Sir Malcolm Arnold
Sep. 24th, 2006 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt seems that every time I check the British papers, someone whose work I enjoy has died.
Sir Malcolm Arnold is described in the headline as a "film composer." Well, yes, he was that. He wrote music for a lot of films, and won the Oscar for the music for The Bridge on the River Kwai. After saying which it is always necessary to add that no, he didn't compose "The Colonel Bogey March" - it was a genuine WW1-era Royal Army marching tune - but he did arrange it and he did put it in the film which made it famous.
My favorite bit of Arnold film music is another march: his clever arrangement of "We Three Kings" as one for Whistle Down the Wind, but mostly I don't care for his film music much as I don't care for old-fashioned Big Hollywood Sound film music generally.
What won Arnold a permanent place in my heart was some of his concert music. He was the composer who first taught me, as an innocent teenage explorer in classical music, that there was such a thing as modern music that didn't sound like cars honking, bees buzzing, or people moving furniture around.
When we lived in Cleveland in my early childhood, there was a classical radio station that used a little bonbon by Edward Elgar as its theme music. My parents liked this piece and bought an LP with it, and for some reason it was one of the few they didn't sell when we moved to California. And so it was there for me to find a few years later when I began my explorations.
On the other side of the LP from all the Elgar was something called "English Dances" by someone named Malcolm Arnold. It had been written in 1950: only twenty years old, practically hot off the presses compared to all the 18th-century stuff I was absorbing at the same time. And it was delightful. Tuneful, fun, and full of strange brass whooping cries that I soon came to realize were Arnold's signature sound. He was an accomplished, colorful orchestrator, and had been an orchestral trumpeter himself, so he was particularly good with the brass.
Arnold's name did not appear in all the books about modern music I was avidly devouring, which were full of crap from Vienna and Darmstadt. (You wouldn't find much about Shostakovich in them either.) Not only that, these books were trying to convince me that tonal, enjoyable music was dead, dead, dead, nobody was writing it any more. I began to realize there was a lot of stuff going on that these books weren't telling me about. Arnold did appear in the Schwann catalog of classical LPs in print, so I began using that as my principal source for finding modern composers. It served me well.
From Schwann I found that Arnold had also written "Scottish Dances". I bought that LP, and found a work of even greater wit. Later on I found "Cornish Dances" too: less witty than spooky and strange. On these LPs were other works by Arnold, especially symphonies, which were serious but with clever bits, and also made good listening. I recommend the Second and Fifth for beginners, especially in the Charles Groves recordings. There are also now CDs with all of Arnold's dance sets on them.
Arnold's best and most cheerful music dates from the 50s and early 60s. After then his previously settled life began to fall apart. There were divorces, frequent relocations, stays in mental facilities, alcoholism, and other unhappy things. As a composer Arnold, bitter at being dismissed by the establishment as a clown, began trying to be the clown who played Hamlet: never a wise move. Then he lost his creative juices, and even his later sets of dances (Irish, Welsh, and Manx) became gnomic and crabbed. For about the last twenty years, as far as I've been able to tell, he's been kind of out of it and hasn't written a note.
So I'll leave you not with that, but with my favorite piece of Arnold wit, from back in the late 50s. For the Hoffnung satirical concerts, he contributed (anonymously) the "Leonore Overture No. 4," a parody of Beethoven's Leonore No. 3 that is the funniest purely musical (as opposed to music with words) satire I've ever heard, better than anything of the kind by PDQ Bach. You need to know the original, but if you do this is a hoot and a half, as we used to say in those days.
Also for the Hoffnungs, Arnold wrote a concerto for vacuum cleaners. The man was inexhaustible.
Sir Malcolm Arnold is described in the headline as a "film composer." Well, yes, he was that. He wrote music for a lot of films, and won the Oscar for the music for The Bridge on the River Kwai. After saying which it is always necessary to add that no, he didn't compose "The Colonel Bogey March" - it was a genuine WW1-era Royal Army marching tune - but he did arrange it and he did put it in the film which made it famous.
My favorite bit of Arnold film music is another march: his clever arrangement of "We Three Kings" as one for Whistle Down the Wind, but mostly I don't care for his film music much as I don't care for old-fashioned Big Hollywood Sound film music generally.
What won Arnold a permanent place in my heart was some of his concert music. He was the composer who first taught me, as an innocent teenage explorer in classical music, that there was such a thing as modern music that didn't sound like cars honking, bees buzzing, or people moving furniture around.
When we lived in Cleveland in my early childhood, there was a classical radio station that used a little bonbon by Edward Elgar as its theme music. My parents liked this piece and bought an LP with it, and for some reason it was one of the few they didn't sell when we moved to California. And so it was there for me to find a few years later when I began my explorations.
On the other side of the LP from all the Elgar was something called "English Dances" by someone named Malcolm Arnold. It had been written in 1950: only twenty years old, practically hot off the presses compared to all the 18th-century stuff I was absorbing at the same time. And it was delightful. Tuneful, fun, and full of strange brass whooping cries that I soon came to realize were Arnold's signature sound. He was an accomplished, colorful orchestrator, and had been an orchestral trumpeter himself, so he was particularly good with the brass.
Arnold's name did not appear in all the books about modern music I was avidly devouring, which were full of crap from Vienna and Darmstadt. (You wouldn't find much about Shostakovich in them either.) Not only that, these books were trying to convince me that tonal, enjoyable music was dead, dead, dead, nobody was writing it any more. I began to realize there was a lot of stuff going on that these books weren't telling me about. Arnold did appear in the Schwann catalog of classical LPs in print, so I began using that as my principal source for finding modern composers. It served me well.
From Schwann I found that Arnold had also written "Scottish Dances". I bought that LP, and found a work of even greater wit. Later on I found "Cornish Dances" too: less witty than spooky and strange. On these LPs were other works by Arnold, especially symphonies, which were serious but with clever bits, and also made good listening. I recommend the Second and Fifth for beginners, especially in the Charles Groves recordings. There are also now CDs with all of Arnold's dance sets on them.
Arnold's best and most cheerful music dates from the 50s and early 60s. After then his previously settled life began to fall apart. There were divorces, frequent relocations, stays in mental facilities, alcoholism, and other unhappy things. As a composer Arnold, bitter at being dismissed by the establishment as a clown, began trying to be the clown who played Hamlet: never a wise move. Then he lost his creative juices, and even his later sets of dances (Irish, Welsh, and Manx) became gnomic and crabbed. For about the last twenty years, as far as I've been able to tell, he's been kind of out of it and hasn't written a note.
So I'll leave you not with that, but with my favorite piece of Arnold wit, from back in the late 50s. For the Hoffnung satirical concerts, he contributed (anonymously) the "Leonore Overture No. 4," a parody of Beethoven's Leonore No. 3 that is the funniest purely musical (as opposed to music with words) satire I've ever heard, better than anything of the kind by PDQ Bach. You need to know the original, but if you do this is a hoot and a half, as we used to say in those days.
Also for the Hoffnungs, Arnold wrote a concerto for vacuum cleaners. The man was inexhaustible.
