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Peter Warlock
Peter Warlock was a pseudonym of Philip Arnold Heseltine (October 30, 1894 - December 17, 1930), an Anglo-Welsh composer and music critic. Although he used his own name when writing as a music critic, he composed under the pseudonym "Peter Warlock" and is now better known by this name.
Life Philip Heseltine was born in London and lost his father as a child. His mother remarried and returned to her native Wales, living at at Cefn Bryntalch Hall, Abermule, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the family home of her second husband, Walter Buckley Jones. Philip's education was mainly classical, including studies at Eton College, at Christ Church, Oxford (for one year), and at University College London (one term). In music, he was mostly self-taught, studying composition on his own from the works of composers he admired, notably Frederick Delius, Roger Quilter and Bernard van Dieren. Nevertheless, one of teachers at Eton, Colin Taylor, had introduced him to some of the modern masters which made a marked impression on him. He was also strongly influenced by Elizabethan music and poetry as well as by Celtic culture (he studied the Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Manx, and Breton languages). It was the move to Wales, occasioned by his mother's remarriage, that was the spark for this; only the working classes spoke Welsh but Philip, never one to shy away from the unconventional, set about learning it with vigour. Heseltine wrote his earliest mature compositions, published to critical acclaim under the newly adopted pseudonym Peter Warlock, following his sojourn in Ireland of 1917-1918. They were followed by a period of concentration on musical journalism; for a while, he was the editor of the musical magazine The Sackbut. His most prolific period, both as a composer and author, was in the early 1920s when he withdrew from the financial and social pressures of London to his mother's and stepfather's house, "Cefn Bryntalch", in Montgomeryshire, mid-Wales, where he wrote some of his finest songs, finally completing his song-cycle The Curlew to poems by W. B. Yeats. During this period he also met Bartók, who visited him while returning from a concert in Aberystwyth arranged by Professor Walford Davies, and whose influence can perhaps be seen in The Curlew. Between 1925 and 1929, following a quiet period, Warlock and his colleague E. J. Moeran led a wild, boozy life in Eynsford, Kent, having to deal with the local police more than once. For Warlock, however, this was one of the most fruitful periods of his life, but by the end of the 1920s his creativity was on the decrease and he had to support himself with music criticism again. He was suffering from severe depression, but whether his death from gas poisoning at the age of 36 was suicide or an accident is not known for certain. He put his cat out of the room before he died, perhaps to spare it. An intriguing figure, Warlock has served to inspire several characters in English-language literature, among them: Coleman in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay (1923), Roy Hartle in Osbert Sitwell's Those Were the Days (1938), Giles Revelstoke in Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958) and Maclintick in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960) by Anthony Powell. D. H. Lawrence's use of Warlock as the model for Julius Halliday in novel Women in Love (1920) led to a threat of a lawsuit, followed by an out of court settlement. His name is surrounded by rumours of involvement with the occult, an interest which he shared with others in the bohemian world of the early 20th century - for example the novelist Mary Butts asserted that it was Warlock who initially introduced her to these subjects. Other less conventional aspects of Peter Warlock's life include experimentation with cannabis tincture, a gift for the composition of obscene limericks and a marked interest in flagellation. His life was the basis of a highly fictionalized film entitled Voices From a Locked Room. The film starred Jeremy Northam and depicted Warlock as having multiple personality disorder.
Works Warlock's compositions are nearly all songs and most of these are for solo voice and piano. There is a smaller, but still significant, number of pieces for voices - choral songs - although a few of these are arrangements of his solo songs. He wrote little instrumental music, although the Capriol (October 1926) is probably his best-known work and exists in versions for string orchestra, full orchestra and piano duet. (There are arrangements for other combinations but these are not by Warlock himself.) His only composition for solo piano is a set of arrangements of Celtic melodies, the "Folk-song preludes". He had a deep affinity for poetry, especially that of Yeats and his friends Robert Nichols and Bruce Blunt (1899-1957), and he always chose texts of high artistic value, many of them from the Middle Ages, as basis for his songs. Many people consider his greatest work to be the song-cycle "The Curlew", for tenor and chamber ensemble, in which he sets four linked poems by Yeats. It is certainly his most substantial piece and was written over a long period of time - some seven years - taking in many stylistic changes along the way from the neo-Delianism of "The lover mourns for the loss of love" to sections within the longest song, "The withering of the boughs" that suggest Bartók and Schoenberg as influences before achieving a more idiosyncratic, modal, and genuinely Warlockian vocabulary. Warlock is also known for his many carols, such as Adam Lay Ybounden, Tyrley Tyrlow, and Bethlehem Down, the last a setting of words by Blunt. Warlock's musical tastes were wide, from Renaissance music to Bartók. In his own works, we hear a development from emulation of the Victorian and Edwardian drawing-room style to a more contrapuntal, strongly personal idiom characterised by the relationship between modal lines and a distinctive palette of chords. He was unusual amongst composers of his generation in being largely unaffected by the folksong movement, either as an arranger (the above-named piano pieces being an exception) or a composer. He only wrote one folksong-oriented work, the cycle "Lilligay" and it might be more appropriate to look to Bartók as an influence here rather than any paradigms from his own country. Apart from original works, Warlock edited and transcribed many lute songs by Elizabethan and Jacobean composers in addition to music by Purcell and other Baroque composers. He also did much to promote the music of Delius, especially by organizing the successful Delius Festival of 1929 with Thomas Beecham. He wrote the first biography of Delius as well as, with Cecil Gray, a book about Carlo Gesualdo. His book on "The English ayre" was a groundbreaking study but he also wrote about contemporary music including an article that was probably the first substantial study in English of the music of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1925, Warlock rediscovered the music of sixteenth century composer Thomas Whythorne, releasing a book of his compositions and poetry. Warlock also edited, under the pseudonym 'Rab Noolas' (to be read backwards), an anthology on drinking 'for the delectation of serious topers', entitled 'Merry-Go-Down' (Mandrake Press, c. 1930).
Selected Bibliography
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Warlock
This Recording - Technical assessment Original surface quality: Quite clean, though with a tendency to noticable swish, especially during the first side. Other notes: As NGS recordings and pressing go, this was a technical success. Was it planned prior to Warlock's Death, just three months before the recording took place? If not, then this recording, and the two short Warlock songs which accompanied it on the original 78rpm issue, make a fitting end both to the Peter Warlock story and to the National Gramophonic Society.
National Gramophonic Society recordings- a technical perspective
The vast majority of the original discs came from Gramophone magazine's own near-mint collection, carefully preserved in the EMI vaults at Hayes and largely unplayed for many decades. Where a choice of discs was present, naturally the very best sides were chosen for transfer, which took place at Pristine Audio over the spring, summer and autumn of 2006. Discs were carefully cleaned and a choice of custom-made stylii were available to achieve the optimum replay possible. Transfers were made at 24-bit resolution and then archived in 32-bit sound. Some initial restorations were carried out at the time of transfer, but all of the recordings presented here have been newly XR-remastered, starting in February 2008, directly from those high-quality transfers. Without the benefits of modern audio restoration technologies, it is safe to say that a good number of the Society's output would be beyond the listening tolerance of all but the most devoted and dedicated music-lover. Of the 165 numbered discs it is not until we reach discs 103-4 (the Malipiero String Quartet No. 2) that something truly remarkable happens sonically, a result of switching allegiances to the Columbia Record Company for recording and pressing duties. Prior to this the results are variable in the extreme - and the problems don't really stop after disc 104 either - we are still talking about the early days of electrical recording, and it seems clear from this history of the Society that money was tight. But for the 1920's listener, these matters would surely have been secondary to being able to hear any of these works at all, as the National Gramophonic Society's remit was to record music that had been ignored by the other record companies. The challenge for the 21st Century therefore is to render these recordings in such a way as to be faithful to the musicians as well as sparing the listener too much pain. I've tried to strike a careful balance between noise reduction and the dangers of over-processing and deadening the sound which, in some cases, may leave some of the blemishes more obvious than you might be used to hearing - if this is the case in any particular recording, I can only respond with "well you should have heard it before I started work on it!" There are many fine recording here, and I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have. Andrew Rose, March 2008
The National Gramophonic Society The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to promote music which was ignored by major music companies. The Society was established for the recording and publication by subscription of classical music, principally chamber music, which was of limited circulation. Prominent on the committee for the selection of material was Walter Willson Cobbett, who was joined by Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), W. R. Anderson, Alec Robinson, Peter Latham and Compton MacKenzie. Cobbett (b 1847), a chamber-music specialist, had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works, prizes won variously by William Yeates Hurlestone (1876-1906, pianist) (1905), Frank Bridge (1908), John Ireland (1909), J. Cliffe Forrester (1916), H. Waldo Warner (viola of the London Quartet) (1916), York Bowen (1918) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1919). In 1921 he was offering further awards to Royal Academy and Royal College of Music graduates, and commissioned many new chamber works from English composers. The National Gramophonic Society was therefore an expression of this impetus to the development of the taste for modern chamber music. The records, issued on 12-inch 78rpm (or in some cases 80rpm) discs with distinctive yellow labels, included the first-ever recordings of familiar works such as the C major quintet of Schubert and Brahms's clarinet quintet, along with pieces (then relatively little known) by Henry Purcell, Vivaldi and Mozart. The organization also helped several living composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Peter Warlock (first recording of The Curlew), Eugene Goossens, Arnold Schönberg (original chamber version of Verklärte Nacht) and Sir Edward Elgar to gain greater recognition for their works. The repertoire consisted largely of chamber music, featuring the Spencer Dyke Quartet and the International String Quartet, but included some works for small orchestra and a few vocal items. Musicians who took part included John Barbirolli (as both cellist and conductor), the clarinettists Charles Draper and Frederick Thurston, the oboeist Leon Goossens, the violinist Adila Fachiri, and the pianists Donald Francis Tovey, Harold Craxton, Kathleen Long and Ethel Bartlett. The NGS ceased operations in 1931. Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gramophonic_Society
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