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7/21/2019 Holst's Debt to Cecil Sharp - I. Holst
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/holsts-debt-to-cecil-sharp-i-holst 1/5
Gustav Holst's Debt to Cecil SharpAuthor(s): Imogen HolstReviewed work(s):Source: Folk Music Journal, Vol. 2, No. 5 (1974), pp. 400-403Published by: English Folk Dance + Song SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4521939 .
Accessed: 07/10/2012 15:19
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7/21/2019 Holst's Debt to Cecil Sharp - I. Holst
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/holsts-debt-to-cecil-sharp-i-holst 2/5
GustavHolst's
Debt
to Cecil
Sharp
IMOGEN
HOLST
WHEN THE TIME
COMES
for the
history
of
English
music
in
the
twentieth century to be
written,
Cecil
Sharp's
name will stand
out
above all
others.
I can
remember
hearing my
father
say this,
with
passionate conviction
in his
voice,
during
a lecture
he
gave
in
the
early nineteen-twenties on
England
and
-her
music .
I
was then
about
fifteen, and I certainly
agreed
with him
but,
at
the same
time,
I
wondered
why he
needed to be so
emphatic
about it:
the folk tunes that
were
at
the centre of
our
lives
seemed
secure
enough
to be
taken for
granted.
It was not until fifteen
years
later, when I was trying
to analyse some of
my
father's
own
music, that
I
began to
understand
his
overwhelming
sense of
personal
gratitude.
It
is
difficult
for
us
to realize
today what
it
must have
felt
like
to
be a
young
English
composer during
the
eighteen-nineties.
Music
meant German
music:
the
operas
of
Wagner
or the
lieder
of
Brahms. My
father once
admitted
to a friend
that
never
having
managed to learn a
foreign
language, songs
always meant
a
peg of
words on which
to
hang
a
tune .
The
possibility
of
finding
an
English song where
the
words and
the music grew
together
had
not
yet occurred to
him.
He knew of the
Elizabethan lyrics
that had appeared in anthologies, but the Lutenist-composers'
tunes
belonging to
them had not yet been
republished.
As
for
folk
songs, he had
been brought
up
in the
belief that
they were
4'either
bad or Irish . Then, in
1903, his whole
musical life was
suddenly
transformed.
This was the
year when Cecil Sharp
collected
his first
Somerset folk
song from
the
gardener
at
Hambridge rectory,
and when
Ralph Vaughan Williams
collected
his firstEssexfolk song from Mr. Pottipherof Ingrave.During the
following year or
two my father greeted
each
newly-discovered
folk tune
as a
revelation. The effect
on his own
song-writing was
instantaneous: from
then
onwards he was
never satisfied until his
tunes
were at
one with the
words .
People have often asked
me
why he
never collected any folk
tunes
himself,
except
on
foreign
holidays in
Algeria
and Sicily.
400
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I think the reason must have been lack of free time:
he had
so
much
teaching
to do that
his
only opportunities
for
composing
were at
weekends
and
during
the month
of
August.
But
the
thought
of
collecting
folk
songs
was
obviously
in his
mind,
for
one
of
his
ex-pupils
who
joined
his
singing
classes
in
the
years
before
the 1914 war has told
me that
she remembers him
asking
them all at the end of term to be sure to
tell
him
if
they
heard
any
traditional songs sung by
people
in
country villages
while
they
were
away
on
holiday.
Folk
tunes revolutionized not
only
his
song-writing
but
also
his
instrumental works. His orchestral Somerset
Rhapsody
(1906-7)
is founded on The
Sheep-shearing Song , High
Germany ,
and
The
Lover's Farewell :
an
introductory
note
printed
in
the full score
says
that it was written at
the
request
of
Cecil Sharp to whom it was
dedicated . In this
work,
and in the
two 1906
Songs Without
Words
for
small
orchestra, dedicated to
Vaughan
Williams, my
father
found
his
own authentic musical
language for the first
time.
In
his earliest
arrangementsof
folk
songs for
piano accompani-
ment
he
was sometimes bewildered
by
the
unaccustomed
discipline
of
having
to
keep within the dorian or phrygian or
mixolydian
mode. In
a letter to
Cecil
Sharp1
he asked if it would
matter
if
he
occasionally
mixed the
modes by combining several versions of
the
same
tune,
or
would
this ,
he
added,
be
too much
like
mixing one's
drinks
?
As it
happened,
these
experiments
in
mixingthe modes helped him to find his way out of the thickets of
nineteenth-century chromaticism and
led him to the miracle of
his 1907-8
chamber opera, Savitri. Miracle is
the only word
with which to
describe it, for
it
was
the
first
English chamber
opera
since
the death of Purcell, and it happened
with astonishing
suddenness.
Only a few years
before this he had
been struggling
with
his
first Indian
opera,
a
discarded work
which
he afterwards
referredto as good old Wagnerian bawling , on account of its
lengthy
three
acts, huge
cast, immense
orchestra, and almost
continuous
fortissimo
chromatic sequences.
Savitri, his second
Indian
opera,
is a
complete
contrast
in
every way. It lasts just
half an
hour:
there
are
only three characters,
a small choir
l
See
page
402.
401
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offstage, and
a
chamber orchestra
of twelve
players.
The
opening
dialogue for
unaccompanied
voices is
startlingly
original,
and
there
is
a radiance in
the
economy
of the
part-writing.
It
is a
radiance that is
characteristic
of
my
father's
music
at its
best,
and he
himself
knew that
he owed
it not
only
to the
lesson
he
had
learnt
from Purcell's
dramatic recitatives but also
to
the lesson
he
had
learnt
from the
simple directness
of
English
folk
songs.
He
never
grew
out
of folk
tunes ,
for
he
shared
Bartok's
belief
that
they
were
masterpieces
on a small
scale ,
and real
models of the
highest
artistic
perfection .
Folk
tunes
helped
him
in
his
commissioned works
for military band and in his
music
for
amateur choral
societies:
they
also
helped
him
in
such
a
highly
skilled
work as the
Fugal
Concerto, where
the
tune of
If
all
the
world
were paper
suddenly puts
in an
unexpected
appearance
in
the last
movement
and
manages to sound
thoroughly
at
home.
During the
mid-nineteen-twenties,
when
my father was
suffering
from the
depression of
overwork and
illness,
it
was folk music
that
brought
him
a
new lease of
life in
his
Shakespearean
opera,
At the Boar's Head. And owing to this new lease of life he was
afterwards
able to write
some
of
his greatest
music,
during the
few years that
remained to
him.
It
is
no
wonder that
there
was
always such
passionate
con-
viction
in his voice
when
he
spoke of his
debt of
gratitude
to
Cecil
Sharp. What about his
prophecy that Cecil
Sharp's
name
would one
day stand out above
all others in
the
history
of
twentieth-centuryEnglish music? It seems unlikely to be fulfilled
in
any literal sense.
But
then,
what is
musical
history ,
apart
from the
actual
music
that is
being written
and
performed
and
listened
to?
We need only
hear
the
greatest of the
English
works
that
have been
written
during the last
fifty
years to
know that
my
father
was
right
to
feel so
deeply grateful
to Cecil
Sharp, on
his
own
behalf
and on
behalf of his
contemporaries and his
successors. We can recognize the essential truth of his prophecy
every
time
we
hear
an
exciting
new
English
composition. And
we
shall
go
on
recognizing
that
truth, as long as
we
have ears
to
listen
with.
The
letter referred
to on page
401 is now held in the
Vaughan
Williams
Memorial
Library.
t is here
reproduced
n
full
for
the
benefitof
readers.
402
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