More thoughts
Congratulations to the committee and ongoing supporters of the Havergal Brian Society upon reaching the milestone of the two hundredth instantiation of the bimonthly newsletter.
First, some comments about a letter I wrote approximately this time last year, about Brian and copyright. By the time that issue reached your letterboxes, there had been a major development as the International Music Score Library Project (imslp.org) had been issued a “cease-and-desist” letter by Universal-Edition of Vienna, concerning some sixty works that were in the public domain in Canada, but not necessarily in some member states of the European Union.
Rather than comply with demands for €180,000 to be able to host the works, the site was taken off-line and relaunched in July this year, “bigger and better” than before. Even without some of the contentious works that U-E objected to, the site is a treasure-trove of works. Although the site no longer hosts any works of Havergal Brian, I thoroughly recommend it for anyone with the slightest interest in Western art music.
So I would like to make a suggestion that the committee contact the Havergal Brian Estate to negotiate the release of several minor works that are already in the public domain in the US, but not in Canada: initially, two of the piano works: the Three Illuminations of 1916–17, and the Four Miniatures of 1918–20. I refer readers to NL 193, and the section on Creative Commons licensing: I would suggest these two works could be released under the aegis of “Non-commercial”, and possibly “No Derivative Works”. These two pieces would then be something of a “sampler” to entice interested music lovers to purchase the Society’s volume of the Complete Music for Solo Piano, published in 1985.
Havergal Brian is represented on the site in another way: if not by music, then by a listing of his works, in which I must confess that I have heavily borrowed from the extensive pre-existing work of Lewis Foreman, Malcolm Macdonald, Jeremy Marchant, Reginald Nettel, and Kenneth Eastaugh, among others. So I would like to announce the prospect of a published thematic catalogue of Havergal Brian’s works, and will have a (very small and only partially complete) first draft to offer before too long.
I feel that such a catalogue (in the manner of L.R. von Köchel, O.E. Deutsch, or D.K. Holoman, to give three worthy examples) would be both a desirable and necessary step towards interesting a publisher in producing a “Brian-Gesamtausgabe”, or complete edition of the extant works. This might be a private pipe-dream, or an item on a personal “wishlist”, but I would not regard it an impossible one.
The New Berlioz Edition was substantially assisted by sponsorship from a prominent philanthropic foundation, and the HBS Scores Subcommittee seems ably suited to provide the typesetting – even if the critical analysis would not meet Bärenreiter’s standards for their “New Complete Editions”. Readers may consult my occasional offerings in these pages for other possible items I would include on my wishlist of things that might be achieved over the next two hundred issues of the newsletter.
I also have one or two reflections to offer on the recent discussion of Brian’s tempi in NL 197 and 198, having considered this in detail during the typesetting of Symphony 7. Brian gave the timings of each of the four movements as 8, 7, 13, and 18 minutes respectively; Newstone’s 1966 reading is 8½, 7, 16, and 9, and Mackerras’ 1987 EMI recording is 9½, 7, 16, and 10 minutes.
Sir Charles I feel misses one crucial tempo change in the first movement: which by the way is very easily done, judging by the MS full score. At figure 3 Brian writes Pesante molto (crotchet = 80), and then 6 bars later a considerably faster new tempo (crotchet = 100). In Mackerras at this point – i.e., at 1′ 6″, if you have the recording – there is no essential difference between the new tempo and the previously established Pesante at 0′ 50″. This incidentally was highlighted by David Jenkins all the way back in NL 98 as the main reason behind Mackerras taking a minute longer compared to Newstone.
That both conductors take three minutes longer than Brian’s alleged 13 minutes for the third movement is not entirely surprising, as many of Brian’s tempi feel rather rushed. The most notable of these is the flute melody (Lento, dotted crotchet = 80) after figure 99, about 3½ minutes into Mackerras’ recording: his tempo is about 55 compared to Brian’s 80, and I prefer hearing the passage at 60, at the very fastest.
The most notorious issue regarding tempi and timings is the fourth movement Epilogue ~ ‘Once upon a time.’ This movement alone was the subject of an in-depth article in NL 107, again by the invaluable David Jenkins: many thanks are due to the acuity of past and present webmasters that one can easily find such useful articles on the website at a considerably later date!
There is simply no way the movement can be made to play for 18 minutes without obliterating Brian’s nominated tempi. One of the nice features of the computer software—ideal for film and television composers—is to timecode, or to accurately determine exactly how long a given passage of music will play for, and allow the precise timing of any event in the course of the music’s progress.
My Sibelius typeset plays through the four movements as follows: 8 minutes; 5 minutes 56 seconds; 12 minutes 12 seconds; and for the crucial final movement, 7 minutes 48 seconds! Now while the computer has no fear of technical difficulties that might cause a conductor sensible of his players’ skill to slow down a notch, there is obviously no way that a movement that plays for 8 to 10 minutes to be stretched out for another 10 minutes.
In conclusion, I would agree with Jeremy Marchant’s suggestion that what is frequently missing from Brian’s scores are indications of minute, local fluctuations of an underlying tempo, compounded by very occasional instances of unworkable tempi. We need a new generation of conductors to perform his music frequently enough to build up a range of performances, so variations between performances can be compared, rather than just having a single CD recording “defining” a given work.
Philip Legge
Melbourne
NL200 © 2008 Philip Legge