Lavender and Old London

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 360, 17 May 1946, Page 10

Lavender and Old London

HE introductory remarks to Vaughan Williams’ "London Symphony" (heard from 3YA) quoted at some length the views of "the composer’s friend Butterworth" on the various sounds and pictures of the sovefeign city which the composer, like other composers, had incorporated in his work. Mr, Butterworth gave a longish list, of which I can at the moment only recall "the cry of a lav-ender-seller." This rather random recollection is indeed a comment on one aspect of the work, and indeed a criticism of most musical treatments of London. The lavender-seller may be taken to symbolise the old-time rural background of London-the days of the walls and markets, when country-foik wandered in and out to do street trade and the smell of flowers mingled with the other and more metropolitan odours of the day. All this, I submit, Eric Coates, Vaughan Williams and others emphasise a deal too much. Their Greenwich is Greensleeves and their Woolwich might as well be Wenlock Edge. The

treason for all this is that the specifically and consciously English music of the early 20th Century tended to be dominated over-much by visions of revivified folk-song. Furthermore, the mind of the time had for some reason to go back to the Elizabethan or Middle Ages and the pre-industrial, pre-capitalistic civilisation for the sort of direct sensuous appreciation of urban life which inspired such poetry as that of the 14th-Century Dunbar: "London thou art of townes A purse ... of most delectable lusty ladies i... . Sa pe O towne of townes! patrone and not compare. London, thou art the flower of cities all." But there is another London tradition, of no inferior antiquity, which one would like to have incorporated in some London music-the lineage which holds the Newgate Calendar and Sweeney Todd, Dickens and Sherlock Holmes, and all the ugly humorous energy called Cockney. We might still, however, have need of the lavender.