Frederic Cowen

[Dundonnell]

With regard to the full score of Cowen's Concertstuck on IMSLP, pages 34 and 35 contain seven bars into which a piano part has been handwritten. Admittedly it is only a very brief passage (of unknown provenance), but it may be of interest to the relevant person at Hyperion!

Those seven bars of piano solo do make it into the new Hyperion recording! I emailed Hyperion suggesting some further orchestral works by Cowen which would be worth investigating and Simon Perry has passed these on to Martyn Brabbins who is going to have a look through the full scores. I realise that I'm probably in a minority of one in finding this quite exciting ...

Oh...super   More turn of the century British music. Just what we need, more sub-Dvorak, sub-Brahms........

(I am only joking.........!)

[semloh]

I would number Cowen amongst the five most significant late-Victorian British composers, along with Sullivan, Mackenzie, Parry and Stanford. .......

I've only just noticed this suggestion, Albion. Although I suspect this was a bit of gentle provocation to kickstart the thread, surely you would count Bantock as significant enough to be included in the top five?

[Alan Howe]

I think Bantock would be counted as being of the following generation...

[semloh]

Ah, yes, Alan. Bantock was born in 1868 and so the first 33 years of his life fall into the late Victorian period - but obviously Albion was talking about the music, and I forgot when I read that post that most of his compositions naturally date from later.
Still - hurrah for Bantock!

[Dundonnell]

I would number Cowen amongst the five most significant late-Victorian British composers, along with Sullivan, Mackenzie, Parry and Stanford. .......

I've only just noticed this suggestion, Albion. Although I suspect this was a bit of gentle provocation to kickstart the thread, surely you would count Bantock as significant enough to be included in the top five?

Cowen was born in 1852. Elgar was born five years later in 1857. Elgar was therefore 44 when Queen Victoria died. By that time he had composed the Serenade for Strings, the Enigma Variations, the Overture "Cockaigne" and the Cantatas/Oratorios "The Black Knight", "The Light of Life", "Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf", "Caractacus" and "The Dream of Gerontius" plus the Sea Pictures.

Even if we can agree that Elgar was an Edwardian composer for the symphonies, the concertos etc. does he not also qualify as a late Victorian as well?

[jerfilm]

I would think that unless you can detect a serious change in Elgar's style after the Queen's death, you'd have to call him a Victorian right up to his death, wouldn't you?? 

The Dream of Gerontius is absolutely my favorite choral work of all time.  The final minutes always move me to tears.   And I'm not even Catholic......

Yes, bring on more Cowen....

Jerry

[albion]

I would number Cowen amongst the five most significant late-Victorian British composers, along with Sullivan, Mackenzie, Parry and Stanford. .......

I've only just noticed this suggestion, Albion. Although I suspect this was a bit of gentle provocation to kickstart the thread, surely you would count Bantock as significant enough to be included in the top five?

Cowen was born in 1852. Elgar was born five years later in 1857. Elgar was therefore 44 when Queen Victoria died. By that time he had composed the Serenade for Strings, the Enigma Variations, the Overture "Cockaigne" and the Cantatas/Oratorios "The Black Knight", "The Light of Life", "Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf", "Caractacus" and "The Dream of Gerontius" plus the Sea Pictures.

Even if we can agree that Elgar was an Edwardian composer for the symphonies, the concertos etc. does he not also qualify as a late Victorian as well?

I would tend to describe a composer historically according to their main period of activity and recognition, and for late-Victorian that would mean roughly from the late 1870s to the late 1890s - so Sullivan, Mackenzie, Parry, Stanford and Cowen stand: these were the five most prominent figures acknowledged by Charles Willeby for his 1893 survey Masters of English Music - it is salutary to compare the space in the book which is allocated to each chapter - Sullivan (103 pp), Mackenzie (70 pp), Cowen (84 pp), Parry (24 pp) and Stanford (21 pp).

Although Mackenzie, Parry, Stanford and Cowen all continued to compose well into the twentieth century and were also therefore 'Edwardians' and subsequently 'Georgians', their heyday was the late-Victorian period.

Elgar's early choral works (up to Gerontius) and the Enigma Variations were written before 1901, but they are very much the tail-end of the Victorian era, presaging his full musical maturity in the decade(s) to follow: to me at least, they seem to be somehow super-imposed on the 1890s rather than growing organically out of their surroundings. Likewise it would be rather strange to label Ethel Smyth (born only a year after Elgar in 1858) as a Victorian composer despite her 1893 Mass in D and 1898 opera Fantasio, or even Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, despite the Hiawatha Trilogy (1898-1900). Yes, these were works written during the closing years of the nineteenth-century, but the greater and more substantial part of their composers' creative lives followed post-1901: similar strictly 'Victorian' works can be found in the catalogues of Bantock, Holbrooke and Vaughan Williams, to name three further examples.

[Dundonnell]

I confess that there was a substantial dash of pedantry in my comments

[albion]

I confess that there was a substantial dash of pedantry in my comments

Naughty, naughty!

[semloh]

Dundonnell, pedantic? Neh - you simply pay attention to detail. In any case, as a seasoned nitpicker myself, I reckon it's no bad thing. After all, if one wasn't a 'pedant' one might be a 'pendant'! 

By the way, some of us know you as a key contributor to a certain other classical music forum, always willing to share your vast experience and knowledge, and where your love of classical music always shines through. I am sure that many of us were delighted to see that you had joined 'unsung composers'.

[Dundonnell]

Blushes

[albion]

I am sure that many of us were delighted to see that [Dundonnell] had joined 'unsung composers'.

Hear, hear - in advocating the cause of 'unsung' composers the keys are knowledge and enthusiasm (and a willingness to 'go it alone' if necessary), and these are clearly attributes that our recently-joined colleague has in spades.

[John H White]

Instead of arguing about who was the reigning monarch when they produced their most important works, let's just call them British post-Brahmsian romantics.

[eschiss1]

there is sometimes some merit in related arguments, I think, or in their detritus (I think I do mean that word- or a related one...) - as when people argue over whether Beethoven was, on the whole, Classical or Romantic... (a logician might suggest that the argument just suggests that the adjective is being applied at the wrong granularity. Or something. Just as philosopher Wittgenstein discussed meaning at sentence level, but not at word level; one notes that it would not make much sense to discuss it at letter or phoneme(?) level, in many languages anyway.)

[Dundonnell]

I listened today -in the car actually- to the new Hyperion coupling of the Cowen Piano Concertstuck and the Somervell Piano Concerto 'Highland' and Normandy Variations.

I am always (I hope )  more than happy to admit when I am wrong about music I confess to expecting some subfusc, sepia-tintented, cobwebbed relics from the tailend of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th which would confirm my expectations.

I was more than pleasantly surprised, indeed delighted to hear three such vibrant, tuneful and such confident pieces. Had tremendous fun listening to them and found myself tapping along on the steering-wheel(wretched bad practice, I know ), particularly to the Highland Concerto. (Helps being Scottish myself, I suppose