Music and Letters
Review of Howells biography in Music and Letters August 1999
This is a touching tribute to a composer who has for many years been
unfashionable, written by one of Howells’s own pupils who happens
to be steeped in the composer’s works through his conducting and
recording of them. Little has been written on Howells: it was typical
of the outlook of the musical hierarchy during his lifetime and since
that Frank Howes's The English Musical Renaissance (1955) virtually
ignored him, and that there has been very little devoted solely to him.
No doubt many ignored him because they considered - consciously or subconsciously
- that he fell into a category outlined by Donald Mitchell: Transitional
periods are almost bound to throw up these rather tragic figures, good
men and fine musicians, who seem compelled by some ironic destiny to create
in a style that is already an illusion. They are plainly victims of Time,
and their gifts – sufficient to enable them to play their roles with
conviction but not enough to rescue them from their fate - only intensify
their predicament. Their status could be more easily assessed if they
were plainly incompetent composers - which they are not. On the contrary,
it is their superior talents which confuse the aesthetic issue. (The
Language of Modern Music, 1963, p. 67). But Howells does not belong
in that category: after all, he revolutionized English cathedral music
single-handedly, and fully deserves a proper study. Spicer's book, one
of a series dedicated to discussing musicians, artists and writers from
around the border between Wales and England, is a step in the right direction,
and should become a classic.
Howells's hard work was legendary: this book makes it clear that, for
the musical world, it was a tragedy that he gave himself so little time
in which to compose. And yet his own view, shared with Vaughan Williams,
was that we ignore ordinary folk at our peril: he therefore spent much
time tending the soil by teaching and adjudicating. As a writer on music
he had an exquisite command of language and a remarkable ability to find
the mot juste and the apt expression; some of his work appeared
in the pages of this journal. His facility at composition was also legendary.
Robert Simp- son, during his lessons for the Durham D.Mus., remembered
taking to Howells what he thought was rather a good fugue: Howells simply
took a pen and, in his habitual exquisite calligraphy, wrote out, there
and then, a fugue of his own on the same subject, thoroughly exploring
all the implications of the material in a way that Simpson had not done.
As Spicer says, Howells has become typecast as a composer of church music: indeed, he is generally known only as a supplier of thoroughly fitting liturgical pieces, and perhaps also through such miniatures as the songs (among which 'King David' must be one of the finest ever composed to English words). Spicer is right to counter this by giving some weight to the larger-scale pieces for chorus and orchestra, and to the orchestral and chamber music. The few who know this repertoire) will always regret that Howells did not compose more large-scale works (there is no symphony, no concerto, no opera), but a busy life did not allow such things; on the other hand, those who benefited from his teaching and adjudicating will have reason to thank him.
The book is mainly biographical and is not intended for music specialists. It follows, then, that there is little analytical discussion of the music (indeed, there are only a couple of tiny music examples): we await a full technical treatment of Howells's music, whose quality certainly calls for such a study. But Spicer himself has a Howellsian facility for encapsulating the features of a work and pointing the reader towards the important elements of the composer's style. He cannot deal with minutiae, so the massive and admirably – paced climax at the end of the Collegium regale Te Deum, for example, is not noted: Howells's particular feeling for 'placing' the voices effectively, and for creating precisely the right atmosphere, are well worth exploring. Neither could Spicer possibly deal with every piece, and each reader conversant with Howells's output may well look in vain for a discussion of his or her own favourite. I personally miss a discussion of the Coventry Antiphon, written for the opening of the new cathedral, and overshadowed by Britten's War Requiem, written for the same set of ceremonies (this is typical of Howells's bad luck - he had the misfortune to live at the same time as Britten, Walton, Tippett and Vaughan Williams, and to be overshadowed by them in the public's mind). Naturally, then, some features are left out; but the cardinal importance of personal tragedy and a sense of 'the spirit of a place' are given due weight, and Spicer deals well with that new spaciousness in the choral music from the 1940s onwards about which Sir Thomas Armstrong memorably said: 'Howells is the master of the long line'.
The book is beautifully written and excellently produced. There are very few slips: I cannot find the discussion of ‘Summer Idyls (sic)' that is mentioned on page 31, and the review by 'B.W.G.R.' of the Missa sabrinensis on page 160 is by Bernard Rose. Spicer does not expand on the initials, though he must be aware of the authorship of this perfectly balanced review: I assume that he was covering up for Rose's notable failure to include anything other than the odd token Howells piece in the Magdalen music lists (the splendid and unaccountably neglected set of Evening Canticles for Magdalen College were written as the result of an offhand remark made in a social context rather than from a desire to reward an exponent of his music). Above all, the book is a great joy to read: let us hope that it begins to put the record straight.
Lionel Pike