Sounds of Spring
To celebrate BBC Radio 3’s series of spring programmes, Geoff Brown ponders the challenges for composers of bringing the new season to life
Geoff Brown shakes off the winter blues in preparation for Radio 3’s musical celebration of the new season
Imagine you’re a composer living in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s the heart of winter, cold and dark, and you’re under the duvet. The phone rings. You reach out an arm to answer. ‘It’s the BBC here,’ the cheery voice says. ‘Sorry it’s so late,’ – blearily, you try to locate the bedside clock – ‘but we’d love to commission you to write a work to mark the coming of spring. Anything you like. We’ll perform it live on 20 March, the spring equinox, so I hope you can put a spring in your step. How about it?’
How about it indeed? Where would your thinking on the topic begin? After all, the range of spring music in the classical field is so vast: from madrigals to Strauss waltzes, from operettas to sonatas, from Stravinsky’s abrasive Rite of Spring to Christian Sinding’s salon trifle The Rustle of Spring and all the murmurs, dawns, voices and whispers of spring inbetween. In the Pliocene era, our human forebears must have wanted to celebrate nature’s re-awakening with some kind of song and dance, even if it only meant letting rip with a yell or beating a rhythm on a rock. Medieval homo sapiens in 13th-century England expressed the same urge by concocting the springtime round Summer is icumen in, later identified by scholars as the earliest surviving secular composition that could be called a ‘tonal organism’. And now in 2021, after a full year of virus lockdowns, who isn’t panting for classical music and all the arts to experience their own versions of the awakening and renewal associated with spring? Classical music needs spring. Spring needs classical music.
Who isn’t panting for classical music to experience its own spring-like renewal?
So, what would be a composer’s options today? If your thoughts are of the pastoral kind, you might be tempted to build your commissioned work round the two-note call of that traditional harbinger of spring, the cuckoo. The call is usually thought of as a minor third, though happier cuckoos communicating in major thirds aren’t unknown. In his early collection of songs for children, Friday Afternoons, Britten included a two-part song with the lower line entirely devoted to 45 repetitions of the minor version of ‘Cu-ckoo’, the call that gave the bird its name, though 45 cuckoos is surely going too far.
Luckily, Delius showed restraint composing the rhapsodic musings in his orchestral piece
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, when he spends far more time mulling over a Norwegian folk tune, ‘In Ola Valley’, than doing cuckoo imitations with a clarinet. I wonder if that was a moral decision, prompted by disgust at the cuckoo’s awful habit of depositing eggs in other species’ nests to be nurtured by the gullible foster parents at the expense of their own offspring, chucked out of the home by the monstrous chick. If I were a composer I’d give the cuckoo the bird.
Even if you bypass the cuckoo, the spring composer still needs to consider suitable spring colours and instrumentation. Up in Finland, Sibelius limited his hues in his faintly lugubrious tone poem Spring Song, obviously the song of someone with a hangover. But there’s much more unbuttoning further south, especially in France and Italy, with mass twittering in trees and shrubs, usually suggested by bucolic woodwinds or hyperactive, high-flying violins.
Harp arpeggios could be helpful too, the run of notes suggesting leaves sprouting, petals opening. Debussy keeps two harps busy in
‘ Rondes de printemps’ from his orchestral Images, prettily sweeping up and down, tinkling or oscillating. One gauge of the pagan and iconoclastic nature of The Rite of Spring is that there is no place for a harp. Sinuous woodwinds, yes; stomping tutti, of course. But a plink from a harp? Nowhere. There’s also no harp in Copland’s original chamber scoring of his ballet score Appalachian Spring, but that’s understandable, since the title quotation from a Hart Crane poem refers to a water spring, not the season at all.
At the same time, no composer should have to wither under a proscriptive list of instruments to avoid. April is a changeable month, after all, so a wind machine and thunder sheet shouldn’t be ruled out. Going by geographical inferences, Britten should probably not have plastered the alpine tones of a cow horn over the choral fray at the end of his 1949 Spring Symphony, a work whose seed was planted by his love of the Suffolk countryside. There are no mountains in Suffolk, but he went ahead regardless, perhaps thinking that the sound could also indicate the painful birth of spring calves.
Key signatures may be another source of concern for the assiduous spring composer, always assuming that the piece under construction features tonality in the first place. Pairing different keys with different colours and emotions may seem a subjective exercise, though over the centuries that’s never stopped anybody who experiences synesthesia promoting their personal theories. In Scriabin’s key system, A major clearly signified green,
the dominant colour of spring. His fellow Russian Rimsky-korsakov disagreed: A major to him meant something pinkish, like a rose. But he also considered A major the perfect key for songs and opera arias about love, the blooming of which is another feature of spring. All told, A major is worth thinking about.
F major shouldn’t be forgotten, either. Beethoven didn’t himself give his Op. 24 Violin Sonata the nickname of ‘Spring’, but its sunshine spirit can’t be denied. It’s also the key of his Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, a work bursting with nature from start to finish, with cuckoo calls tucked into the second movement and a thunderstorm in the fourth – Beethoven’s version of a light April shower. It’s a pity that the concertos in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons let spring unfold in E major and leave F major for the autumn, but you can’t have everything.
Vivaldi’s concertos bring us towards probably the knottiest considerations for composers, concerning matters of form and point of view. How abstract should the piece be or, indeed, how descriptive? Vivaldi showed that it was possible to tick both boxes by festooning an abstract design with imitative sounds. Spring features quite a crowd, including bagpipes, a babbling brook and a goatherd’s dog, barking on the viola.
Most composers today would probably prefer less literal ways of reflecting the spring spectacle. Several prolific 20th-century figures spent a lifetime conjuring the spirit of spring simply by writing scores bustling with energetic notes dashing over the pages. It’s no surprise that Milhaud in his long career wrote seven works featuring Printemps in the title, though with a catalogue stretching to 443 opus numbers, he might well have written the same amount celebrating poached eggs. I sense a related spring spirit in the jollier works of another voluminous master burbler, Martin . However, a composer’s BBC commission would probably be easier, certainly less tiring, if some strong but simple formal device was located to help in the season’s conjuring. A classic pocket example is offered by April – England, a seven-minute piano piece (later orchestrated) by the British composer John Foulds, who wrote it after breakfast on the morning of the 1926 spring equinox. Dancing fanfares introduce a folksy tune that eventually flattens out into a resemblance of a stately Bachlike chaconne, only for the music to build into an exuberantly joyful tangle. It’s like watching fast-motion footage of a winter tree breaking into spring leaf, then into riotous blossom.
Twenty years later, the spirit of spring surprisingly moved John Cage, that demolisher of musical norms, to concoct a related effect in his score for Merce Cunningham’s 1947 ballet The Seasons, music so laid-back as to be almost transcendental. But you can tell when spring begins. The placid becomes less placid; the lines of sound multiply. Something is growing inside the music even if it only proves to be a mushroom, of which Cage was an avid collector.
Of course, our composer of 2021 could avoid these issues by never moving from the duvet, never answering the BBC’S call. I hope not.
We all need spring joy, whether the music’s a Vivaldian effusion, a Schumann symphony or a charming portrait of a piglet’s average day.