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Music and War Throughout history the arts and war have had a long and complex relationship. Over the centuries, music has been employed to portray the “art of war” as a noble, heroic pursuit, tied inexorably to the glorification of crown, country and church. Marches, hymns, oratorios, and operas were composed, set to patriotic texts meant to inspire and bolster national pride. In the visual arts, vast canvases were painted celebrating and commemorating great battles and campaigns, kings and generals. Many national anthems and their texts are born of conflict: the U.S. Battle Hymn of the Republic, and France’s La Marseillaise are examples of this. The seldom heard second verse of “God Save the Queen” (or “King”), part of the original text of 1745, became popular again during the two World Wars: Oh Lord our God arise Scatter her enemies And make them fall: Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks On Thee our hopes we fix: God save us all! With the onslaught of the Great War, artists and composers were confronted and challenged by the inescapable, grim realities of devastation on a scale not previously fathomed. As the casualties mounted, the pre-war patriotic, rousing compositions were replaced by requiems, elegies, and laments “in memoriam”. Music now expressed a desire for peace, and mourned and lamented those that had lost their lives. National glory was replaced by national sorrow and reflection. Prior to the Great War, European nations had generally bounced back with renewed optimism and vigour after each war or conflict. After the devastation of WW1, and the unfathomable numbers of dead and maimed, the old world order was shaken and broken, and a state of global unease and skepticism became ingrained in the collective psyche. There was also an important focal shift to include not only national sentiment and commemoration, but also individual loss and grief. Artists, poets, and composers now created works that portrayed – not the panoply of battles, nor the fate of rulers and generals – but the microcosm of the common soldier, magnifying it to represent a global message. This is in part due to the fact that prior to WW1 wars had been fought largely by professional armies. The idea of military conscription – the massed compulsory enlistment of a nation’s civilians – was a relatively rare phenomenon; Napoleon had employed it to create his Grand Armée which overwhelmed Europe’s professional armies. Britain introduced conscription for the first time in its history halfway through the Great War in 1916. Among the 8,000,000 men who were

Photo from Imperial War Museum.

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conscripted, artists, composers, writers, and poets were now part of the “rank and file” of the army, and saw first hand the devastation of the trenches. They chronicled their experiences through art, music and words. Composers like Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ralph Vaughan Williams were the “lucky” ones who emerged after the war relatively unscathed. But so many of their musical colleagues were either killed in action or greatly affected by their experiences in the trenches. A whole generation of “bright lights” was extinguished within four years, their creative promise unfulfilled. The survivors were left with nightmares or worse, their creativity forever coloured with a darkness that permeated their work. Here is a brief look at individual composers and their legacy. Their music came to define the war, helping future generations understand the realities of war.

GEORGE BUTTERWORTH On the 5th of August, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, George Butterworth was shot through the head, killed by a sniper’s bullet. His body was never found. Butterworth personifies the brilliant, talented generation that was snuffed out in the melee of the war. Like his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, Butterworth studied and collected folksongs, and used them in his works. He also set poems of A.E. Houseman to music, including the evocative A Shropshire Lad. He destroyed the majority of his early compositions before he left for the front in 1915. His pastoral work The Banks of Green Willow (1913) is an innocent, idyllic evocation of the English countryside. It is now often played during commemoration ceremonies at the Somme.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Ralph Vaughan Williams was one of the most important British composers to see active service in the Great War. He was a close friend both of Gustav Holst and George Butterworth, and a mentor to composer Arthur Bliss. Probably the most famous piece of music associated with Vaughan Williams from 1914 is The Lark Ascending. The piece has since come to represent a loss of innocence; an elegy for the war dead. Vaughan Williams was holidaying on the coast in Kent on the day Britain entered the First World War. The composer later told the story that the melody for The Lark came into his head as he walked along the cliff, and he began to jot it down in his notebook. A young scout spotted him and made a citizen’s arrest, assuming he was a spy scribbling details of the coastline for the enemy! Vaughan Williams was 42 when in September 1914 he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was made a wagon

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orderly due to his flat feet. His field ambulance unit was posted to France in June 1916. They arrived in the village of Ecoivres, near the ruins of a 7th-century abbey. To the south, the bombardment of the Somme had already begun. Vaughan Williams would set out with his ambulance to collect the wounded, and it was during these experiences that his evocative Pastoral Symphony (no. 3) began to take shape in his mind: “It’s reall wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres, and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset. It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted.” The Pastoral Symphony is actually a soundscape of his wartime experiences: the sound of a bugler practising at Ecoivres inspired the long trumpet solo in the second movement of the symphony. It brings to mind the Last Post. A ghostly, wordless soprano solo accompanied by a drum roll opens the elegiac, unsettling fourth movement. Vaughan Williams was to become one of the most important English classical composers since Henry Purcell, writing nine symphonies, six operas, and a vast amount of choral and vocal music. His bleak, disturbing Sixth Symphony (1948) is often regarded as a response to the Second World War. Conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent said of the work: “I never conduct the Sixth without feeling that I am walking across bomb sites.” Ralph Vaughan Williams, suffering increasingly from deafness in his later years – a result of his service in 1917 in the Royal Garrison Artillery – died in 1958.

GUSTAV HOLST English composer Gustav Holst was a scholar at the Royal College of Music, a professional musician and teacher. He was 40 when war broke out, and was rejected as unfit for military service due to ill-health. He was frustrated that friends and family were participating: his wife became an ambulance driver, his close friend Ralph Vaughan Williams was on active service in France, and his friends Butterworth and Coles were killed at the front. But in the last months of the war, Holst finally had his chance to serve. He worked as a volunteer with British troops in Europe awaiting demobilization in Salonika, Greece. Having been told his surname, Von Holst, sounded too Germanic, he changed it to Holst. His most famous work, The Planets, was written in 1914, before the war had made its cataclysmic impact, but it included a portrayal of the reality of warfare in Mars, the bringer of war. This powerful movement became a huge international success after the First World War. On his return from Salonica, Holst wrote his choral work, Ode to Death (1918-19), a contemplation on the waste and futility of war, inspired by a Walt Whitman poem.

Photo from Imperial War Museum.

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MAURICE RAVEL Ravel in uniform, 1916 (Image: copyright gallica.bnf, fr.) Maurice Ravel was already well established as one of France’s leading composers at the outset of the war. His muisc for the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, written for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and premiered in 1912, was praised for its opulence and beauty. Attracted to the brave and dashing image of military airmen, Ravel hoped to serve his country as an aviator, but at age 39, was considered too old, too short, and of poor health. He served instead as a driver with the French artillery on the Verdun front for two years, succumbing to frostbite. The appalling loss of life on the front affected him deeply. In 1917 he wrote Le tombeau de Couperin (1917), a suite for solo piano in six movements, each movement dedicated to a friend or friends killed in the war. Ravel orchestrated the work in 1919. In 1918, the last year of the war, Ravel composed a highly unusual piece for five hands at two pianos. It is fifteen measures long and lasts less than two minutes. Frontispice was written to compliment a collection of poems by avant-garde poet and dramatist Ricciotto Canudo, based on that author’s wartime experiences. The poems were published alongside a portrait of Canudo by Pablo Picasso. By the end of the war Ravel was suffering from severe depression. Ravel was a composer who aimed at technical control and perfection, but the enigmatic music of Frontispice perhaps belies his troubled state of mind: each hand seeming to go off in its own direction, only coming together in the final moments of the piece, but ending in a musical question mark. One of Ravel’s greatest works is his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. The concerto was commissioned in 1929 by the famous Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm in the war. Volunteering for military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he was shot in the right elbow while fighting in the Ukraine, and captured by the Russians. His elbow shattered, his arm had to be amputated, but he refused to accept that his career as a pianist was over. Following the war, he commissioned pieces for left hand alone from numerous composers.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG The brilliant, revolutionary Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg saw the outset of the war as an opportunity to eradicate what he regarded as the bourgeois tendencies of French music. Like the advance of the German Army on France, Schoenberg was waging a personal war against “mediocre kitschmonger” composers like Ravel, Bizet, and even Stravinsky. But drafted into the Austrian Army at 42, Schoenberg quickly saw how incompatible he and the military were. He resented the disruption to his composing, which was well on its revolutionary journey away from traditional tonality to a free, atonal language known as “serialism.” Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra produced a storm of controversy when premiered in Berlin in 1928. By the 193O’s, with the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg’s works were labelled as “degenerate” Jewish music, and the perceived “decadence” of his compositions forced him to move to America. He settled in Los Angeles, teaching at American universities. He died in 1951.

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EDWARD ELGAR At 57 years of age Edward Elgar was too old for military service. He instead was on the governing committee of the United Arts Rifles, a volunteer corps formed of artists, musicians, writers, and actors. He also served his country through music of a patriotic if slightly naïve nature. His powerful setting of Carillon by the Belgian poet and playright Emile Cammaerts was an instant success at its premiere in 1914. Later patriotic war works included Polonia, The Spirit of England, and Fringes of the Fleet. Elgar’s famous Land of Hope and Glory, already popular, became more so during the war years. His Cello Concerto of 1919, belies the increasingly disillusioning influence of the carnage of the Great War on Elgar’s inspiration. Elgar’s sentiments, however, were somewhat skewed. In August 1914 he wrote to his friend Frank Schuster: “Concerning the war I say nothing. The only thing that wrings my heart and soul is the thought of the horses. Oh! my beloved animals. The men and women can go to hell, but my horses ... I walk round and round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured. Let him kill human beings but how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.”

IVOR GURNEY The talented Ivor Gurney was already composing at the age of 14. In 1911, at 21, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. He studied composition there with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. His teacher later wrote that of all his pupils – who included Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, and Bliss – Gurney was potentially “the biggest man of them all,” although he added that he was also “the least teachable.”! Gurney had also begun to write poetry, but suffered from bouts of depression due to a bipolar disorder, and had to take leave from his studies in 1913. Recuperating, he wrote excitedly to his poet friend F.W. Harvey about a set of songs he had composed on Elizabethan texts. War intervened and Gurney enlisted in 1915. He was shipped off to France the following year, and in June of 1916 wrote a letter home about an enemy attack: “It left me exulted and exulting, only longing for a nice Blighty that would take me away from all this and leave me free to play the G minor Prelude from the Second Book of Bach. Oh for a good piano! I am tired of this war, it bores me. But I would not willingly give up such a memory of such a time.” Astonishingly, Gurney managed to write verse and compose music while in the trenches. His 1916 setting of By a Bierside by poet John Masefield – written while lying on a damp sandbag in a disused mortar trench – is the first of five songs that Gurney is known to have written at the front. In 1917 he composed his now famous In Flanders, a setting of a poem by his friend “Willy” Harvey about being in the trenches and longing to be back home in the Cotswolds of England.

Photo from Imperial War Museum.

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That same year Gurney was wounded, and later transferred to the Machine Gun Corps. In August 1917 his unit moved from the Somme to Ypres. A month later he was gassed, and sent back to England. Gurney never returned to the front, but published two volumes of poetry before the end of the war, Severn to Somme and War’s Embers. 1919 to 1921 proved to be the three most productive years of Gurney’s life, music and poetry pouring out of him. But he was increasingly plagued with serious depression and mental instability, hearing voices and seeing visions. After attempting to shoot himself, Gurney was committed to an asylum in 1922. He continued even then to write songs and war poems. He died of tuberculosis in December 1937.

CECIL COLES Cecil Coles’ music was largely unknown until 2002. He was a friend and protégé of Gustav Holst. His most important surviving piece, Fra Giacomo, was written between 1913-14 while touring with the Beecham Opera Company as chorus master. In 1915 he enlisted in the Queen Victoria Rifles, becoming their bandmaster. During his service Coles sent manuscripts home to Holst. At Christmas 1917, Holst received one of Coles’ manuscripts, splashed with bloodstains and muddy water: it was the score for a four-movement orchestral suite Behind the Lines, written by Coles while in the trenches. In the second movement, entitled Cortege, he depicts a military funeral procession. A year later in April 1918, Coles was dead at 29, killed near the Somme while attempting to rescue wounded comrades. In 1919 Gustav Holst dedicated his moving setting of Walt Whitman’s Ode to Death to Coles and his fallen comrades. The stained manuscript score of Behind the Lines, composed by Coles in the trenches

ERNEST MACMILLAN Canada’s pre-eminent composer, conductor, and educator was 21 when he travelled to Paris in the spring of 1914 to study piano with Thérèse Chaigneau. While MacMillan was visiting the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in August of 1914, Canada declared war on Imperial Germany. MacMillan was imprisoned as an enemy alien. He was interned for the duration of the war at Ruhleben, a British civilian detention camp outside of Berlin. He helped create a musical society at that camp, directing performances with orchestra of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. MacMillan, with the help of four other musicians, transcribed the music from memory. The prison camp also had a drama society, and Macmillan acted in performances of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. He gave lectures on Beethoven’s nine symphonies, performing them in four-hand piano arrangements with

Photo from Imperial War Museum.

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fellow prisoner Benjamin Dale, a British composer and academic. The camp magazine in 1917 noted: “The gradual improvement of the orchestra under the splendid training of such fine musicians as Mr. Peebles Conn, Mr. MacMillan and Mr. Weber paved the way for regular orchestral concerts which have proved such a welcome feature of our captivity.” While imprisoned, Macmillan composed a string quartet, influenced by the “war-time style and themes.” He also composed a setting for choir and orchestra of Swinburne’s ode England, which he submitted from the prison camp to Oxford University to earn in absentia a Doctorate in Music. After the war MacMillan went on to be director of the Toronto Symphony, Principal of the Toronto Conservatory of Music (later the Royal Conservatory of Music), and Dean of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. He was knighted in 1935 for his services to music in Canada.

Ivars Taurins is a founding member of Tafelmusik, director of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, and guest conductor with orchestras and choirs across Canada. He teaches at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto.

Photo from Imperial War Museum.