An Inexplicable Inspiration?
by Arthur Butterworth
Composers are often
asked how musical ideas come to them.
Elgar, once being asked this question,
is reputed to have remarked: ‘Oh, music
is all around, you just pluck it from
the air’. But this is a glib, all too
facile answer; hardly likely, or even
intended, to satisfy the ordinary person
who is not a musician.
There is a perceptive
line by Wordsworth from the poem ‘Intimations
of Immortality’: Thoughts that do
often lie too deep for tears ... It
has often seemed to me that this could
be paraphrased and extended: Thoughts
that do often lie too deep for words
can better be expressed in music ...
Most people, even unmusical
ones, have melodic ideas floating in
the mind from time to time; musical
people can identify them, composers
go a stage further and actually write
them down for others to savour. As a
boy of perhaps nine or ten I first heard
a brass band playing Finlandia and
was immediately captivated by this uniquely
memorable theme. At that time my imagination
was generally more stimulated by visual
rather than aural impressions. My parents
had some fine prints of fishing boats
becalmed on a summer evening in northern
waters, the green-blue waters shining
in the pale sunlight. Other family pictures
were of whaling ships beset in the ice
of the Arctic in winter time. These
essentially Nordic impressions were
most powerful. Coupled with that I recall
romantic tales of the Vikings, read
to us at school. We also had tales of
ancient Greece and Rome, but somehow
these hardly interested me one little
bit; my emotional view was ever northwards.
After all, I am a northerner, whose
forebears in the dim and distant past
originated from the northlands. As I
grew that little bit older it was hardly
surprising then, that — for some reason
— I came to recognize the indefinable
emotional and cultural connection between
visual impressions and aural ones. This
did not happen immediately, nor easily.
It must have been about
1937, when around the age of fourteen,
and having seen the name ‘Sibelius’
and connected it with Finlandia,
I was curious one evening to listen
to a performance on the radio by the
Queen’s Hall Orchestra, conducted by
Sir Henry Wood, of the Second Symphony.
It was so puzzling that, after four
or five minutes, I just had to switch
it off. This was not like any symphony
I had ever heard before: Mozart, Haydn,
Beethoven. There seemed to be no readily
identifiable ‘tune’ or ongoing pulse.
I was bemused yet somehow still curious.
Not very many years later, when first
called up to the army, I was in a noisy,
rowdy canteen surrounded by dozens of
other young men and, dimly in the background,
the radio could be heard. It was a programme
very familiar and regular in the early
1940s — These you have loved introduced
by Doris Arnold, whose alluring, mellifluous
voice was utterly captivating. One piece
of music, quiet, mysterious, mesmerizing,
held me in a kind of spellbound trance
- and this despite the clatter of cups,
the raucous shouting all around. When
it was finished she said: ‘That was
The Swan of Tuonela by Sibelius’...
That was something of a turning point
in my musical life.
A year or two later,
the war being over by a month or two,
I was idly sitting in a billet in north
Germany; no one else was around but
the radio was on and I listened with
curious anticipation to the Hamburg
Radio Symphony Orchestra playing Tapiola.
This was an electrifying experience
indeed. It was soon followed by hearing
the Hallé Orchestra under John
Barbirolli, while I was on a brief leave
in Manchester, performing the Second
Symphony, that ‘curious thing’ that
had so puzzled me almost a decade before.
In the gloriously exhilarating
late March of 1947, after the most bitterly
cold winter in living memory, I heard
one day the Sixth Symphony of
Sibelius and ever since that day I have
connected this symphony with the fresh,
ecstatically uplifting nature of springtime.
Of course, these are only a few of the
more obvious impressions of the composer.
For me it has ever since gone much,
much deeper than a mere liking for his
music. It is, I think, something connected,
but quite philosophically, and psychologically
inexplicable, with my own intuitive
awareness of what Nordic things signify:
ancestry? weather? climate? culture?
attitudes of mind and ways of thinking?
landscape? ...
When I began to write
music, however inexpertly, around the
age of ten, my earliest influences were
imbibed from what was then around me:
light music of the early 1930s — the
local brass band, Gilbert & Sullivan
(of which my mother and father were
inordinately fond), church music that
I learned as a choir boy, popular overtures,
and the like. My leanings were inevitably
towards English music and especially
English composers: Elgar, Vaughan Williams,
Bliss, Parry, Stanford and others. It
has to be admitted that I am still allied
to this tradition of earlier twentieth-century
English music and came especially under
the influence of Vaughan Williams.
But something else
happened: at the end of the war in Europe
I found myself in north Germany and
spent much time on the Danish border
in and around Schleswig-Holstein. There
was something in the aura of the region
that suggested Nordic culture; this
suited me and I felt strangely at home
with everything: the music I heard,
the landscape, the architecture, the
light: it all fitted for me. Not long
afterwards, after a few years as a student
at the Royal Manchester College of Music
(now the RNCM), I went to join the Scottish
Orchestra (the present-day Royal Scottish
National Orchestra). This inevitably
led to a closer awareness of northern
landscape, climate and that indefinable
quality that goes to make up the north
in the widest sense of the word. Sibelius
seemed to express it all precisely for
me. So it is perhaps not surprising
that my own more mature music was inspired
by the example of Sibelius more than
any other composer. The criticism of
such an avowed allegiance is, of course,
that one becomes a mere epigone, lacking
in any original ideas or inspiration
of one’s own. I have ever been most
acutely aware of this and I know all
too well that much of my musical thinking
is derived from the example of Sibelius.
Vaughan Williams once said to me: ‘All
young composers have to learn from their
forebears; come to terms with the common
usage of musical language, its traditions,
its melodic and harmonic qualities;
to struggle, to create a totally original
style, merely for the sake of being
different and "clever" is
arid ...’
His exhortation was
to be true to one’s self, not to force
things into a style that was not natural.
If something had already been said before,
it was not really of such import that
it was expressed again by a later generation,
for we, each one of us, in our turn,
experience much the same emotions as
the previous generation. Inventing a
completely new musical language — as
some composers at the beginning of the
twentieth century most certainly did
— runs the risk of leaving others puzzled
by the message they would like to communicate,
although it is not by any means denied
that new ideas and ways of expressing
them have indeed often proved enlightening,
nor that they possessed a new kind of
beauty and expressiveness: for example
the Berg Violin Concerto or some
of Webern. The firm traditions of musical
language are never exhausted, however,
for it is not primarily a matter of
originality being essential, but of
individuality.
Now, individuality
is subtly different from originality:
it rather implies that one uses a language
— a recognized mode — in one’s own individual
way, just in the same way that one’s
signature is individual. Vaughan Williams
stressed that individuality could not
be forced: given time it could come
of its own accord if the composer had
something in his or her make-up that
needed to expressed. There is never
a guarantee that this will happen; some
composers achieve it, others do not.
Sibelius, then, has been the most influential
of all musical sounds; his aura, melodically,
harmonically, structurally and in aspects
of technique, has inspired my own creations.
Most of all in that totally inexplicable,
emotional way that I can only imagine
must stem from a common awareness or
a like-minded emotional response to
one's surroundings and a feeling that
what he expressed in musical sound has
found an undeniable counterpart in my
own experience.
I am not Finnish, so
my own reactions to my surroundings
can never have been just a carbon copy
of what he experienced; they may indeed
have echoes and at times suggestive
facets of how he did it, even to the
acknowledged extent of — like all composers
regarding their predecessors — avowedly
quoting recognizable characteristics
of the earlier creative artist: Brahms
acknowledging Beethoven, Bach respecting
Buxtehude, Shostakovich paying tribute
to Mahler, and so on.
It has not been without
significance for me that, some few years
ago, I was attracted to Nordic painting
and found that my visual interests paralleled
those in music; this all seemed to make
sense to me. It was not just Sibelius’s
music, but everything that his culture
expressed that found a response in my
own way of thinking and my attitude
to life.
My own music has generally
been confined to listeners in this country.
I cannot claim an international following,
but I was especially gratified some
years ago to have some orchestral music
played by the Finnish Radio Symphony
Orchestra. One of my most ardent wishes
would be to export one or other of the
symphonies I have been able to write
to the Nordic countries.
Arthur Butterworth
This article first
appeared in the UK Sibelius Society
magazine and is reproduced with permission
www.sibeliussociety.com
