UNSUNG HEROES
THE SEARCH FOR SELF
Murray McLachlan
reflects on the fruits of a private
pilgrimage
in the life and music
of JOHN WILLIAMSON, 75 this year (2004)
‘Not a lot of exciting
things to say about my life - teaching,
composing, relationship problems, cycling,
periods of depression ... The eternal
seeking through life for my own individual
voice - and I have found it' (John Williamson,
July 2004).
John Ramsden Williamson
was born in Manchester in 1929 and studied
at the Royal Manchester College of Music
under Richard Hall. But unlike many
of Hall's other especially talented
pupils (and these include illustrious
names from the 'Manchester school' such
as Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle,
as well as Ronald Stevenson and John
Ogdon), Williamson's music has until
very recently remained completely unknown
to the general music public, and virtually
unperformed in professional concerts.
We are dealing here
with an extremely reticent, quietly
intense musician, someone who endured
literally decades of frustration as
a general music teacher in a long succession
of posts at various schools and colleges
(1952-92). He unquestionably felt that
his true metier lay far beyond the confines
of the schoolmaster's traditional brief,
and his professional restrictions most
certainly contributed to the fact that
much of the music he composed prior
to retirement now frustrates him. The
scores in Williamson's 'bottom drawer'
are apparently prolific and varied,
evidently including several large-scale
piano concertos in full score. Much
of this pre 1990s music was perused
and admired by important figures in
the BBC and elsewhere (names worth mentioning
here include Lennox Berkeley, Williamson's
teacher for a brief period, the distinguished
Russian piano pedagogue Sulamita Aronovsky,
as well as William Mathias), but as
the composer is reluctant to release
most of this material for performance,
little else can be said of it here.
Not that this seems
to matter, for Williamson has been mercurial
to a phenomenal extent since his retirement
to North Wales in the early 1990s. It
is as though something revelatory happened
in his artistic life, for leaving aside
the cello concerto (2002), recorder,
cello, violin and percussion sonatas
(1997, 1999, 1998 and 1999) not to mention
most of the eighty Housman songs, we
are still left with a huge collection
of piano works written in recent years:
72 Palindromic Preludes (1993-2002),
Sonatas 2-6 (ranging in duration from
15 to nearly 25 minutes long), Diversions
in the form of 21 variations for piano
and orchestra (only recently completed),
Twelve New Piano Preludes (1993), the
Sonatina in C (1990), Seven Interval
Studies (2001), Lament for Sarah (1998),
and An English Suite (1993), to mention
only the works which the composer has
so far chosen to share with the outside
world! The reader may find it unbelievable
when I write that all of the music from
this list which I have seen is immediately
individual, instantly recognisable as
John Williamson. It is certainly highly
unusual in contemporary music that such
a late, intensely prolific flowering
can also be regarded, irrespective of
subjective opinions, as unique.
In reviewing volume
two of an on-going survey of the major
piano music of John Williamson for the
Dunelm Records label, the critic Robert
Matthew-Walker eloquently encapsulated
the qualities which makes this approach
so unmistakable: 'Williamson's music
is nothing, if not consistent; he has
a uniform style in his keyboard writing
which is predicated upon a chordal-arioso
manner in which the underlying chordal
bases remain fluid but hardly 'progress'
in the sense of inner movement; what
we have is a fascinating mixture of
coloration in the harmonies, much of
them founded upon diminished sevenths
and ninths, but fully chordal as befits
music written for the piano. The result
is a style not unlike that of a heady
late-Romantic sensuality, but this should
not be taken as merely atmospheric or
Impressionistic, for there is another
layer of genuine compositional skill
at work here: the almost obsessive palindromic
writing - in which, and purely mnemonically,
halfway through, the music retraces
its steps, as it were; nor is this necessarily
the emotional expression in -reverse.
Of course, any music can be played backwards
as well as forwards ' - ' the skill
lies in devising music which makes sense
in these terms, and it must be said
that Williamson is often very successful
within this rather stringent framework.'
Palindromic formal
structures, along with harmonic, rhythmic
and melodic 'mirror' compositional devices,
abound. For an instant Williamsonian
'sound-bite', try playing the last two
chords from his immediately accessible
yet excitingly rewarding Piano Sonatina:
F-G-B flat-D flat-E natural (left hand)
plus G flat-A-C-E flat-F (right hand),
followed by F-A flat-C-E '(left hand)
plus G-B-D-F (right hand). The 'mirror-pianism'
gives tactile pleasure, and in this
respect the composer's lifelong love
affair with the works of Chopin is significant.
If one looks at the proportions of the
emotionally varied New Preludes, one
in each pitch centre, there is an immediate
connection with the essence of the Chopin
Preludes. Indeed selected numbers from
this highly impressive cycle seem to
have echoes of particular numbers from
Chopin's great cycle, though nothing
is ever unsubtle, with merely ghostly
hints of the great master's C sharp
minor, E flat minor, and G major Preludes
appearing to remain. And the six sets
of Palindromic Preludes continue in
the spirit of the New Preludes, each
set containing a "movement for each
of the chromatic semitones. The flavour
of Williamson's harmonic vocabulary,
on the other hand, has more than a little
in common with the Messiaen of Vingt
Regards (though he denies, more than
a superficial awareness of Messiaen's
music).
Along with the Chopin
and Messiaenic parallels, there is a
distinctly pastoral reflective strain
in this music. Wistful shades, melancholic
turns of phrase, simplistic, folksong-like
phrase-structures ... all these add
up to a style that could never be described
as 'cutting edge'. Indeed its radical
nature is inherent in its refusal to
conform to fashion, and though works
such as the recent Seven Interval Studies
(2002) may show something of a debt
to Debussy (in this case, to Book I
of the Etudes), Williamson has clearly
found that 'individual voice', whose
discovery has been the goal of a lifetime's
labour.
Murray Maclachlan
Published in, and with acknowledgement
to, Piano (Sept/Oct 2004)
With thanks to John Williamson for
his permission to use this article
With thanks to the
British
Music Society
