Books
Our critics cast their eyes over this month’s selection of books on classical music
Jerusalem – Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness
Jason Whittaker
Oxford University Press 256pp (hb) £25
When my schoolmates and I belted out ‘Jerusalem’ in the 1950s, we knew instinctively what it purveyed: a simple socialist message. But as Jason Whittaker makes clear, William Blake’s lapidary lines initially caused great exegetic confusion. Whittaker’s subtitle, ‘Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness’, indicates the three main elements in this brilliant book, which is both the tangled history of a song, and an up-to-the-minute essay on social history, with ‘Jerusalem’ reflecting many contrary kinds of Englishness.
Through the prism of ‘Jerusalem’ – long a contender to be our national anthem – we view the politics of the Great War and the ’20s, with Hubert Parry’s Blake espoused first by the army and then by the suffragette movement. Throughout much of the 20th century it was owned by the Women’s Institute and the Proms, with Elgar’s bombastic arrangement setting the seal on it as an expression of quintessential conservatism.
But this book is fascinating on what people have done with it over the past 30 years, with hardleft playwrights and filmmakers balanced by Brexiteers and the far right. Blake the revolutionary was never more relevant. Michael Church
★★★★★
Malcolm Arnold – The Inside Story
Anthony Meredith
Book Guild 528pp (hb) £19.95
Even your best friend can get bored if you keep banging on about your medical problems, and readers may feel in a similar position with Malcolm Arnold: The Inside Story. The outside story of this singularly gifted but troubled British composer, relayed in an earlier book by Meredith, is gruelling enough. But the amount of new detail about his mental breakdowns, drunken sprees, hospitalisations and decades of living under the control of his over-reaching carer, the late Anthony Day, stretches beyond the pale.
For the first hundred pages, the music Arnold actually composed is kept in counterpoint with the chronicle of personal difficulties. But for the 420 others, toxic relationships and calamities dominate, reaching a nadir in the lengthy transcriptions of Day’s vituperative answerphone messages to Arnold’s long-suffering daughter Katherine, the book’s instigator and dedicatee.
Meredith’s journalistic tenacity should be acknowledged, but when the result takes us so far away from Arnold’s music (the only element in a composer’s life that should really matter for posterity), the number of people who might profit from reading this monster volume is likely to be small. Geoff Brown
★★
The Silver Chain
Jion Sheibani
Hot Key Books 341pp (hb) £12.99
This emotive Young Adult verse novel explores the power of music to heal, transform and build resilience. Told through free-flowing poetry, the story charts the struggles of 16-year-old Azadeh, a talented violinist with a music scholarship to an elite private school. Alongside the usual teenage travails of heartache and friendship groups, Azadeh must also navigate her mother’s severe mental health problems and the distance she feels from her Iranian heritage: ‘Farsi is a song I know so well in my head / but cannot sing’. Throughout these various struggles it is the violin that proves Azadeh’s safety net, the one thing that offers a ‘tiny light… in all this darkness’.
Sheibani writes with confidence and integrity, and her descriptions of classical music ring with knowledge and experience. While mostly written in free verse, the book draws imaginatively on other poetic forms – from acrostics to shape poems – and also includes an especially beautiful ghazal, originally an Arabic form that uses hypnotic repetition to explore themes of loss and love. This is a sensitive and engaging book that offers a moving celebration of music’s capacity to bring solace in times of darkness. Kate Wakeling
★★★★
Vaughan Williams – Master Musicians Series
Eric Saylor
Oxford University Press 336pp (hb) £22.99
We’ve waited too long for a truly authoritative new Vaughan Williams biography from a leading scholar. Here it is, from the professor of music history at Drake University in Iowa. The sole regret is that Saylor’s clearly exhaustive research couldn’t have been expended on a volume of greater length than the ‘Master Musicians’ brand can allow. That’s life, but one deceptively small example makes the point: Saylor can mention only in passing the possibility that VW’s ‘London’ Symphony could have had HG Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay as a prime (rather than partial) inspiration – an eminently arguable and seriously perception-changing proposition. Whatever, Saylor masterfully embraces the constraints of the ‘Master Musicians’ brief (including the necessity of separating out biography and music) without his highly readable prose ever seeming rushed. New material is expertly woven into familiar narratives – for example, revealing information on the earliest works is integrated into a convincing account of an uncertain young composer finding his feet. Vaughan Williams enthusiasts of all hues will want this; but prepare to be rendered breathless at the great man’s astonishing energy. Andrew Green
★★★★★