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Let me also declare several vital interests. Of the 96 composers 10 are ex-pupils of mine (and two ex-teachers), 33 are personal friends, 48 are known to me by acquaintance and/or repute, 15 I’d not heard of before. These categories overlap — I know the sum comes to more than 96! Nor are they hard and fast. And the same goes for a preliminary (but probably also final) sifting according to my sense of calibre and interest. The ‘experience of a lifetime’ grading exams at a great university and the occasional excursion into adjudicating international composing competitions have made it natural to assign classes to this mass of material. Here the sums do add up. My figures yield 40 Duds — varying between frankly dire to passably decent; 24 Standards — minus, middling, plus — representative of a sound well tried mainstream; and 23 Triumphs — pieces (sometimes by surprising names, and often not achieved by those more celebrated) that sustain real utterance within the constraints: something to say, said with skill, intensity, strangeness, beauty. If to these are added 9 which can only be called eccentric, the total comes to 96, I think (though sums were never my forte — a composer only needs to go up to 12, and even that can be too much!).
Perhaps the eccentrics offer the most immediate entrée. Far extremest is Gerald Barry’s ‘setting’ of a characteristic bariolage between Lady Bracknell and the hero of The Importance of Being Earnest, both voices and the piano accompaniment dispatched with zestful glee by the composer himself. Others approaching the condition of prose-declamation rather than sung-song are a Leyton Orient football chant, extracts from a National Trust brochure, a cod folksong besprinkled with bureaucratese, two uncanny slices of supernatural experience, observations on Italian women in music and love from Stendhal, an aesthetic spat from William Blake, and a scene of exhaustive chastisement from Samuel Pepys (piquantly set adjacent to a dour creepy-crawly nursery rhyme from the Master of the Queen’s Music).
But these are the exceptions. The brief was a song, to English lyric verse and celebrating (or at least invoking) some aspect of our islands’ sensibility, for one or two singers (of every variety), unaccompanied or accompanied by piano, or harp, or percussion, and not to exceed three minutes. (In the event, seven songs go beyond four and many beyond three, but some clock in at only just over or under one, so all is well.) Nostalgia for a pastoral past was enhanced if not enforced, by advice to choose old texts because their authors were no longer around to forbid, or demand exorbitant royalties.
So there’s predictably a lot of folklore, nursery rhymes, riddles. Of named poets Blake (himself a composer of sorts, singing the Songs of Innocence and Experience to his own tunes, no doubt as strange and original as his words and his illustrations) looms large, with Shakespeare, Hardy and Edward Thomas (but Housman only once). Self-made texts (often sweetly embarrassing) are frequent, as are verses by friends, spouses, partners: and three take a last-ditch recourse to wordless voculise. Piquant one-offs include a passage from Tristram Shandy, the Latin of Swift’s famous epitaph in St Patrick’s Cathedral (supplemented in the generous booklet by Yeats’s English version), a passage of English’d Lucretius, a haiku, a recipe for whisky, a tirade of supermarket-and-road rage, and the reiteration of a vatic one-line rune.
It would be mean to single out the direst of the Duds. Let me, rather, name a few of the undoubted Triumphs: a tiny, gleaming palewater gem from Howard Skempton; a masterly Ah! Sunflower from Jonathan Harvey; Jonathan Powell’s chalorous setting of Shelley’s Stanzas 1814 (in a juicy idiom closely recalling the Russian avant-garde a century later); two magically simple folktales from Judith Weir and Jonathan Lloyd; and — for me best of all (if it were a competition) — Anthony Gilbert’s Bells of East Anglia, superimposing upon John Clare a litany of Suffolk place names in delectable tintinnabulation — ‘the music of the sky’. Any one of these (and not forgetting the other 17 Triumphs) would make the anthology worth buying.
Songs from the NMC Songbook will be performed live at Kings Place (90 York Way, London N1) in a series of concerts from 1–4 April: www.kingsplace.co.uk; 020 7520 1490
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