The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music about poultry! Every piece this week contains some illustration or reference to great birds that have been used for human food consumption. While the works in this playlist span centuries I think you will be struck by how similar the representations tend to be across styles. We’ve always been fascinated by birds and their unique mannerisms have provided musicians with inspiration and material to work into their compositions throughout human history. Some have done it almost obsessively, but for many musicians it was just the right thing to try at a certain time.
Music about Poultry, Day 5 – With the Wild Geese by Hamilton Harty
It seems that the British Isles did not need an artistic avant-garde like many other cultures in Europe. While the conflicts between England and Ireland, with the latter state yearning for independence in recent centuries, is well-known, the United Kingdom remains to this day the one and only monarchy left from the old world order that concluded around the time of the First World War. France’s monarchy had more than a century prior in the French Revolution and the country had barely managed to restabilize after its turbulent series of revolutions and wars over the course of the nineteenth century. The German and Austro-Hungarian Empires both met their terminus after World War I, the unbelievably brutal and globe-spanning arm conflict that had seemed to begin innocently enough, resembling at first countless other provincial conflicts between various European states. But this one turned out to be different, the uncontainable reaction of a confluence of modern cultural forces and currents that couldn’t help but to destroy the old world order. All except for Great Britain, that is, who had come out on the right side of the conflict. Even Russia, Britain’s ally in the Great War, found its monarchy overthrown by an internal force unrelated to the belligerents it faced on the Eastern Front as Lenin’s Bolshevik uprising succeeded in its aim to seize the Russian nation and impose its Marxist doctrine on the nation’s politics and economy. Only Great Britain’s monarchy remained.
While it may be a coincidence (which I doubt), most of the great currents of modern music happened to occupy the same time as societal collapse and seemed to reflect the uncertainty that accompanied it, or elements of the new regimes that took root. All of these movements are unified in their abandonment of traditional harmony and form. In France it was Impressionism (probably the gentlest of all of them), in Russia the dehumanized and even tortured works of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, et al, in Hungary the barbaric primitivism of Bartok, and in Germany the strident intellectual pursuit of serialism, all developing around the times of their respective monarchical disruptions. But that did not happen in Britain. Its monarchy in tact (even if increasingly symbolic in actual power), its musicians seemed to have no need to dissolve their traditional musical language in favor of an avant-garde grammar. Britain was threatened, certainly, by the German blitzkrieg, but it was not broken. And its composers’ forays into avante-garde seem almost a formality, or an act of admiration. Holst was clever in many ways, bending conventions more than his contemporaries, but always friendly to common ears. Britten, a bit later on, admired those who pushed the envelope on the continent, but deep down may have felt that ultimately British composers had no philosophical reason or drive to do it themselves to that extent. And so, while the Germans, French, Russians and others on the European mainland were venting existential fears through their musical arts, the contemporary musicians of the British Isles, secure in their service to king and country, expressed their comfort in lush, conservative musical idioms that would never cause any ears the slightest discomfort or philosophical uncertainty.
Elgar is the best-known British musical figure of this inter-war period, but there were many others active at this time, composing in a similar, if not quite so distinctive manner (after all, Elgar is the name we still mention the most from this group). Highly melodic, conventional and even sentimental but very proper sounding harmony, large orchestras, folk-song like themes to contrast those gorgeous outpourings of soaring melody, and a general celebration of the cheerful propriety of the British experience. This is the general style of interwar art music in the British Isles. And one composer who fit this mold to a T is the Irishman Hamilton Harty, which is a name I wager you have not heard before now.
Hamilton Harty was born in Hillsborough, County Down, in what is today known as Northern Ireland. His childhood musical experiences were shaped by his church-organist father, William, gave him an early musical foundation in piano, viola and compositional technique. He quickly followed in his father’s footsteps, himself securing posts at church organs in various Irish locales. He came to study with Michele Esposito, an expatriate Italian pianist and composer, who, with his teaching post at Dublin’s Royal Irish Academy of Music, had been busy shaping and cultivating the classical music scene of the Irish lands. Perhaps encouraged by Esposito, Harty set sail for the English main island, headed for London, to pursue his musical career in whatever shape that would take, and he remained outside of Ireland for the rest of his life, save a year or two toward the end of his life while he was recovering from a major operation. Harty gained renown as a piano accompanist, composed steadily, and had appointments conducting orchestras. His early position with the London Symphony Orchestra ended shortly when his concerts met with limited success and it was discovered that he did not have the knack to direct operas. But it was during this time that he wrote some of his major orchestral works, including the sweeping symphonic poem With the Wild Geese, which was the first work he conducted with the LSO. The bulk of his career was spent in the northern city of Manchester, conducting the their Hallé Symphony Orchestra, which had been established in 1858. Harty enjoyed his tenure conducting the Hallé from 1920 to 1932 at which point he seemed to develop other interests. But under his baton the orchestra became among the best in England and there are amazing stories of the rapport he developed with the players. He also used his position to champion works of his favorite composers, and many of the underappreciated and emerging composers of that day, including Mahler and Shostakovich
While Harty must have appreciated some of the more jagged and adventurous harmonic experiments from various places on the continent, his language remained utterly conservative. He is among the last generation of Irish musicians to live and work prior to the turbulent political and sectarian conflicts which resulted starting in the 1920s when long-simmering animosity between the Anglican British and largely Catholic Irish finally bubbled to the surface after building for centuries. The unpredictable eruptions of violence that dotted Ireland’s timeline spanning the from the War of Irish Independence in 1919 to the Good Friday Agreement, generally agreed to have ended “The Troubles” as recently as 1998, disrupted Ireland’s cultural scene and made it difficult for any artistic movement to take root or flourish.
My guess is that Harty, with his Anglican religious roots, his attraction to the cultural centers of England, and his knighting in 1925, would have been sympathetic to the interests of the British Crown as far as Ireland was concerned, although I’m not sure how I would confirm this. The “Wild Geese” of this symphonic poem’s title often refers to Irish soldiers who enlisted with the French army to fight British forces, so celebrating that heritage indicates sympathy with Irish sentiments against its long-occupying imperial force. But his emigrating from Ireland in favor of English centers indicates an affinity for English culture, if not its power and authority. Also, I might speculate that his music, staying as conventional and uncontroversial as it did, seems to demonstrate no sympathy with the underdog Irish, instead producing a comfortable synthesis of British elegance and Irish heritage.
Take his symphonic poem, With the Wild Geese of 1910, for example. This was the first work he directed with the London Symphony Orchestra and, according to accounts of the event, the performance was well-received. It is an immense, stirring, thickly-orchestrated essay synthesizing the British spirit, both hearty and sensible, with the joviality of Irish folk song, painted on a grand symphonic canvas. It is youthful, with high ideals and a rollicking sense of adventure as it evokes the rolling landscapes of the British Isles from the view its titular foul (or soldiers?):
I think that last performance, benefiting from the superior audio technology of recent decades, gives a good sense of the orchestrational depth and detail of Harty’s symphonic poem. But, we are also fortunate to have access to this recording of Harty himself directing the Hallé Symphony Orchestra, which responded to him so well. I think it actually captures the flow and scope of the piece better and, as such, is more captivating. Everything just makes a little more sense. Many music historians with experience in Harty’s story say that his brilliance is well captured in early recordings such as these.
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