An investigation and comparison of three setting of A. E. Housmans ‘A Shropshire Lad’, by George

Butterworth, John Ireland and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

.

By Emily Taylor

Contents…

Introduction

Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by G. Butterworth

‘The Land of Lost Content’ by J. Ireland

‘On Wenlock Edge’ by R. V. Williams

Summary

List of References

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Introduction

Originally entitled ‘the Poems of Terence Hearsay (after the character conveyed in the poems), ‘A Shropshire Lad’ was published in 1896. The set of sixty-three poems, set in a partially fictional Shropshire, ‘The Land of Lost Content’, gained popularity during the Second Boer War and the First World War, due to the relevance of the theme of morality, and their exploration of the loss of youth and the transience of human love (Maund, A. c. 2011).

The folk song like simplicity of the poems attracted many a composer to set them to music, including Butterworth, Ireland, Williams, Moeran, Gurney and Somervell, the first three being the most popular. The dark irony of Housmans writing was best matched musically by Butterworth, Ireland and Williams, who brilliantly conveyed the idea that death could strike at any time (Hold, T. 2005. p 93).

“Housmans writing was described by Morton Zabel as: “his lyrics speak from the threshold of silence itself.”

(Banfield, S. 1989. p 244)

Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by G. Butterworth4 In the years of 1911-1912, George Butterworth set 11 of the 63 poems to

music, dedicating them to Victor Annesley Barrington-Kennet. Included in the eleven Butterworth set to music are ‘Lovliest of trees’, ‘When I was one and Twenty’, ‘Is My Team Ploughing’ and ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’. Although all taken from the same set of poems, Butterworths cycles were published in two sets; ‘Six songs from A Shropshire Lad’ and ‘Bredon Hill and other songs’, the former being the most famous set. Whilst very rarely are the two sets performed together, both are performed and recorded regularly (Hold, T. 2005. p 235). It is believed that Butterworths cycles were first performed at Oxford University Musical Club with Singer J. Campbell McInnes and Butterworth himself at the piano. The performance, organised by Adrian Boult, took place on May 16th 1911. (Dibble, J. 2013. p 75). At this point, Butterworth had still not completed all eleven of the settings, and so only a select amount of them were performed. One setting that wasn’t completed at this point was ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’, which Butterworth wouldn’t complete until much later, when he was living in Cheyne Gardens in London. It is recorded that soon after the first performance, Boult himself performed a selection of the songs at a private function. It is likely that Butterworth’s ‘Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad’ are the most famous and the most performed English Art Songs.

Butterworths cycles are folk like, simple and unfussy, described by Finzi as “reminiscent of English watercolour”

“Saying more in its few strokes than words could do”

(Hold, T. 2005. p 236)

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In writing the music for the poems, it is argued that he comes close to the heart of Housmans writing matching the simple writing with simple songs.

“Housman acted as a catalyst for Butterworth – he emerged largely unchanged and unscathed in Buterworths settings –

housman acting as the liberating agent allowing butterworth to create his own personal idiom”

(Banfield, S. 1989. p 244)

who was a professor of Latin at Cambridge, based his poems on the Anglo Saxon language, avoiding using longer words of Latin origin where a shorter Anglo Saxon word would suffice. Matching this musically, Butterworths songs are, for the most part, simple, based on the simpler modes over the modern keys, with simple, light accompaniments on the piano. Although folk song like sounding, Butterworth used no known folk tunes in his writing.

In his writing, Butterworth creates a feel for the summery, drowsy feel of the poems, specifically at the end of ‘Is My Team Ploughing’, with an unresolved minor added sixth chord. This is left open to interpretation for both the singer and the audience, and though in all performances the music stays the same the way it is treated with performance has differed. It has been sung both with a smile, and with a look of guilt or sadness.

‘Six songs from A Shropshire Lad’ forms the basis for Butterworth’s Orchestral Rhapsody of the same name, composed in 1912, which takes a lot of its ideas from ‘Lovliest of Trees’. In the orchestral rhapsody, Butterworth moved away from the idea of folk song like sounds and shows a much stronger homoerotic passion through his music, similar to his earlier ‘On the Idle Hill of Summer’ from the first published set (Haggerty, G.E, 2000. p 292).

‘The Land of Lost Content’ by J. Ireland

Although Ireland set more than one of Housman’s poems to music, his most famous setting is that of six poems from ‘A Shropshire Lad’, entitled ‘The Land of Lost Content’ (A title taken from a poem not included in his cycle). In fact, Ireland didn’t keep any of Housman’s original titles, instead giving them his own titles, all taken from the ‘A Shropshire Lad’ poems. Written for Piano and Tenor (with a predominantly high tessiatura), the six songs are linked together with a recurring falling 5th cadence. The work starts of cheerful and progressively gets sadder (Hold, T. 2005. p 198-190).

‘Look not in my eyes’ (Housmans ‘Lads Love’) is set with a vocal line that constantly pushes upwards. Most notably at cadences, where, in English songs, the melody most commonly falls. Whilst Butterworth’s cycle uses solemn, simple music to convey the dismay and irony of the poems, Ireland uses more difficult complex harmonies and rhythms, with an energetic, striding bass, better conveying the unease of the poems. In his writing of the music for this poem, Ireland made it impossible for us to know where the pianists opening ritornello is going to halt. The piece starts with a D minor 7th chord, into B flat minor 7th, into A Major, then F minor and finally F sharp minor 7th before reaching the home key of E minor at the cadential point of the verse, ending with a tonal

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variation of the striding bass line and a pre echo of the basso ostinato of the fifth song (Hold, T. 2005. p 190-191).

Among the poems Ireland set is ‘If Truth in Hearts that Perish’, entitled ‘The Vain Desire’ by Ireland, a poem that has gained little attention from other composers. He set the four stanzas as two strophes, separated by the piano ritornello. The tonality constantly moves between A minor and E flat Major, a tri tone apart. The falling fifth featured in ‘Look not in my eyes’ is prominent in this song also, both in the vocal line and in the left hand piano. The vocal cadence used at the end of this song reappears later on, at the end of the cycle. Irelands setting of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ is by far the bleakest and most subdued of them all, in particular ‘The Vain Desire’ (Hold, T. 2005. p 192).

The next song in the set, ‘The Encounter’ follows the example of Somervell and the penillion technique. Both the piano part and the vocal line are almost two separate entities at times. The piano part is very self-contained and robust, with a march like feel. The vocal line is equally as stong at times doubling the right hand piano melody, in descant at others. Ireland very effectively uses bitonality to get across a message of disharmony and irony. The vocal line is very modal (G major/D minor with no accidentals and no F’s) whilst the right hand piano plays a very chromatic tune over the left hands four note ostinato pattern (F-G-A-B). The tonality of this piece is very much ambiguous, but is guided into C Major for its final cadence (Hold, T. 2005. p 193-195).

Of all of Housman’s poems that Ireland set, it is in ‘Land of Lost Content’ that he showed the true skill of how he could match Housman’s economy of means. Ireland once stated that he didn’t know anything about writing folk song and that all of his tunes are his own, but perhaps there is an unconscious influence of the mood of the poems that led to Ireland creating the sounds that he has. In his writing, Ireland has clearly heightened the sense of stress in the words with ever changing time signatures, almost breaking away from the imprisonment of bar lines (Foreman, L. 2011. p 184-185). It is clear that of all the poets of whom Ireland set text, it is for Housman that he could dig deeper and unleash his own feelings into his writing as well as that of the poet (Foreman, L. 2011. p 328-330).

In their 1997 book, Mellers and Paynter described Irelands writing as ‘sophistically nostalgic’ and ‘impeccably laid out’ (Mellers, W. Paynter J. 1997. p 102).

Originally, Ireland wanted to set more of Housmans poems but in March 1921 received, from Housman, a letter saying:

“Allow Mr Ireland to set to music all the poems he wishes, but he must not print No 50 as a motto; Nor No. 40, which is what he means”

(Banfield, S. 1989. p 237)

Soon after, Ireland received another letter from Housman:

“I do not want revenue from gramophone or mechanical rights, and Mr Ireland is welcome to as much of it as his publisher will let him have. I hope it may be sufficient to console him for not being allowed to print the poem he wants.”

(Banfield, S. 1989. p 238).

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Ireland and Butterworth both wrote with homoerotic passion and created haunting settings of Housman’s words.

‘On Wenlock Edge’ by R. V. Williams

Williams’s setting of ‘A Shropshire Lad’, called ‘On Wenlock Edge’ was written shortly after he received orchestration lessons from Ravel at the Paris Conservertoire, and although it clearly achieves the lightness and subtleness that Williams had been yearning to find (Holmes, P. 2011), it is also disloyal to his recent studies with Ravel. The orchestration, written for Tenor, Piano and String Quartet, negates the straw booted image of the English man (Mellers, W. Paynter, J. 1997. p 101).

However, at this point, his writing does suggest that he is moving away from the writing styles of Parry and White.

‘On Wenlock Edge’ gained a lot of critics responses, most notably, the very public disagreement between Edwin Evans and Ernest Newman in an edition of The Musical Times in 1918. Evans stated that:

“On Wenlock Edge’ is as sincere and unsophisticated as that of the poems themselves. No where is it marred by the self-indulgence of excess, and nowhere does it show signs of being studied or self-conscious. It is fresh and spontaneous

and therefore convincing… it expresses, as it were, in the colouring of his own climate, the clean faith of the healthy young Englishman”

(Evans, E. 1918. p 247)

Evans also felt that Williams had ‘realised the inner qualities of the poems’ and wrote for them accordingly (Evans, E. 1918. p 247-249).

In retaliation, Newman said that Williams’s writings to not do the poems justice, and accused him of ‘Wagnerian Word Painting –

“Not conveying the sentiment that’s at the heart of the poem, rhythm of the poem distorted and mutilated by the music”

(Newman, E. 1918)

‘On Wenlock Edge’ was first performed by Frederick Kiddle (Pianist) and Gervase Elwes (Tenor) at the Aeolian Hall on the 15th November 1909 (Frogley. A. Thompson. A, 2013. p 114-115).

Williams once said:

“I could not have written Ravel’s music even if I had wanted to”

However, the opening to his setting of ‘Bredon Hill’, the fifth song in his cycle, about death and despair, is to the eye a remarkable allusion to the final movement of the piano suite Miroirs, Le Vallee de Cloches (1905) (Frogley. A. Thompson. A, 2013. p 41-42), as can be seen in figures 1a and 1b.

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FIG. 1A, BARS 3-6 OF RAVELS ‘LE VALLEE DE CLOCHES’ FROM MIROIRS. (FROGLEY. A. THOMPSON. A, 2013. P 41).

FIG. 1B, BARS 20-23 OF THE PIANO PART OF WILLIAMS’ ‘BREDON HILL’ FROM ‘ON WENLOCK EDGE’. (FROGLEY. A. THOMPSON. A, 2013. P 42).

Summary

Although the writings of Butterworth, Ireland and Williams are so different, it is clear that they all fully conveyed the message of Housman’s poems very well. Although the words are the same, the writings are entirely different. Butterworth’s writing ‘Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad’ is arguably the best match of the three settings to the writing, haunting and subtle with a lasting meaning.

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List of References

1. BANFIELD, S (1989). SENSIBILITY AND ENGLISH SONG: CRITICAL STUDIES OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY. CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

2. DIBBLE, J (2013). HAMILTON HARTY: MUSICAL POLYMATH. :BOYDELL& BREWER LTD, 2013. 70-76.

3. EVANS, E. (1918). ENGLISH SONG AND 'ON WENLOCK EDGE'. THE MUSICAL TIMES. 59. 247-249.

4. FOREMAN, L (2011). THE JOHN IRELAND COMPANION.  BOYDELL & BREWER LTD.

5. FROGLEY, A. THOMPSON, A (2013). THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO VAUGHAN WILLIAMS. CAMBRIDGE : CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

6. HAGGERTY, G. E (2000). GAY HISTORIES AND CULTURES: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA, VOLUME 2. : TAYLOR & FRANCIS

7. HOLD, T (2005). PARRY TO FINZI: TWENTY ENGLISH SONG-COMPOSERS. BOYDELL PRESS.

8. HOLMES, P (2011). VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: ILLUSTRATED LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS. : OMNIBUS PRESS.

9. MAUND, A. (C.2011). A SHROPSHIRE LAD, "THE HYPOTEXT HOUSMAN". AVAILABLE: HTTP://WWW.HOUSMAN-SOCIETY.CO.UK/SHROPSHIRE-LAD.HTM. LAST ACCESSED 9TH APRIL 2015.

10.MELLERS, W. PAYNTER, J (1997). BETWEEN OLD WORLDS AND NEW: OCCASIONAL WRITINGS ON MUSIC. FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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