Our first composer in this 62nd bouquet
was one that I encountered in BBC Radio 2's excellent "Legends of Light
Music" series. Morning Call, by JOHN CARMICHAEL, is a cheerful,
bustling piece; another orchestral number of his, French Flirt,
his parts for glockenspiel, vibraphone, guitar and harp. Carmichael
appears to have been particularly active either side of 1960. His smaller-scale
publications include: for clarinet and piano, Fetes Champetres
(1963); and for piano, variously solo, four-hands-one-piano or four
hands-two pianos, lightish genre numbers, entitled Bagatelle
(1958), Puppet Show (1959), Tourbillon (1959), Bahama
Rumba (1960) and Paris Left Bank (1960). It is very likely
that some titles will have had orchestral variations.
Little need by said here about CHRISTOPHER MONTAGUE
EDMUNDS (1899-1990), in view of Michael Jones' detailed article about
him in Volume 21 of the BMS Journal (1999), but we may note that several
of his compositions fairly clearly fall within out light music remit,
among them the overture Festival of York, the waltz Summer
Night, the Harlequinade suite and Shepherd's Song,
both for strings, his works for brass band (Concert Overture
and the prelude, Macbeth) and a number of his pieces for piano
solo and for other instruments.
ANTHONY PAYNE, born in 1936, is a many-sided musician
but few of his compositions are really classifiable as light music;
even his brass band writings are "serious". We might perhaps make an
exception of his suite (though not described as such), A 1940s Childhood,
written for flute and guitar and later (1989) rearranged for flute and
harp in which version it was recorded by Nimbus and which sounds like
film music, something with which Payne has been involved.
The Gloucestershire-born HERBERT NORMAN HOWELLS (1892-1983)
is another who we think of as primarily a serious composer of orchestral,
chamber, church and choral music with perhaps the Hymnus Paradisi
uppermost in many people's minds, also of organ and other instrumental
solos (though several of the latter are amusing parodies in the style
of other composers), but he had a strong lyrical impulse and this in
turn makes him for us a credible composer of light music. It is, I suppose,
debatable whether his two works for brass band, Pageantry, a
suite used five times as a test piece in the Open (1934, 1942, 1970)
and National (1937, 1950) Championships, and Three Figures, both
recorded in the LP era, are classifiable as light music; but we certainly
include, I think the following orchestral compositions as such - the
Three Dances of 1915, for violin and orchestra, the Fanfare
For Schools, the Two Pieces Opus 20 (Puck's Minuet
and Merry-Eye), Lady Aubrey's Suite and another suite, Music
For a Prince, which celebrated the birth of Prince Charles in 1948
and from which Corydon's Dance and Scherzo in Arden have
at times been performed as separate movements. And we may also here
include a number of Howell's instrumental pieces, like the Country
Pageant and Two Folk Dances for piano solo and the intriguingly
titled Minuet (Grace for a French Egg) for bassoon and
piano.
Finally we retrace our steps to the late Victorian
period and notice briefly two composers there from: a brass band man,
one HOWARD, whose march Dick Whittington was quite popular in
the 1890s; and T POPPLEWELL ROYLE, producer of waltzes like Toreador
(especially popular, apparently) and Eldorado and a man having
at least a nodding acquaintance with the light musical theatre as he
is almost certainly the "P ROYAL" who contributed additional music to
W Meyer Lutz's burlesque of 1889, Ruy Blas and The Blasé Roue,
produced at the Gaiety Theatre.
© Philip L Scowcroft
October 1999
Philip's book 'British Light Music Composers' (ISBN 0903413 88 4) is
currently out of print.
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