Havergal Confessional

[semloh]

Picking up on Tapiola's comment in the Finnish Downloads discussion.............. I've decided to gird my loins, grasp the nettle, and stand up and be counted! I confess .............. I really don't care much for Havergal Brian's Symphonies! 

Yes, I know that many of you good people, including Dundonnell, Herrenberg, and many others, adore his work, but I trust you won't send me to Coventry for this quirk in my musical sensibilities! Before anyone starts trying to tell me what I'm missing, I should point out that I have all the symphonies, and have been patiently listening to them on-and-off for 40 years, thinking that one day I might understand what it is that holds his fans in thrall, but without success. I've listened to the Gothic many times and it's OK but it doesn't really do much for me. I don't dislike it, you understand, and I am delighted that HB has his champions and dismayed by his neglect, but his music doesn't talk to me, doesn't move me in any significant way.  (So, I was far more moved by Colin's wonderful account of his son's encounter with HB' music, than I have ever been by the music itself!)

I don't want to spark a 'for and against' argument here - I just wanted to reassure others with a similar view that they are not alone!  As we've agreed so many times before - musical taste is amazingly diverse and long may it be so!

[Jimfin]

Semloh, rest assured I would never think less of anyone for not liking music I like, particularly if you have tried so honourably to do so. All of us on here are surely frequently victims of disapproval for some of our music tastes, so hope we can all be open-minded. It's just interesting to see things the opposite way round: I'm usually the only person within a thousand-mile radius who likes Brian. His music definitely isn't everyone's taste and never will be, however much his popularity increases. Much the same could be said of Berlioz or Wagner

[Alan Howe]

Don't tell anyone, but apart from the early symphonies they don't do much for me either. My loss, I know, but there we are. Something to do with his lumbering gait, I think. The music just doesn't flow. But the Gothic, that's something else. The RAH Prom was simply the greatest concert experience of my life...

[Mark Thomas]

I nailed my colours to the mast some time ago. I admire the Gothic, thought the Proms concert a wonderful experience, but I don't share the adulation for Brian's music which others have. My loss I'm sure and I'm really not saying they're wrong but I'm losing no sleep over it.

[Jimfin]

I hope this isn't going to become a thread for beating Brian with, though. I'm sure we all have composers we don't like on here, and surely it's better if we focus on talking about the ones we do like...

[Alan Howe]

There should be no problem with posting negative reactions to Brian's music provided that they are expressed with care and courtesy - and preferably with arguments to back them up.

[BFerrell]

Interestingly, I have admired Brian since the first Aries LPs. I find his work difficult but well worth repeated hearings. My point is, after the marvelous group of CDs released in 2011 with more to come in 2012, I think Brian can no longer be considerd "unsung" or just a curiosity.

[semloh]

Interestingly, I have admired Brian since the first Aries LPs. I find his work difficult but well worth repeated hearings. My point is, after the marvelous group of CDs released in 2011 with more to come in 2012, I think Brian can no longer be considerd "unsung" or just a curiosity.

My apologies if I seemed to imply that you didn't like HB - I was just thinking of your observation regarding the extent of the championship he receives here. I feel the same way as you about his status - the many years of neglect seem to be finally coming to an end. I suppose we will all have our ideas as to what makes a composer "unsung" and maybe these will be aired in a new thread in due course.

Thanks for the understanding responses to my "confession" .... I promise to persevere with the Gothic at least!

[BFerrell]

Would that all of our composers on the site get a Hyperion double, two Toccatas and two Dutton releases this year! I think Havergal himself would be stunned.

[albion]

One thing that I greatly admire about Brian's music is that, right from the Burlesque Variations (1903) all the way through to Symphony No.32 (1968), it has the stamp of originality to an extraordinary degree and could not be mistaken for that of anybody else. His essential characteristics of discontinuity, orchestral virtuosity (to the point of awkwardness, in much the same way that some of Bach's vocal lines are written with the clear pre-requisite that the human voice should ideally be an instrument capable of reaching the same agility as a violin or an oboe), and essentially tonal (though often with grating dissonance) counterpoint are consistent throughout his entire output.

Probably because of his largely untutored beginnings, combined with the sheer bloody-mindedness of his personality, he seemed to emerge in the early years of the twentieth-century more or less pretty fully-formed with a highly idiosyncratic musical mind which then grew and developed in a fascinating way over his enormous creative career. Yes there is some Elgarian nobilmente in For Valour and In Memoriam, some Straussian orchestral wizardry (and parody) here and there, some Brucknerian monumentality occasionally, but there is a vast amount of musical thought, material and process that is well-nigh unprecedented. Certainly this is backed up by the extant vocal scores of By the Waters of Babylon (1905-09) and The Vision of Cleopatra (1908).

I regard him in all honesty as the twentieth-century Berlioz, thinking of the sharp juxtapositions of disparate-material, the blatant disregard of 'conventional' harmonic progression (a fabulous example the climactic, seemingly-random chord progressions towards the end of the first movement of Harold in Italy) and the reckless demands on an orchestra with no concessions for human frailty. The language of the musical 'text' used by both composers is different but the syntax of self-reliant originality is basically the same, but with Brian you also have a more obsessive interest in contrapuntal structure: as Malcolm Macdonald points out several times in his majestic three-volume survey, Brian often wrote quite logical, flowing (but complex) counterpoint and then proceeded to completely break it up as an aural experience by abrupt changes of orchestral colour and tempi. That he clearly took the deliberate decision to do this (and thereby obscure the relationships between different sections within the same movement) is a never-ending source of fascination: he presents us with his music and wants us to put some work in, to tease out his logic. If we don't want to do this I don't think he would have any other response but a wry smile implying "whether you personally like it or not, I wrote it and here it is".

[eschiss1]

(I try to make it a point not to get miffed if a composer I cannot get, is getting to my mind, too much attention in some area of this forum, for too long a time; for it's all a relative thing, and composers who are very sung and who I cannot abide - and will not name (and who I have not seen named here, in some cases at all, I think- hrm, maybe once) - are doing, or their estates are doing, very well no matter what goes on here.) 
Perspective.

[Jimfin]

Albion, you put it more eloquently than I possibly could: Brian brings me into a sound world I find nowhere else. However, I understand that precisely because his style, which is pretty unmistakable, is so distinctive, it is not going to be to everyone's taste, and is open to accusations of 'sounding the same'. If you don't like one piece of Brian, one can't really say "oh well, try this other one", as you probably won't like it either. Added to this is the comparative limitation of his output genre-wise: mostly orchestral, very little choral music (and what there is includes two symphonies), due to the loss of "Prometheus Unbound", almost no chamber music, piano works or songs and five operas which are almost completely unheard. So I do understand that he really is not everyone's taste.

[Dundonnell]

Picking up on Tapiola's comment in the Finnish Downloads discussion.............. I've decided to gird my loins, grasp the nettle, and stand up and be counted! I confess .............. I really don't care much for Havergal Brian's Symphonies! 

Yes, I know that many of you good people, including Dundonnell, Herrenberg, and many others, adore his work, but I trust you won't send me to Coventry for this quirk in my musical sensibilities! Before anyone starts trying to tell me what I'm missing, I should point out that I have all the symphonies, and have been patiently listening to them on-and-off for 40 years, thinking that one day I might understand what it is that holds his fans in thrall, but without success. I've listened to the Gothic many times and it's OK but it doesn't really do much for me. I don't dislike it, you understand, and I am delighted that HB has his champions and dismayed by his neglect, but his music doesn't talk to me, doesn't move me in any significant way.  (So, I was far more moved by Colin's wonderful account of his son's encounter with HB' music, than I have ever been by the music itself!)

I don't want to spark a 'for and against' argument here - I just wanted to reassure others with a similar view that they are not alone!  As we've agreed so many times before - musical taste is amazingly diverse and long may it be so!

Colin(Semloh), just for clarification It was my greatnephew that I took to hear the Proms Gothic not "my son"-I don't have one of those

Those who think that Havergal Brian is receiving a measure of extravagent attention should stay well clear of that other music forum GMG where the HB thread has now reached 190 pages and 3,799 replies Mind you it does tend to veer off on all manner of extraordinary tangents

As Albion has so well put it, Brian is, for me too, a wonderfully unpredictable and fascinating composer and always has been. I share Alan's belief that the Proms Gothic was the most wonderful experience of my concert-going life. Brian certainly fully merits the exposure which is music is again enjoying, following the earlier 1970s broadcasts of the entire symphonic series.

But....yes, there is a 'but'...the later symphonies can be hard nuts to crack. I do "enjoy" the earlier symphonies more, particularly Nos. 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.
I hope that I will give no offence by saying that the advocacy of Brian's music  was sometimes in the past open to the charge that those who appeared fanatical about it had been seduced by the aura of "the old man" composing all those symphonies in an isolation which was far from 'splendid': Brian contra mundum.

This inevitably led some critics to react in a hostile way to the music and many of them still do. In reality, I sometimes think, the adverse reaction is not informed by actually listening to and studying the music-as semloh obviously has-but by a determination not to give ground to those 'amateurs' who dared to challenge the established view. Thus the perception of people like Andrew Clements that, essentially, Brian-lovers are cranks.

Nor does it help when-and I suppose that there is an inevitability in this-people set composer against composer. As I have said many times before, I winced in surprise, pain and, yes, anger when I read in Malcolm's Volume II his disparaging comments on the "Cheltenham Symphonists".  I will continue to champion Brian's music but never, I hope, at the expense of equally championing the music of a composer like Edmund Rubbra, whose symphonies touch a deep spiritual chord in me.

[Jimfin]

Quite. There are many composers I love who thought little of each other: Vaughan Williams/Britten, George Lloyd/Britten, Elgar/Stanford, and I reserve the right to love them all. And to dislike whom I please, though with respect. In fact, one of things I like about Brian is how he seemed to find a synthesis between the Mahler/Sibelius divide (the symphony containing the whole world versus the symphony as a glass of cold water) and also between the Elgar/Delius stylistic divide.

[Dundonnell]

Quite. There are many composers I love who thought little of each other: Vaughan Williams/Britten, George Lloyd/Britten, Elgar/Stanford, and I reserve the right to love them all. And to dislike whom I please, though with respect. In fact, one of things I like about Brian is how he seemed to find a synthesis between the Mahler/Sibelius divide (the symphony containing the whole world versus the symphony as a glass of cold water) and also between the Elgar/Delius stylistic divide.

As a teenager I used to argue for hours about the respective merits of Bruckner v. Mahler, Sibelius v. Nielsen, Walton v. Britten(yes, I must have been a rather odd "teenager") but, on reflection, that was all so silly. Bruckner's 7th, 8th, 9th and Mahler's 1st and 2nd all move me, so do Sibelius's 4th, 5th, 7th, Walton's 1st, Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem. I prefer Belshazzar's Feast to the War Requiem but I would take the Britten Violin Concerto over the Walton Violin Concerto.

We prefer one composer over another, or one composition over another based on our own temperaments and our own aesthetic responses. That does not make one composer "greater" than another ipso facto