Strange news: my affair with George Butterworth.



I have never had much of a liking for British folk music. It had a very specific aura to it when I was a boy: a sense of the failure of the sixties ideological revolution, fizzling out in doleful open mic sessions in half-empty pubs; of a halfhearted mythologising of the historical and rural counteracting a grinding sense of disappointment with the realities of unfulfilled, small town, mundane life. Of course, this was probably never true, and indeed says much more about me and the place and time I became an adult in – small town Hampshire in the early eighties – and more about my burgeoning thrill in the discovery of musical modernism, than it does about the very subtle and complex place folk tradition has in the world of music. But still, I never really liked it.

It came as something as a surprise to me then, that a few years ago, I found myself seeking out sources of folk music for a project I was working on. I had started a site-specific choreographic collaboration centred on the notion of The River in urban life, and was interested in the way in which this was expressed in music. I found myself looking at a book of English folk songs in an idle moment, wondering if waterways were much in evidence. “Gently flows the winding river” went the first line of one, and later continued “...I live not where I love”, a poignant sentiment for me at the time, as I was in an exquisitely difficult and doomed long-distance relationship. I decided to make my own version of the song as a part of the project, although it rapidly evolved into something more personal, and private. Although not without its flaws, I felt oddly, that in some way I had uncovered a magic spell; of release or of earthing. You can hear the result here:

Some time later I quit the collaboration, but turned back to the books of folk music at the library, feeling that there was still something unfinished there for me. In amongst all the ballads and jolly military tales that left me cold I discovered a narrow but very rich seam of material I’d had no idea was there: unforgettable songs of love and heartbreak. Folk material has a fantastic, unselfconsciously direct way of expressing certain kinds of experience: a breakup is not just a loss for instance, but often an actual death. Sometimes in art there is a magical combination, when great abstract reasoning meets a beautiful physical surface, and I found hints and sparks of this in some folk songs that had been arranged by classical composers; particularly by that group of men who were actively transcribing, arranging and publishing folk songs at the beginning of the twentieth century: Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst. And George Butterworth.





















It’s a controversial matter these days, as to the validity, or honesty of the motivations of that group of collectors and arrangers, but from a very personal point of view, there is a piquancy for me in the straitlaced bourgeois gentleman unearthing some inner authenticity through his apprehension of this culture that is both Self in its englishness and Other in its historical provenance and class; absorbing and changing it, and at the same time being irreversibly changed by it. Of course, I may well be describing myself in some ways here too. We can still witness this curious combination not just through Butterworth’s music but through surviving film footage of he and Cecil Sharp Morris dancing: their Edwardian stiffness is animated by an idea of pastoral physicality and ease. The dance they are acting out is drawing out something from them, as surely as they are using it to express their own notions of a prelapsarian idyll. It’s hard to be sure because the footage is so grainy, but there is a moment when Sharp and Butterworth crash into each other. They really seem to be laughing, having a real hoot.
http://youtu.be/tI5qxjWutrs?t=3m22s
(The video won't embed, but follow the links).


A Blacksmith


Born in 1885, Butterworth was the son of a wealthy industrialist whose successful Edwardian musical career, begun at Eton College, was abruptly ended when he joined up and became an officer in the trenches of the First World War. He died from a sniper’s bullet in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He actively recorded folk songs from the working class inhabitants of rural Sussex, arranging some of them for voice and piano, and many of his compositions were built on a foundation of folk material.


I first came across Butterworth in his arrangement of ‘A blacksmith courted me’, a song collected by Vaughan Williams in 1909. The protagonist in this song is a world apart from the dreary maids and lads in the songs I remembered from my youth. ‘A blacksmith’ projects a powerful sense of desire and longing overwhelmed by anxiety and loss. This desire is for a man, the blacksmith, with “his hammer all in his hand”, and Butterworth’s arrangement, in its simple cadences and subtly ambivalent harmony, brings out the complex allure of that unattainable object; perhaps the transgressive desire of one man for another, or of the aristocrat longing for the assumed simplicity or honesty of the proletariat, we can’t know for sure. The blacksmith is objectified as an impermanent thing of beauty, through his physical attributes – “he looks so brave and clever” – which establishes a complex position for the protagonist of passive watching and imagining as if from a distance. This creates a dissonance between the real blacksmith and his fantasy counterpart which is resolved in the bewildered, piercing repetition: “Strange news is come from abroad, strange news is carried, strange news is come to tell that my love is married” underlining the potency and agony of that unfulfilled desire, and the curse of that passivity.


I didn’t really know anything about Butterworth at this point. In some ways I still don’t, though I have read much about him. I don’t know if he desired other men, or where in his heart he felt that ache of longing for the unobtainable that the song pulled out of him. Wikipedia says that “the parallel is regularly made between the…subject matter of A Shropshire Lad (a song cycle of his on texts by A E Housman)…and Butterworth's subsequent death during the Great War”. It’s easy to romantically associate this unfulfilled longing in the folk song arrangements with Butterworth’s future fate, too. His life and work as a composer are in some ways as tantalisingly gone from us as the blacksmith is.


Butterworth arranged these songs for piano and voice, and his discourse is a solidly public, art-song one. My music is concerned in some ways with a kind of interiority: work that demands a psychologically private medium that headphones and domestic speakers provide. So when I embarked on my own version of Butterworth’s ‘A blacksmith’ I decided to use the computer and my home studio to do it, rather than to write it down for public performance. It became a very personal project for me, and so, despite my own limitations – and learning as I went – I decided to sing it myself, too, in the same way those singers that Butterworth encountered on his collecting trips would have done. If Butterworth legitimises his folk material through the mask of the public performers, I wear Butterworth’s hand as a kind of glove, through which the folk material becomes manipulable. But also, because I play all the instruments myself (voice, piano and soprano saxophone predominantly), I act as a mouthpiece for the unnamed original songsmith and for Butterworth too. There’s many layers to this cultural costume: perhaps Oscar Wilde was right when he said "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."


My version falls into four sections, the three verses of Butterworth’s arrangement, with an instrumental interlude. I tried to make explicit those things that are implicit in the original: the heedless, denying simplicity of the opening, the slowly overwhelming anxiety of the second verse, and the emotional horror of the last, with its paralysis of shock and final, furious, self-defeating declaration. The music I wrote draws strongly on the very first phrase of Butterworth’s piano accompaniment, that twice-rising tone that then falls and rises again, curling around itself, never quite resolving harmonically.


The saxophone interlude refers to a specific, personal loss. It is a quotation of sorts, of a piece I wrote in the nineties for a friend who died shortly after. In fact I play this music on the saxophone that belonged to him. There’s a concatenation of longing in this brief song, then: for that doomed long-distance relationship I had just then lost, for the friend I had lost almost 20 years ago, and for the idea of writing classical music itself, in some ways. And too, the poignancy of Butterworth’s life and death, of his longing for something unreachable that spilled over into his arrangement, and that long lost original author whose blacksmith left them for that field in the sun.





A True Lover’s Farewell


After ‘A blacksmith’, I decided to seek out some more of Butterworth’s folk arrangements. I was a little surprised to discover that ‘A blacksmith courted me’ isn’t exactly typical of them. Most of them fall into the jolly romp category, though they share the deceptive simplicity of their arrangements. ‘A true lover’s farewell’, of all the arrangements in his collection, is perhaps the most doleful. It’s ambivalent though: the words are in some ways a passionate declaration of love and fidelity and yet the arrangement hints at something darker. When I played a couple of friends the recording by Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside, their first reaction was to laugh. I suppose this was because of the stark grandness of Butterworth’s gesture combined with the sweetness of the tune, I don’t know. He does seem to protest a little too much it’s true. But it seemed to me that Butterworth turns this sweet little song on its head: the accompaniment is overweening for a reason. It transforms the singer’s intent from a declaration of love into a honeyed lie. The lover is not true, there will be no return.


The core musical appeal of this song for me was twofold: the beautiful melody and the harmony. The tune is one of the catchiest I’ve ever worked with. It compels you to sing it. The harmony’s attractions are more complex: it is basically modal but hovers just on that border between major and minor, first shifting one way then the other. Butterworth cleverly works with the implied harmony of the tune to provide a wavelike alternation of tension and release, most notably on the last word of the first accompanied verse’s “Oh fare you well for a while”.


In general, folk songs fall very much into a strophic form, and Butterworth mostly follows this – as he does in ‘A blacksmith’ – by writing an accompaniment that repeats for each verse. His arrangement of ‘A true lover’s farewell’ doesn’t do this: it is through-written, each verse accompanied differently, though the harmonic underpinnings remain the same. It builds from literally nothing – he leaves the first verse unaccompanied – to a deep, sonorous, baleful climax at the end of the third. The scrap of melody the piano provides as a brief introduction sets the tone: low in register, in stark octaves and rooted in the minor-key aspect of the tune’s double nature. The accompaniment acts as a kind of shadow to the voice, undermining the guileless veracity of the text’s declarations. The bigger the singer’s claims become, the more thundering the denial has to be.


One of the main things about my version is that everything in it is in some ways false. The voice is electronically manipulated in different ways, the piano is an electric one; in fact there are no acoustic instruments in it at all. The instrumental part I added after the third verse is made up of a web of distorted transcriptions of birdsong, a kind of alienated robotic dawn chorus. Despite what the singer – me again, wearing a three-sided digital mask this time – asserts, the plastic fakeness of everything else about the song denies it. The unexpected but neat cadence of the end is like a little bow tied around that pat falsification, as if to say: believe THAT, sucker.




The cuckoo


The first thing that appealed to me about ‘The cuckoo’ is the way in which it talks about death. “The grave it will rot you and bring you to dust” is sung in the same chirpy tone that gives “The cuckoo is a merry bird, she sings as she flies” its jaunty appeal. In fact, the only thing that makes this song cohere at all – the text is all over the place – is the repetition of the melody and its accompaniment. Like an accomplished film actor barely moving their face, we are able to project a host of contrasting emotions and ideas onto the impassive unrolling of the piano part. It’s a very twentieth century setting in this regard.


Butterworth sets up a lovely bouncing rhythm that is very definitely in three, only to trip us up with a couple of bars that are three sets of two. Like ‘A true lover’s farewell’, the harmony fluctuates between the major and the minor, though it’s much more prominent in the tune here.


I changed the text quite a lot. The folk tradition has always had a very free approach to the malleability of language. You rarely find two versions of a song that are the same. I had changed some of the words in ‘A true lover’s farewell’, as I found I couldn’t bring myself to sing the oh-so-Victorian affectionate epithet “dear”, and went further in ‘The cuckoo’. I made it more generalised and gender neutral. The way the text is structured is like the links of a chain, the ideas join up to one another though they don’t really make a coherent whole. The interesting thing that got me thinking was the transitions: you don’t necessarily notice but you end up somewhere completely different from where you started. Butterworth irons out these differences, I chose to exaggerate them.


The beginning of my version is full of summer languor. It picks up speed and becomes more rhythmic when Death becomes the subject. I liked the idea that it’s mortality and the physicality of death that inspire the movement and energy that make up the dance-like section. Above all, the psychological landscape this song describes is rooted in physical Nature. So like I did in ‘A blacksmith’, I use found and environmental recorded sound to root my version in a twenty-first century setting: there’s bees and birdsong and the sound of aeroplanes overhead. The cuckoo is absent, but the saxophone alludes to it.



Keith Johnson, London, 2013.


Speak low




Speak low

My version of the Kurt Weill/Ogden Nash song.



Black roses

















My rendering of the song by Sibelius, sung by Hilary Robinson. I thought it a beautiful, simple song, though rather melodramatic. It's something I've begun to notice more and more, how a lot of classical music has a kind of public quality: despite the fact that much of this kind of work was written partly as parlour music, it's still designed to be performed on a public stage. I tried to make a more sympathetic, intimate, psychological version that is more suited to the kind of solitary listening that makes up the majority of my own musical experiences today.


Here's Sibelius's version:




A computer



These are two songs that I wrote in 2003 from Some simple concrete facts that can be detected in the world. I had them at the back of my mind for some time; working on the folk song re-imaginings of Strange News gave me the tools and the confidence to make finished versions myself. Arranged for midi instruments and some old-school sounding synthesisers, the voice is mine transposed up a third to give it a more synthetic quality.

A computer

Information from the cybersphere

The cuckoo

The cuckoo is another reinterpreted folksong, the third (after A blacksmith and A true lover's farewell) that is based on a version by George Butterworth. It took me a long time to get right: the transition from one tempo to another was rather tricky.

2009 Blue light, white flags

Blue light, white flags is an electronic study, from the end of the Music from the worm farm project. It combines elements of two songs that I used to make ensemble pieces: Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler and Hejira from the album of the same name by Joni Mitchell. This piece uses a version of the rhythm guitar from Hejira which has been sculpted down using data from the lab. From the Mahler it takes the instrumentation and the changes in tempo.


"Die liebe Erde allüberall
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu!
Allüberall und ewig
Blauen licht die Fernen!
Ewig... ewig..."
Gustav Mahler

"We're only particles of change, I know I know,
Orbiting around the sun.
But how can I have that point of view
When I'm always bound and tied to someone?
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room."
Joni Mitchell

2009 A book of mutants

A book of mutants
piano

Music from the worm farm was a research and development residency project, involving composer Keith Johnson and neurobiologist Dr Stephen Nurrish. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project culminated in a public performance of the musical works, performed by ensemble [rout] and pianist Philip Howard at the Dana Centre in the Science Museum in March 2009.

A book of mutants for the piano is made up of 18 mutated versions of the C major Prelude from Book 1 of the Well-tempered Clavier by JS Bach. It is a response to the use in the lab of deliberate mutations to their model organism, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. They use these to examine the internal workings of the motor neuron. I’ve made systemic changes at root level to various different musical parameters to generate mutations in my own model organism.

Performed here by Philip Howard (photo by Tony Wilburn)





1993 Honesty

Honesty 2001
Sinfonia 21 cond. Martyn Brabbins

Honesty 1993
The BBC Philharmonic cond. Peter Maxwell Davies


Both kinds of honesty, the virtue and the plant Lunaria Annua


played their part in the genesis of my piece. Though the plant undergoes what is obviously a continuous growing process, it seemed to me to be more like a discrete series of stages with apparently no transition between them. These stages are very different from one another: from the small, rather untidy rosette of leaves through the maturity of the flowering plant to the skeletal, shell-like seed pods. While the qualities of these different stages of growth are only tangentially reproduced in the three broad sections of my piece, the idea of a relationship between the continuous and the disjunct, governed by the listener’s perception, played a significant role in the writing process. Through very simple musical means, the wide use of repetition, predominantly slow tempi and very little traditionally ‘composerly’ manipulation of musical material, I hoped to create an ambiguous sense of the level at which the musical continuity was being played out, drawing the ear to the events that occur within the sounds themselves and to the broader gestures within which they are located, rather than simply the notes out of which the piece is made.


Honesty Radio 3 interview

1993 Torso

Torso

For soprano saxophone and piano

Played by Paul McIlveen and Keith Johnson

Early works 1984-1993

Passing 1993
For 6 players
(Manchester University students)

Break, break, break
For 10 players 1990
The Esbjerg Ensemble

Winner of the Sonorities Young Composer's competition

Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
Tennyson


Still water tread
Nottingham University students
Still water tread MIDI
Voice, 2 violins, cello 1985

Who are you to unsettle me?
beneath this layer of water
queer white arms
dead things, leftovers pale in my bath

Who are you
under the thin layers
that curl and clasp at my throat?
Tonight you were two arching birds
wild geese visiting my roof
my roof
learning and yearning
into thickening night

You slip back and I hear your
honking strange heavy call

my limbs linking to your voice.
Jennifer J Rankin


And darkness
Voice and string quartet MIDI version

And darkness
Nothing but darkness,
or almost so.
At that fringe near the light
such a little way
it seems
I can't think clearly there
Guillevic from 'Carnac'