A Singularity of Voice

Music for a While by Henry Purcell is one of this country’s musical gems. According to critic Tom Service writing in The Guardian last year (6 Dec ‘10) the second movement of Purcell’s Oedipus (1692) is equable with his song of five years earlier O solitude, my sweetest choice (1687). I do wonder what characteristics music should have to be amongst Service’s gems (would we find Robert Wyatt’s Sight of the Wind?). And yet I don’t disagree with his claim, but hasten to add two other Purcell jewels: the hymn Now that the sun hath veiled his light and the aria The Plaint from The Fairy-Queen. A wistful, melancholy lyricism – what Peter Ackroyd in his book Albion calls ‘plangent sadness’, with its mournful, wave-like sense – unites all of these pieces (perhaps plangent sadness is continuity that links Purcell and Wyatt?).

O solitude, my sweetest choice!

Places devoted to the night,

Remote from tumult and from noise,

How ye my restless thoughts delight!

The twelve-note ground underpinning O Solitude returns again and again for the duration of the performance with rhythmic inevitably. It is a cycle that captures the listener, conspiring with these lyrics that express desire for darkness, isolation and order.

Music for a while

Shall all your cares beguile.

Wond'ring how your pains were eas'd

And disdaining to be pleas'd

Till Alecto free the dead

From their eternal bands,

Till the snakes drop from her head,

And the whip from out her hands.

As in O Solitude, ground bass – this time ascending – is a continuous element around which Music for a while hangs. When heard accompanied by harpsichord the first cycle amplifies its ponderous momentum. Hearing this in my early twenties at the waning of a teen infatuation with post-punk I understood Music for a while to be a proscription of music, if only for a little bit. I was staggered that something so old could sound so modern – it was short at four minutes; it seemed to be about angst and alienation; and most staggeringly of all it was about music, it was ‘meta’. To this day I am impressed by literature, visual art and music that, however meekly, shows self-awareness of its own conditions. There was Brecht, but there was also Music for a while which had, four hundred years earlier, commented on the edifying, consolatory or ameliorative qualities of art. Today O solitude is usually heard on compilations of Purcell songs, tweezered from its original context as the second of four incidental pieces composed for John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus (1692). The contextual detail is instructive; it demonstrates that the affective quality of music was taken seriously earlier than even the Elizabethan era.

The Oedipus story comes from Greek mythology. Alecto referred to in the lyrics is, according to Virgil, one of three minor deities in Greek mythology known as the Erinyes. Meaning literally ‘the avengers’ the Erinyes’s role was to seek vengeance by punishing those that committed a crime. Of the three Erinyes described by Virgil, Alecto is given the role of persecuting those who kill a parent – such as Oedipus. The Erinyes are depicted as having wreathes of snakes for hair with blood that dripped from their eyes. Dryden would have understood the writhing, bleeding, hissing snakes as an image of violent insanity. Where Oedipus is considered to have been a reasonable ruler, free of emotion and prejudice, Alecto is quite the opposite with a mind torn apart by a multitude of voices. In the seventh book of his Politica Aristotle discusses the instructive or cathartic qualities of music. Music could have the effect of creating calm and clarity, building moral character, and introspective contemplation – a tool for restoring reason. If Alecto stands for irrational rage and violence when the snakes drop from her dead the ameliorative qualities of music restore her to order. Music here is a tool for restoring reason.

Music, too, interjects into time, effecting strange transformations of temporality. In the epilogue of his 1932 biography of Purcell, A.K. Holland laments the neglect of his subject, ‘the most professional composer in English musical history’. Misunderstood outside of his century Purcell’s ‘harmonic licenses’ suffered from being treated as ‘faults of grammar, of the occasional aberrations of a man of genius which need correction.’ His compositions, Holland argues, simply fell prey to those with a ‘mania for making “arrangements”’; bass had been unscrupulously altered and the harmonies emasculated. Otherwise it was a matter of selection whereby the least interesting anthems and services were chosen. Combined with a style of singing that usually halves the intended pace, church choirs have managed to prove that Purcell is ‘one of the dullest composers of religious music that ever existed.’ Writing in the early thirties Holland tells us there is no department in which Purcell is performed as a matter of course; nor was there a society (at the time of his writing) devoted to studying and performing him:

The result is that Purcell… is totally unknown to professionals, except in a few songs and perhaps a keyboard piece or two, and is generally regarded by them as a composer of amateurs.

Yet Holland does not despair. He realises other composers too have been written off, treated merely as of historical interest, to later be revived and ritualistically worshipped – in particular Bach and Mozart. Indeed in my edition of 1948 Holland footnotes the passage above, conceding that: ‘The above passage (written in 1932) is perhaps a little rhetorical and exaggerated. It is, of course, less true since the advent of the B.B.C.’s Third Programme.’

It was Music for a while Alfred Deller sang for Michael Tippett, who had been encouraged to listen to the unlikely lay-clerk following a performance of the composer’s Plebs Angelica at Canterbury Cathedral in wartime 1944 (according to music critic Alan Blyth on the sleevenotes of the 1984 Decca Grandi Voci series on Deller it was 1943). In the choir practice room which appeared, as Tippett puts it, ‘not to have been dusted since Orlando Gibbons was there in the seventeenth century’, the centuries ‘rolled back’. Despite the poor arrangement that accompanied Deller Tippett recognised immediately that this was the very voice for which Purcell had written. 'When you sing for me,' Tippett told Deller, 'I shall give you the old English classical name for your voice, which is countertenor’. Until then Deller and those around him had understood the voice as alto. Deftly swift, Tippett situated the voice in a moment of recognition that, by all accounts, launched the career of the first modern countertenor.

In the year following the singer's death in 1979 Tippett recalled in his obituary for the journal Early Music that Deller's first performance as countertenor had been singing the "Esurientes" part of J.S. Bach's Magnificant. Morley College choir, where Tippett was then director of music, was not ready, he felt, to perform Purcell. Nor it seemed were the critics who were so put off by the use of recorders in the Bach that in a subsequent performance of Purcell's Ode for St.Cecilia's Day that section was hidden out of sight. It wasn't however until 1946 that Deller's voice reached a broader general public over the radio airwaves. For the inaugural broadcast of the Third Programme, BBC's national radio network for the arts, he sang Purcell's Come, ye Sons of Art. It's perfectly likely that Deller was one of those reforming voices Chesterton heard on the Third Programme that caused him to revoke his 'rhetorical and exaggerated' statement on the neglect of Purcell.

Demand for the countertenor following this performance was such that it enabled him to take up singing full-time. He left Canterbury cathedral choir to join St. Paul's in 1947 and three years later, in 1950, assembled the Deller Consort. For the following twenty-five years the Consort gave themselves, under the auspices of Deller, to performing and recording historically accurate works of, initially, English Renaissance music and then French, German and Italian music of the Renaissance and earlier. (In A Desert Island Discography of 1970 pianist Glenn Gould writes on Hermit's Choice, a Canadian spin-off radio show based on BBC's Desert Island Discs format. In spite of his 'peerless reputation as the country's most experienced hermit' Gould was never invited to give his selection. This he hopes to rectify by writing the article. Alongside Bruno Maderna's Schoenberg and Karajan's Berlin Philharmonic Sibelius is the Deller Consort's recording for the Archiv label of the hymns and anthem of Orlando Gibbons)... More shortly.