"Much too jolly:" Britten Project III

This weekend the Chorale sings a program of English cathedral anthems. Three of Benjamin Britten's canticles are featured in this concert. Two settings of the Te Deum (composed a decade apart), and a Jubilate Deo. The latter setting was deemed "much too jolly" for the choir master who premiered it, but we think otherwise. Britten's music is serious fun.

The Jubilate Deo was the first Britten piece I learned, as a high school student in Chesapeake. I love and appreciate it now more than ever. And that is one of the (subjective) tests I use when quantifying a work's relative greatness, value or worth. How has my relationship to this piece evolved over time? What is it saying to me now? What details emerge in a new light? What was there all along I simply missed? What shift inside me has opened a new window, or offered a different perspective to enable deeper appreciation? Sometimes I feel like the music hears me.

I find Britten's music penetrates deeper to the core of my being as I revisit it, and paradoxically, I find it simpler and more direct. There is a playfulness in so much of it, a delight in the sheer joy of music-making. He often said he composed especially for human beings (not for the sake of posterity, academia or even art), and that human touch is especially apparent in his choral music.

This concert is the Chorale's third offering in its ongoing Britten Project, a five-season initiative to explore the works for chamber chorus--both familiar and lesser-known--of one of our favorite composers for voices.

As I revisit Britten this go-round, I am learning his Te Deum in C (from 1934) for the first time, and returning to the Festival Te Deum (1945) and the aforementioned Jubilate (1961). I am struck by the improvisatory quality of the latter two pieces. And I hear more and more the connections between them to the gamelan music of Indonesia Britten loved so much.

Britten's indebtedness to--and assimilation of--Indonesian (specifically Balinese) gamelan music is still under-appreciated (even in academic circles, which thrive on such lacunae). The gamelan is a percussion orchestra of gongs, bells, drums, and tuned percussion instruments (like xylophones) indigenous to Indonesia. Without turning this into an academic piece of ethnomusicology (for which I am utterly unqualified), Britten's style from his earliest years reveals similarities to gamelan (and other eastern) music(s).

Short melodic motives (conducive to improvisation and/or variation), a strong rhythmic pulse, and an interest in the expressive potential of texture are fixtures of Britten's style and gamelan music. When Britten first visited Bali, he wrote to his assistant, Imogen Holst (daughter of the composer of The Planets, Gustav):

"The music is fantastically rich--melodically, rhythmically, texture (such orchestration!) & above all formally. It is a remarkable culture."

The glittering affirmation and evocative other-worldiness of this music mirrors "themes" associated with Britten: childhood, innocence and peace. Britten was a lifelong pacifist, and spoke passionately about a worldview based on being a creative artist. He and (his life partner-to-be) Peter Pears left the UK as conscientious objectors in 1939 and lived in the US for several years before returning home to face a tribunal and possible imprisonment. Britten had this to say in his defense (in 1942):

Since I believe that there is in every man the spirit of God, I cannot destroy, and feel it my duty to avoid helping to destroy as far as I am able, human life, however strongly I may disapprove of the individual's actions or thoughts. The whole of my life has been devoted to acts of creation (being by profession a composer) and I cannot take part in acts of destruction. Moreover, I feel that the fascist attitude to life can only be overcome by passive resistance...I believe sincerely that I can help my fellow human beings best by continuing the work I am most qualified to do by the nature of my gifts and training, ie the creation or propagation of music.

His years in the US were fascinating and formative. He and Pears lived in a house in Brooklyn with W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and among others, Gypsy Rose Lee. He was commissioned and championed by such eminent figures as Serge Koussevitzky (through whom he met the up and coming Leonard Bernstein). He heard a radio broadcast that would give him the subject of his first opera, Peter Grimes (which motivated him and Pears to return home). He also worked with Colin McPhee, a Canadian musicologist--and specialist in Balinese gamelan music.

One of the features of gamelan music is heterophony, the "simultaneous presentation of different variants of the same melody" (from one of the only books on this particular subject, Mervyn Cooke's Britten and the Far East).

If we took "Row your boat" and had the bass section sing the melody in long, sustained notes while the tenors sang the regular tune, with the altos and sopranos singing the tune in whatever tempo or variant they desired, we would have instant heterophony. The melody would be audible, but the overall effect would be a wash of sound, an impressionist blurring of "normal" contours.

Among other composers, Mahler, Debussy and Ravel all used heterophonic techniques (and "exotic," eastern-sounding percussion instruments for effect). And all were big influences on Britten's style before he met McPhee and discovered the gamelan.

The Jubilate Deo opens with a jaunty, bell-like tune that immediately evokes the gamelan. The voices are paired in heterophonic textures. The tenors sings a tune while the sopranos "improvise" a slight variation on it (at the same time). This "unity in diversity" is both a prominent trait of Britten's music and is symbolic of an ideal. This symbol resonates in one of the improvisatory-sounding sections of the Festival Te Deum, where the voices vary a single melody individually, before stacking on top of one another to create a stratified texture on the very words, "the holy church throughout all the world..."

Besides the obvious associations between the gamelan effects and the "exotic" world of the east, Britten connects the gamelan with ideas of innocence and purity, themes as close to his heart as creativity and peace. When I hear the gamelan in his orchestral scores and opera, other-worldly images come to mind and pique my imagination. I hear a connection between this music and the beyond, the ideal, the sacred, the "other."

I have been sharing quotes from my mentor, courtesy of a new book edited by another friend and colleague, Donald Nally. Conversations with Joseph Flummerfelt is full of wonderful observations. When asked about "the source" of creativity, he refers to the "gift" of a great composer like Bach or Beethoven:

"My answer is 'the gift of connection.' Now clearly, there was a mastery of craft, that is essential. But what allows the music of a great composer to enrich our human understanding and to help quench our spiritual thirst is that, at the moment of creation, the composer was connected to a divine source, a powerful creative impulse. I call that source 'God.' Not God as prescribed by any religious beliefs, but the designation used as a symbol..."

Joe's eloquent statement echoes Britten's above, and thus is fitting for another composer to be included in the pantheon of "greats." And though Britten's pacifism might strike critics as naive or "soft" (or worse), his idealism was tempered by a keen awareness of the reality of the human condition. This creative tension is present in his music, and in works like the canticles discussed here, it is transcended. As another colleague, Graham Elliott writes, "from the '40's until the end of his life, he was clearly aware that man's potential for good needs spiritual support" (Benjamin Britten: The Spiritual Dimension).

The "powerful creative impulse" inspired music from Britten that is vivid, imaginative, playful as a child, and unexpected as a pleasant surprise. So individually jolly we might not recognize it for the angel's voice it is.