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| President SIR CHARLES MACKERRAS |
Vice-Presidents OLE SCHMIDT HARRY NEWSTONE SIR CHARLES MACKERRAS LIONEL FRIEND MYER FREDMAN DAVID J BROWN JAMES KELLENHER |
To act as an information source about the composer and his music for both the general public and for musicians. In collaboration with the University of Keele, a Havergal Brian Archive has recently been established at the University.
To promote and sponsor live performances and recordings of Brian's music. Piano and song recitals have been given, a major contribution was made towards the first performance of The Tigers, and numerous recordings have been sponsored, including the current series of CDs on the Marco Polo label which is intended to encompass all Brian's extant choral and orchestral music, including the 32 symphonies. The world premiere performance of The Cenci is the Society's most ambitious live event to date.
To advise and assist prospective performers in their choice of works and access to performing materials.
To publish original material on Brian and his music. A bi-monthly Newsletter has been continuously published since 1975, many issues containing authoritative articles on aspects of the composer and his music discussed in no other source. A book about the Gothic Symphony was published in 1978, and the Complete Music for Solo Piano has been reissued in a single hardback volume. The Society is also involved with a series of volumes of Brian's journalism, as well as the continuing publication of his music.
To gather as much information as possible on the whereabouts of Brian's missing scores, most importantly the full score of Prometheus Unbound. As the result of a reward offer made by the Society, the full score of The Tigers was recovered after being missing for 30 or more years.
Currently available CDs, cassettes, and hooks are available to HBS members at discount prices. For membership details, contact:
The Hon. Secretary, The Havergal Brian Society, 5 Eastbury Road, Oxhey, Watford, Herts EN6 lEN, England.
Brian's output comprises a large body of orchestral music including 32 Symphonies; five operas some large-scale choral works; a great many part-songs and solo songs; a small amount of piano music and a few works in other genres - though several pieces, major ones included, are missing only a few of his most important works have been published, notably by Cranz & Co. in th 193Os, then by Musica Viva, and latterly by United Music Publishers; a significant number even now have never been performed, and many have yet to be heard in public. Like that of many composers, his oeuvre can be divided very approximately into three periods The first lasted from before the turn of the century to the first years of World War One. Much of Brian's music from this time is lost, but that which has survived is, generally speaking, characterised by two parallel, contrasting, and often cross-fertilising modes of expression: the first grotesque, sometimes satirical, vein of humour, as in the Engish Suite No.1 and the Comedy Overture Doctor Merryheart; the other a mood of grand seriousness, in works like the orchestral tone poem In Memorium and the choral By the Waters of Babylon and The Vision of Cleopatra.
Between these early works and the post-war compositions of his maturity stands the opera The Tigers (1917-19, orchestrated 1928-29). Drawing upon much from his earlier burlesque vein, its action satirises war, patriotism, soldiering and many other contemporary English targets ill manner unknown in 'serious' music of its time. But a darker dreamworld repeatedly breaks through the nonsensical surface, and the powerful, elegiac, at times nightmarish music of the opera's substantial ballet sequences foreshadows much that was to come in later years.
Although humour never entirely left Brian's music, its manifestation was far less overt from no on. After writing some of his most searchingly expressive songs and part-songs (genres he virtually renounced forthwith), he retamed with a new depth and intensity to his vein of grandeur and seriousness. The work in which he first gave full reign to this became his most famous and notorious - the Gothic Symphony, probably the largest symphony ever composed which eventually gave him his greatest public triumph at its first professional performance 1966, and which was most responsible for the damaging and undeserved reputation he acquired as an eccentric composer of huge and unperformable works. In fact, it is a creation of great seriousness of purpose, in which the inspiration of Gothic architecture, expressed in the text of the Latin Te Deum, combines with elements from the whole history of Western music fro mediaeval plainsong to the 20th century to form a vast and immensely varied musical fresco. The Gothic was a crucial work of Brian's career. Four more symphonies and a violin concerto major works by any standards - followed in the 1930s, and his 'second period' drew to a close with the composition from 1937 to 1944 of his huge setting of Acts 1 and 2 of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. He seems to have regarded this as his masterpiece and the climax of his life's work, but he experienced a renewed onset of creativity in 1948 after four years' silence.
An early fruit of this 'third period', the one-movement Symphony No.8, represented by far his most radical approach to symphonic form at that time. His style, grown to maturity through many years of private exploration, was now vasty different from that of any of the surviving members of his own generation. In the 24 Symphonies which followed No.8 and which, with his four late operas Turandot, The Cenci, Faust and Agamemnon, were by far the most important products of his 'third period', he continued his uniquely wide-ranging exploration of the possibilities of the form, in harmony linear structure and orchestration. In common, however, with most genuinely original artists, this approach seems to have been the natural form of expression for his creative personality, and not a self-conscious imposition. Though he often worked with vestiges of traditional structures, his symphonic language is most often rooted in a highly allusive kind of metamorphosis through developing variation which amounts almost to a musical 'stream of consciousness'. The products of this language are amazingly diverse in their procedures and atmosphere, and they display a trend to ever greater concentration of thought as well as an almost unparalleled capacity for self renewal at the most fundamental creative levels. The music of Brian's 8Os and 90s, therefore, from being a nostalgic swan-song or an old man's trilling, in fact forms the most forward-looking original and satisfiing body of music in his entire output.