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In 1926, Benjamin Britten's father submitted an orchestral “Ouverture” by his twelve-year-old son to the BBC's Autumn Musical Festival Prize Competition. The competition was an initial attempt by the young British Broadcasting Company, then only in its fourth year, to increase the number of first performances in its concert broadcasts; it was planned jointly with the recently formed music department of Oxford University Press. This competition was a prime opportunity for this young composer, this broadcaster, and this publisher – setting out on their respective journeys at around the same time – to secure their footing in their respective spheres, and to gain public recognition and acclaim. Prizes were offered for works in six different genres, the top prize for an overture being set at L150. The entries were judged by some of the most eminent British composers of the day. The results were announced in the Radio Times of 24 December 1926, just a week before the BBC was reorganized as a corporation. There had been 240 entries, and, rather surprisingly, “in not one of the classes was there a single work which reached the standard meriting the important prizes offered. The judges felt that the B.B.C. would be doing harm rather than good to British music if they awarded prizes to works which did not merit them.” There was no separate consideration of children's works, and Britten's overture apparently went unnoticed. This was an inauspicious first contact between the budding composer and the young broadcaster. Nevertheless, they were to have a long and mutually beneficial collaboration, which would have profound impact not only on Britten's career and on the BBC's musical trajectory over forty years, but – perhaps more importantly – on the radically changing concept in the twentieth century of what it meant to be a “professional” composer.
During the years when Britten was first developing and then honing his compositional skills, there are many references in his diaries to listening to the wireless, with notes of his responses to works by Delius, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Holst, and many other composers of the day. Once the BBC Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1930, the Corporation had a truly fine instrument with which it regularly broadcast orchestral trends of the past and the present. Britten was among the first generation of composers who were able to hear as a daily occurrence professional performances of music in all genres.
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Look, stranger, on this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea.
W. H. Auden, from On This Island (1937)
AUDEN INVITES the observer, a stranger, to gaze upon a defining element of the British Isles. ‘The leaping light for your delight discovers’ – the sounds of the sea delineating the island's borders. Just stop, stand still, and listen, listen through the channels of the ear to the swaying sound of the sea. The poet continues to conjure up these liminal sounds, utilizing evocative images and onomatopoetic words: ‘Here at a small field's ending pause / Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges / Oppose the pluck / And knock of the tide, / And the shingle scrambles after the suck- / -ing surf, and a gull lodges / A moment on its sheer side.’ Thus, in a few words, Auden sketches both a landscape and, more importantly, its associated soundscape as an introduction for any stranger unfamiliar with a fundamental aspect of British life. He points to the inherent role of the sea in British experience, emphasizing particularly the sounds of the sea, the winds, and marine life, in all their manifestations, which are ever-present aspects of life on this island.
This desire of the British artist to engage with the crucial role that the sea has played in British life is fundamental. The interrelationships between human existence and the power of the sea have long been established as the basis of many celebrated and distinguished bodies of work in the visual arts, literature, and film, such as J. M. W. Turner's many extraordinary seascapes, the role of the sea and sea voyages in many writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and many of Ealing Studio's films, such as the highly successful The Cruel Sea (1953). Given the sensations of sea sounds that, as Auden points out, are intrinsic to the British experience, it is self-evident that British composers and musicians would also engage with the sea in their sonically driven creative worlds.
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
For centuries, the sea and those who sail upon it have inspired the imaginations of British musicians. Generations of British artists have viewed the ocean as a metaphor for the mutable human condition - by turns calm and reflective, tempestuous and destructive - and have been influenced as much by its physical presence as by its musical potential. But just as geographical perspectives and attitudes on seascapes have evolved over time, so too have cultural assumptions about their meaning and significance. Changes in how Britons have used the sea to travel, communicate, work, play, and go to war have all irresistibly shaped the way that maritime imagery has been conceived, represented, and disseminated in British music. By exploring the sea's significance within the complex world of British music, this book reveals a network of largely unexamined cultural tropes unique to this island nation. The essays are organised around three main themes: the Sea as Landscape, the Sea as Profession, and the Sea as Metaphor, covering an array of topics drawn from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. Featuring studies of pieces by the likes of Purcell, Arne, Sullivan, Vaughan Williams, and Davies, as well as examinations of cultural touchstones such as the BBC, the Scottish fishing industry, and the Aldeburgh Festival, The Sea in the British Musical Imagination will be of interest to musicologists as well as scholars in history, British studies, cultural studies, and English literature.
ERIC SAYLOR is Associate Professor of Musicology at Drake University.
CHRISTOPHER M. SCHEER is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Utah State University.
CONTRIBUTORS: Byron Adams, Jenny Doctor, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, James Brooks Kuykendall, Charles Edward McGuire, Alyson McLamore, Louis Niebur, Jennifer Oates, Eric Saylor, Christopher M. Scheer, Aidan J. Thomson, Justin Vickers, Frances Wilkins
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
Edited by
Eric Saylor, Associate Professor, musicology (Drake University),Christopher M. Scheer, Associate Professor, musicology (Utah State University)
The composer has an ally in Broadcasting. Radio needs all the music it can get. If the composer can write the kind that is wanted he need not wait for a performance. Music with attractive melodies, used and harmonised with distinction of thought and fancy, is nowadays hard to find . . . Generally speaking, when a man gets home tired and ‘fed up’, he wants to be cheered by a good, lilting tune and harmony that is distinctive without being so ‘modernish’ as to disturb the increasing tranquillity of his mental state.
Thus the first BBC Handbook characterised the relationship between ‘broadcasting and the composer’ in 1928 – the sixth year of the BBC's existence – burbling on to specify that music by ‘thoroughly “English” composers is always welcomed’. The challenge for the young BBC was to discover the right music with which to define its image, with which to broadcast, quite literally, its musical identity. And as part of that, the BBC sought a specific ally, a sort of composer-mentor who could adorn and distinguish the music programmes: a ‘thoroughly English’ composer with the right demeanour and a broadly recognised reputation, who wrote music with ‘a good, lilting tune’ and just the right kind of appeal – ‘distinctive without being modernish’. That was the challenge indeed.
The fledgling British Broadcasting Company was hugely ambitious, using its ever-increasing powers and financial base to negotiate ways to make a name and establish a reputation of national and international importance and influence. When founded in 1922 and placed in the hands of John Reith, it was a tiny organisation bounded by the current state of technology, with few employees, a small audience base consisting of amateur radio enthusiasts, no identity, and no direct remit with respect to output. But there was huge potential for this new mass-market medium – and, interestingly from a musical point of view, there were no expectations, conventions or traditions about how music on air might be shaped or what it might consist of.
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