passes, premiered in 2011 at St Mary’s by Yvonne Howard and the English Piano Trio. Sadly Veronica died before the work was finished; but thrilled by Yvonne’s performance of Pippa Reg. then wondered if I might set some of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese for him. Some years before, Spode House (part of what was then Hawksyard Priory near Armitage) had run regular arts events, including evenings of music and poetry recitations, and at one of these the Brownings had recited the opening sonnets “I thought once how Theocritus had sung” and the penultimate one “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
[CCA colleagues visitors to this site may be interested in the fact that from 1971 until Spode House closed in 1987 our late colleague Robert Sherlaw Johnson was director of the annual Spode Music Week at Armitage.]
In the end I decided to set a third of the Sonnets, opening and closing with Reg’s suggestions, and the result is the present song-cycle, dedicated to Miss Howard.
WHAT WOULD BE A GOOD PROGRAMME NOTE FOR THIS WORK WHICH EXPLAINS THE STRUCTURE, USE OF MELODY AND HARMONY AND ANY TECHNICAL POINTS RELATED TO THE PERFORMERS?
The story behind the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and these present settings.
The title “From the Portuguese” is confusing. Elizabeth Barrett was herself the ‘Portuguese’, secretly writing the 44 sonnets which were to chronicle her emotions through the twenty months of her and Robert Browning’s courtship, from the first of their 574 letters in January 1845 up to the dramatic days of September 1846 when the couple first secretly married and then ‘eloped’ to Italy. Only three years later did Robert Browning first see these beautiful poems, which he is said to have declared “the finest Sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s”.
These are not the feelings of a young girl. Elizabeth Barrett was thirty eight at the time and spent much of her life confined to her sick room. She was already a much-read poet, more so indeed than Robert Browning, and it is of significance that she chose to channel her emotions through the highly disciplined format of the Petrarchian sonnet, with its fourteen lines, ten or eleven syllables each, and its distinctive rhyming sequence abba abba cdcdcd.
One of the ways by which these musical settings aim to be faithful to the spirit of the text, and its discipline, has been to impose constraints upon the music, similar to those the poet herself worked within. It will not be obvious to the ear; but the rhymes of the text are paralleled by similar notation matches so that the notes for the end of each line of sonnet one, for example, are
F Db C# F, F C# C# F, Bb Ab, Bb Ab, Bb and A natural.
All being well, these limitations will not be obvious, the music hopefully managing to capture faithfully the various changing moods and emotions of a remarkable woman.
Kerry Milan "Sonnets from the Portuguese" from VYKA on Vimeo.
WHEN DID YOU FIRST START COMPOSING AND WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST PIECE?
I still have the manuscript for a violin and piano sonata, dating back to my school days near Glasgow; but it is important to remember I was always a violinist first, pianist second and composer a very distant third, at least in terms of practice time! On the other hand I do recall that at my RSAMD audition I had the audacity to play the opening of a piano sonata I was then working on. The first work to have a public performance was a song-cycle of three songs for Tenor and Pianoforte which was included as part of a concert of students’ compositions at the RSAMD in June 1963, performed by Roger Crook and Anne Strachan. After that, though, composing was very much put on ‘hold’ until I retired from full-time teaching.
WHO WAS IT THAT FIRST ENCOURAGED YOU TO DEVELOP YOUR INTEREST IN COMPOSING AND HOW DID THEY HELP?
I remember my school music teacher Charles Mclean encouraging me to develop little ‘germs’ of an idea, as he put it. Later, at college, Anthony Hedges kept a kindly eye on me, even though I was not officially ‘doing’ composition. The first ‘real’ composer I met was the then elderly Hans Gál, and this made a big impression, not least because he was not a dead composer!
WHOM DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR GREATEST INSPIRATIONS IN TERMS OF MAJOR COMPOSERS AND WHICH OF THEIR WORKS HAVE INFLUENCED YOU THE MOST AND WHY?
In terms of my own composing I am not conscious of having been especially inspired by specific composers or works; but at the subconscious level, who knows?
Having been closely involved with the Episcopal Church in Scotland must surely have had some part to play in my decision to set the Compline settings which comprise my double chorus work Completus.
Generally speaking, being first and foremost a violinist certainly influences one’s melodic vis-à-vis harmonic perception of music and likewise being an orchestral player gives one a different perspective to a keyboard player. Naturally one seeks to redress the balance; but the inherent strengths and weaknesses will always be there, just as a violin down bow will always be inherently stronger than an up bow, however long we practise to even them out!
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR STYLE TO SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER HEARD YOUR MUSIC BEFORE?
In a word, melodic - though since my sister once described one of my pieces as morbid and like a dirge, one can never judge the effect on the listener, who sadly often makes a snap judgement on the strength of a single hearing.
Again, developing my previous answer, there will often be counter-melodies, and counter-counter-melodies. I’m a firm believer in the saying ‘Set limits and release creativity’.
WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS ORIGINAL IN YOUR MUSIC?
The sound-world of Pippa Passes. Who knows where it came from - a complete ‘one-off’ according to the English Piano Trio. In a sense, though, I feel that each new piece reveals something new and different. Perhaps that is simply that I only started composing seriously rather late in life, and I’m still learning!
HOW DO YOU WORK? WHAT METHODS OF CREATIVITY AND WORK ETHIC DO YOU HAVE?
I did about three months’ preparatory work on the Sonnets, then started composing on a January the second, I remember. I finished on the last day of June, having had just a week off at Easter and another break in late May before the final few settings. During this six months I worked very intensively from early morning till late evening, and everything else more or less stopped. It never gets easier, I’ve found. The pressure is always on to maintain the standard. The answer is to get something mapped out on paper, if only a key sequence or a specific number of empty bars. It doesn’t matter that everything is later changed. That’s just part of the process.
DO YOU SOLELY USE MUSICAL TECHNOLOGY OR DO PAPER AND PENCIL STILL FORM PART OF YOUR PROCESS?
The ideas are always jotted down on paper. The technology helps to test and refine. Above all else I find it helps me judge the proportions of a phrase, in relation to others passages. Hearing in one’s head and out loud are not necessarily the same thing. No where is this more true than in judging tempo - and even then the eventual performers will have their own opinion, to which I’m usually happy to accede!
WHAT PROJECTS ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?
I am working on a book of my early family, a fascinating experience trying to get inside the lives of people who were living a hundred years before the Spanish Armada.
I am also planning another song-cycle, Rapture, this time of poems by a poet very much alive! Pippa was for mezzo and piano trio, the Sonnets for mezzo and piano. I think perhaps the new cycle, again of love poems, may be for mezzo with string quartet and French horn; but who knows how it will turn out?
TO FINISH, WHO OR WHAT IS YOU FAVOURITE:
GENRE OF MUSIC, INSTRUMENTALIST, SINGER, CONDUCTOR, CHAMBER ENSEMBLE, ORCHESTRA, CONCERT VENUE, PIECE OF MUSIC?
I tend not to have favourites - or at least they change from week to week, depending on the circumstances.
But for sentimental reasons Paisley Abbey has an enduring place in my heart, since it was there I performed my first concerto with orchestra, the Bruch with Renfrewshire Schools Orchestra, while I was still at college.
As for favourite singer, how could it not be Yvonne Howard? She sings my music, and is exquisitely expressive!