"A LONDON SYMPHONY"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 150, 8 May 1942, Page 4

"A LONDON SYMPHONY"

Sir,-It is just as well for The Listener that Mr. Andersen Tyrer took responsibility for the programme notes on Vaughan Williams’s "London Symphony" printed in this week’s issue. They are ill-informed and deceptive. To quote the indefatigable Percy Scholes on this same Symphony: "The composer decidedly does not want us to try to relate his music phrase by phrase to any material things or happenings. ‘Hearers may, if they like, localise the various movements and themes, but it is hoped that this is not a necessary part of the work.’" Scholes tells of an English conductor in New York who "took responsibility for a most detailed series of annotations which related almost every page of the work to some particular spot in London or some particular phase of London’s daily life," and he says that these annotations "do not enjoy the composer’s authorisation." The description applies so exactly to the notes supplied to you by Mr. Tyrer that I should say these were actually based on those annotations which the composer disallows. Or did Mr. Tyrer invent the phrase "an air of shabby gentility"? Where is his authority for telling us in what street we are (the Strand) and at what time, and what people are around? If the chimes of Big Ben had really been meant to give us the time, why didn’t

Vaughan Williams write exactly 15 minutes of music between the first chimes (in the Lento) and the second, three-quarter-hour (in the Epilogue)? Does Mr. Tyrer really believe that Vaughan Williams got that beautiful melody in the Phrygian mode (viola solo, 2nd movement) from a fiddler outside a pub? Of the third movement he writes: "One must imagine oneself sitting on a Saturday night on... the Embankment; that part lying between the houses of Parliament and Waterloo Bridge." In this instance he disectly contravenes the composer’s wishes by saying "one must" (see quotation above). Finally is there’ any authority for calling the "marcia" theme "The Hunger March" or did Mr. Tyrer actually hear the unemployed singing this tune? If so, how did Vaughan Williams come to write it in 1914? Or maybe there was some earlier Hunger March than the one usually referred to by that term? I’m sorry it takes so much space to say all this, but after reading Mr. Tyrer’s notes I can’t help feeling that if he can so completely overlook the wishes expressed verbally by the composers he represents, it is possible that he also overlooles the things they ask for in their scores.

PHILOMATHES

(Christchurch).

Mr. Andersen Tyrer has supplied us with the following teply:When the NBS Orchestra broadcast the first performance in New Zealand of the "London" Symphony by Vaughan Williams,'on April 21, I supplied to The Listener the composer’s own notes, in which he stated: "the title, ‘A London Symphony’ might rum ‘A Symphony by a Londoner’. That is to say, various sights and sounds of London have influenced the composer . . . but the music must succeed as music and in no other way.’’ I also included notes on the Symphony published in the British Music Society’s Bulletin when the Symphony was brought out (under the auspices of the British Music Society) in its revised version, at a concert in the Queen’s Hall, London in 1920. On this occasion it was stated to be the fourth performance of the Symphony. If these notes were acceptable to a Queen’s Hall audience on a fourth hearing of the work, surely we can accept them in New Zealand on a first hearing?