Incredible talents

Think you know your composers? Think again. As a festive treat, Duncan McCoshan invites you to meet five geniuses that history has left out in the cold

Duncan Mccoshan uncovers six unbelievable composers, forgotten in the mists of time

We all know who the titans of classical music are. But for every ‘big cat’ there exists a thousand domesticated moggies. Who were they, these whippersnappers of the stave, these half-pint Puccinis and bantam Beethovens? They are a group of composers unknown even to Grove’s Dictionary of Music – shadowy figures lost in the dusky recesses of time. However, they are not completely enveloped in darkness, and it has been possible to sketch them in a little detail – largely by holding up a candle and squinting a lot. Manuscripts have been uncovered in dusty vaults, drawers have been rifled, archivists from Avignon to Murmansk have been buttered up, and a tentative picture of a handful of these figures emerges...

Frank Barnstaple (1873-1939)

Frank Barnstaple was born to not entirely respectable lower-middle-class parents who ran a small taxidermy business in Chipping Camden. The peculiar atmosphere of deceased fauna made a deep impression on the young, and acutely sensitive, Barnstaple who later wrote to composer Mathers Colclough that ‘the very air was redolent of inanimation’ (see Stuffed badgers are my muse: the letters of Frank Barnstaple). This inanimation would lead to a static quality in his own music.

From a disused workshop just off the High Street, Barnstaple first learnt to make music on his mother’s dilapidated harmonium, an instrument that sat between a pair of stuffed gazelle: ‘Those stuffed ruminants were my first audience, their glassy, indifferent stare haunting my every effort at composition.’

His father was of a morbid disposition but his mother was vivacious and musical. Frank grew up with both parental traits, vivacity inevitably giving ground to morbidity in later life. His mother would play hymns on the harmonium and snatches of folk songs, performing with ‘a splayfingered intensity that bordered on the demonic – like Scriabin in a frock’. And when the young Frank showed an aptitude on the instrument, she threw all of her considerable drive and ambition into nurturing his talent. He took lessons, played in the town band and church and started composing. His first piece clearly bore the stamp of the family business – it was entitled Adagio for stuffed marmoset and wind ensemble – and was premiered at the Chorlton-cum-hardy Festival in 1892. Frank was just 19. The critics were just confused. A visit to Paris followed and his quivering spirit was ravished by the beguiling enchantments of French music.

His next piece, Des peluches (‘The stuffed animals’), subtitled ‘a jeu d’esprit for bicycle bell, a brace of pheasant and a pensive shrew’, brought him to the attention of Harcombe Smint, music critic for the Evesham Gazette, who declared that ‘this son of the Cotswolds is our very own Erik Satie!’

But success did not follow and he drifted into obscurity, composing in a shabby potting shed in Deptford. His work became increasingly morbid and static, resulting in his extraordinary final composition, the unsettling Sarabande for a dead otter.

‘This son of the Cotswolds is our very own Erik Satie!’

Recommended recording: Inanimate Spaniels: The Music of Frank Barnstaple

The Matlock Players/horace Wainscot Otter Music 2465

Osip Serafimovich Gulovsky (1834-69)

Born in Ekaterinburg to a father obsessed by the Byzantine machinations of his job in the Tsarist bureaucratic service (the Department of Samovar Permits) and a mother who spent her days reclining on an ottoman, drinking kvass and recalling the days of Napoleon’s invasion, OS Gulovsky overcame every obstacle in his path to becoming one of Russia’s most forgotten composers. Neglected by his parents, he found comfort in the family piano. On discovering the folk tune Prekrasnyy troika, prekrasnyy malen’ kiy troika (‘Lovely troika, lovely little troika’) he would play it for hours on end. The servants complained. Neighbours complained. Passing serfs complained. Driven to distraction, his parents decided on drastic action: the piano must go… along with Osip. Both were given away to the Duchess Klatkinsky, a distant relative.

The Duchess was under the spell of her piano teacher, the magnetic but despotic YY Dologub. His uncompromising and outlandish methods were most singular: strength was built up by playing Bach’s Art of Fugue with rashers of bacon wrapped around the fingers, rigidity of posture was maintained by executing Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata while balancing a samovar on the head. The young Gulovsky made great strides with composition: etudes, mazurkas, waltzes, ballades and scherzos all gushed from his pen (‘All of them of the most startling mediocrity’, was Glinka’s stark opinion). And then, after a meeting with Balakirev in 1866, he attempted larger orchestral pieces that showed a penchant for insistent rhythms, cymbals and the melancholic nasal meanderings of the cor anglais. The nationalistic feelings that permeated Balakirev’s compositions also imbued much of Gulovsky’s own work, notably in such pieces as Prelude written on the banks of the extraordinarily beautiful Iset River that flows through the magnificent city of Ekaterinburg

(Op. 6) and the symphonic poem The bigness of the steppe fills the heart with longings indescribable (Op. 19). But fellow composers were harsh in their judgements: ‘Trash. Not so much compositions as compost-itions,’ Borodin punned clunkingly.

Things turned nasty in the winter of 1869 when, having been drinking heavily in a St Petersburg tavern, Gulovsky became involved in a brawl with the group of composers known as The Five: Balakirev was bashed with a balalaika, Borodin punched in the mouth, Cui kicked in the shin, Rimskykorsakov bitten on the elbow and Musorgsky put in a head lock. Gulovsky fled, but as he sped through the forests east of the city his troika was overtaken by wolves. The next morning his remains were discovered by a gamekeeper of the Duchess Klatkinsy – his severed right hand clutching a set of variations on ‘Lovely troika, lovely little troika’. Recommended recording: The Soulfulness of our Great Emptinesses and other works

Ekaterinburg Philharmonic/evgeny Minsky Russkiphonic 456 654

Theophilus Frescobaldus Humdrum (1685-1774)

Born in Lübeck. His father was an itinerant organ-grinder who, in 1690, lost both arms in a game of cards. Thereafter he turned the handle of the organ with the aid of a set of sturdy cork dentures and took to the bottle. Theophilus helped his father and was known as ‘Die Affenleierkasten’ (‘the organ grinder’s monkey’). The pennies that he picked up out of the gutter were spent on music lessons. He was beaten regularly with a crumhorn and it was this, he said, that gave him his remarkable feeling for rhythm. One day, with old Humdrum slumped in a drunken stupor, the Margrave of Bad Klumpen happened to pass. Seizing the moment, Theophilus started to play a set of variations on the Bad Klumpen national anthem ‘Gott, gib uns eine gute Ernte von Ruben’ (‘God, give us a good harvest of turnips’). The Margrave was so taken with it that he made him Kapellmeister on the spot, with the stipend of 90 pfennigs a week and all the turnips he could eat. Humdrum’s first commission was a military piece – a rousing march tune for the Margrave’s beloved

Pottes made a name for himself, ‘blowing with great gusto’

Guard. But the Margrave laid down one unusual stricture: it was to be a solo piece, as his mistress, Violenza dalla Piccolla, a Milanese courtesan with a fondness for the bassoon, was to have a starring role at the head of the Guard as it went into battle. Working at white heat, Humdrum produced his masterpiece: ‘Sieg, Sieg, bringt das Fagott uns den Sieg!’ (‘Victory, victory, the bassoon will bring us victory!’). It was premiered at the battle of Stocklesdorf (3 June 1702), during the Fourteenth War of the Wigs. The Margrave, with Humdrum at his side, watched as the morning mists rolled away and the Guard advanced. At its head was Violenza, accoutred with a set of huge wings – the wings of Victory. Within 40 paces of enemy lines, alas, her cadenza was cut short by a withering fire. And with it went the fortunes of Theophilus Frescobaldus Humdrum.

Sacked, he spent the rest of his life writing hack pieces for minor European royalty, his gifts diminishing as his patrons grew shabbier. His later career has been called ‘the longest diminuendo in Baroque music’. Recommended recording: Coffee Tafelmusik from the Court at Bad Klumpen The Assembly of Wind/heinrich Pfutt

Deutschenhistorischeschalplatten 222

Melchizedek Pottes (1593-1653)

‘His giftes at Musicke outshone the very sunne/without his heaven-sent tinkling what would we all have done?’ So wrote the poet Lemastus Porridge, a lifelong friend of Melchizedek Pottes. The only son of Devonshire ‘small gentry’, Pottes was encouraged by his indulgent parents from an early age: at four he was adept on the sackbut (and took pleasure in disturbing fishermen ‘with great rasping puffs’), though his ‘trew delight’ was to play on the virginals.

Falling out of a tree while practising the dulcimer resulted in a blow to the head, a new-found ability to extemporise, and the urge to play ‘for the sheepe of the fields and the birdes of the air’. And so servants would lumber across the water meadows carrying the virginals, Pottes trotting behind carrying his ‘playing stoole’. Here he would sit and improvise melodies. The sheep were clearly beguiled, ‘for they didst form a circle around the young master whilst he didst play most divertingly; all the whiles looking up at the sky as if for Divine Inspiration’. His first known composition, the Pavan for a Milke White Ewe, is touched with the flights of fancy and exquisite melancholy that mark so much of his work. Pottes now passes into obscurity before appearing in the records of Llandaff Cathedral as ‘that most eccentrique master of Musicke mister Potes [sic]’. The Civil War saw the cathedral sacked by Parliamentarian troops in 1647 and, outraged,

Pottes offered himself to the monarchist cause. Appointed ‘sacqueboutier Royall’ of the Prince’s navy, he was present at various ‘sea brawles’, making a name for himself ‘hanging in the very rigging and Blowing alltimes with great gusto’. From this period date his Begone, foul Roundheads, begone!, Come sackbutt, Puff away yon naughty rebells!, and Blow, blow ye brassy braggart.

Deeply disturbed by the turmoil of his times (‘This Warre hath dealt me many hard knockes’), he retired to Devon and sequestered himself at the battered family seat. He seems to have written little music, but there is one final piece, the sprightly and deeply affecting Galliard for a long wool sheep.

Sometimes he could be seen sitting in the meadows, once again playing the virginals to a bemused f lock. Recommended recording: Musicke doth Delight Mine Lugholes: pieces for sackbutt and virginals.

The Consort of Scrapey Tunefullness/mark Priggins

Agnus Pro Cena 969999

Jean-jacques Sonneur (1820-44)

As citizens of Paris fled the Place de la Concord during a rainstorm in the autumn of 1841, one figure stood alone staring at a cow. This was a moment of epiphany for Jean-jacques Sonneur, without doubt the shortest composer in 1840s France (‘five foot four – and that was standing on a piano stool!’, jested the Belgian tuba virtuoso Guillaume Plonck). Sonneur was a struggling composer writing reams of predictable salon music; but that day on the Place he was ‘thunderstruck by the sound of a cow bell – its dull tinkle muffled by the rain. Such a simple sound! But it gave me a frisson of unimagined delight’. Sonneur persuaded the dairyman to sell his beast and it became ‘La vache d’inspiration’ (‘The inspirational cow’). Ever the Anglophile, he named her Buttercup.

Rushing home, Sonneur managed to get the cow up eight flights of creaky stairs and into the confined space of his garret. While Buttercup helped herself to the contents of his window box, Sonneur started to pen some of the most inspired music of the entire 19th century – but entirely for cow bells. Cow bells of all shapes and sizes. And only cow bells. But who cannot admit to a tingle of excitement on hearing the opening bars of the

Prelude for a herd of Friesians or the closing passages of the Vaches dans un brouillard?

These works are on a chamber scale, but before long Sonneur was composing symphonies, tone poems and opera. He showed the score of his one-act opera

Buttercup: un opéra pour troupe au laitier (Buttercup: an opera for dairy herd) to

Berlioz, who admired its intricate scoring but said that he could not help – although he did place an order for three pints of milk. Dejected but determined, Sonneur became set on the idea of a move to Switzerland: home of the cow bell. In the autumn of 1844 he and Buttercup travelled on foot, crossing the border during a snowstorm – a moment that inspired his strikingly impressionistic

Neige, passe montagne et mamelles gelées (Snow, mountain pass and frozen udders), a work later much admired by Mahler.

Cow and owner were impoverished but happy: while Buttercup chewed the cud, Sonneur hunkered down on his milking stool and composed. And then tragedy struck.

On 9 May 1844, Buttercup was approached by an amorous bull. The composer intervened. There were words and snorts, a mêlée of hooves and Gallic epithets, and Sonneur was gored to death. A simple granite cow bell marks the spot where he fell.

Recommended recording:

Les vaches et les cloches

The Campanologists of Carcassonne, dir. farmer Gaston Tintement Suite Moosique 345