Music for all seasons 1 - Summer

There is an accompanying Spotify playlist to this article.

Do you find it easy to decide which piece to listen to? Do you put on an album or do you prefer to go to a specific piece or both? Sometimes it can be easy for me to choose: I’ll have a piece in my head and just have to listen to it. Failing to do so will leave me  replaying it in my head endlessly, even waking in the middle of the night to find myself halfway through it. Listening to it in its entirety can act as an ‘exorcism’ but not necessarily. I can sometimes obsess over a piece and have to listen to it five or six times over a two week period before it’s out of my system. Fortunately, things aren’t always quite so dramatic and I’ll sometimes think of a piece that I haven’t heard for a long while and will go with that.

Sometimes, though, I agonise over my listening. My choice will often be determined by many factors: the time of day, the time of year, the weather, my mood, my surroundings. Fortunately, there is music to suit just about every season, mood and situation, such is the variety and wealth of the medium. I suppose this is not surprising when you think that people have been writing music down for hundreds of years and for hundreds of reasons, influenced by their upbringing, culture, tuition, beliefs and vision, available resources and the ‘rules’ of their time. (By which I mean the rules surrounding composition and performance of music: Debussy’s piano music might well have had him sent to an asylum had it been performed in Beethoven’s day as it did not conform to the style or expectations of the period.) I’m writing this post as the weather improves and suggests that Summer might finally be arriving. So what will I be listening to?

Music suitable for Summer (as I feel it) probably starts with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to Bach or Haydn in the Summer – I’m talking here about music which I consider to be Summer-y. Beethoven’s Pastoral (his 6th Symphony) is not only a symphony but, to use Beethoven’s , ‘an expression of feelings upon arriving in the countryside’.  The first movement is very much that – music expressing contentment and quiet joy. But the following movements venture into what is often called tone painting – using music to express a non-musical idea or image. In this case, a scene by the brook, peasants’ merrymaking, a storm.  One doesn’t need to be in the countryside to enjoy this, such is the quality and vividness of Beethoven’s writing. It can be enjoyed both as programme music (music which attempts to convey extra-musical images) or as absolute music (which was has no extra-music idea or intention but which exists for its own sake). If one enjoys the Pastoral Symphony, then there is a strong chance of enjoying Brahms’s two serenades, seldom heard in the concert hall. Both have a pleasant rustic, outdoors feel but without the extra-musical imagery. Also worth investigation are the string serenades by Dvorak and his son in law – Suk. The latter is less well-known than the Dvorak but very much a neglected gem. Both will give lasting pleasure.

For me, English music is essential listening over the Summer. Many people will listen, throughout the year, to Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’. I fear it is in danger of being wrongly maligned by the snobbish and sniping who foolishly believe that popularity precludes greatness. This is a fate that has befallen many a great work in the past – over-exposure led some to dismiss  or ‘pooh-pooh’ Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, one of the most perfectly and brilliantly constructed symphonies in the repertoire. Tchaikovsky’s stock also fell for a while following an over-reliance on his more popular works by concert promoters eager to fill seats. In truth, popularity can be something of an enigma: it leads some to believe an ordinary work to be great  and others to undervalue one which truly is great. I digress.

The Lark Ascending, beloved of Classic FM, is a miniature masterpiece, inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name, which begins:

‘’He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break,I

n chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,

All intervolv’d and spreading wide,

Like water-dimples down a tide’’

Vaughan Williams evokes, through sustained strings, a feeling of the warmth of a Summer evening. Above them, the lark, embodied by a solo violin, circles and soars from the lower range of the instrument to its highest. A middle section has a folksy feel and may be interpreted as the music turning from nature to something more human. I’ve often found myself hearing an inherent sadness in the music and thinking that the summer it evokes is missing the sound of leather on willow or the laughing of harvesters. I then have to remind myself that it was composed in 1914, before the country lost so many of its men to the first World War. That thought also prompts me to mention that Vaughan-Williams also composed a Pastoral Symphony – a much misunderstood work that has little to do with nature and everything to do with the war. I’ll almost certainly be writing about that piece in the future.

Contemporaries of Vaughan Williams also produced works belonging to what has become known as the English Pastoral School. Among them Frederick Delius. I will be completely honest and declare that I am no fan of Delius. I find his music both aimless and unmemorable. Others disagree and hear something in it that I cannot. I do, however, enjoy his ‘’On hearing the first cuckoo in spring’’. This short piece suggests (to me) a summer morning, just after sunrise. The opening movement is sustained, but where The Lark gives a sense of warmth, the Cuckoo shimmers as though the air is only just starting to warm. The clarinet’s cuckoo is tinged with sadness but that may just be how I hear it. Now that I think about it, I find an air of melancholy about much of the English Pastoral School. That may be something in the music itself but it is probably also related to a sense of nostalgia – there is a sense of visiting an older, pre-war era when people still walked between villages rather than using motorised transport and used their hands rather than machines to work the land. This may be partly due to the use of modes – effectively a type of scale which was an important feature of folk music and which is subtly different from the more common major and minor scales. The modal quality of many melodies created by the English pastoral school harks back to the time of Thomas Hardy or AE Housman, whose words have been set by the likes of Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and John Ireland.

The First World War had an enormous impact on music around the world. It’s not a subject I would even attempt to discuss here. But what is relevant is the loss of composers to the war. Vaughan Williams’s friend, George Butterworth was just one greatly-mourned. His two miniatures, A Shropshire Land and On the Banks of Green Willow are essential summer listening.

I do not want to give the impression that the Summer is only for English music. The music of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy (both French) is also necessary listening for me. The difference is that the warmth and modality of the English school is displaced by a clearer, brighter warmth and a more adventurous harmonic language. Having said that, Debussy’s seminal “Prelude to the Afternoon of a faun” could be heard as a French cousin to Vaughan Williams’s Lark. Debussy’s Prelude opens with one of the most famous flute solos in all music. Swaying between a C sharp and a G natural, it leaves the listener wondering what key we are in, if any. Debussy’s inspiration was also a poem, by Stephane Mallarmé, which describes the thoughts of a faun who has just woken on a warm afternoon. The rapturous central section has a golden glow but the overall feeling is one of mystery.

Debussy’s Images for Orchestra are, perhaps, more sophisticated and take longer acquaintance but look across to Spain. Which brings me neatly to Manuel de Falla, whose Nights in the Gardens of Spain, for orchestra and solo piano generate a far more oppressive heat. Indeed, the opening movement, En el Generalife, evokes for me the listless feel of a hot and humid evening. The piano provides a welcome glitter to the music. A similar impression is conjured up by the 6th movement of Olivier Messiaen’s gargantuan and rather more avant-garde Turangalila Symphony - Jardin du sommeil d’amour (Garden of Love’s Sleep). The orchestra’s sultry, langorous  sound is punctured by the piano’s bird-song interjections (Messiaen spent much time recording the sounds of birds and trying to recreate them in music, resulting in Catalogue d’Oiseaux – Catalogue of Birds). This is not dissimilar to Ravel’s La Vallee des Cloches (Valley of bells), in which we can hear the influence of Javanese music. Originally written for piano, the Vallee was later orchestrated (quite brilliantly) by Percy Grainger (he of English Country Gardens fame). In this piece, though, the percussion is very much part of the landscape where, in the Turangalila, it represents a separate element. Many 20th Century composers took inspiration from the sounds of the percussion-based Javanese gamelan orchestra, either as a result of their travels abroad or through exposure at the great Paris Exhibition of 1889.

I feel I have skated over a fair bit of terrain without spending much time really taking in the sights. But, having written a fairly basic tourist’s guide, I would invite you to try some of the pieces I have mentioned. All of this music will be freely available on Youtube or other streaming services. As a long-time user of Spotify, I have compiled a playlist on there which you might like to sample. Here’s to some good weather!

Spotify Playlist – Talking about music – Music for all seasons 1 – Summer.