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Singapore Conference Paper - February 2014  

 

Sounds from the trenches: Australian composers and the Great War

Artistic impressions of the Great War by seminal Australian painters and poets such as Arthur

Streeton and Henry Lawson, have long served as poignant reminders of Australia’s tragic

wartime history. The same level of engagement with the war, however, is not apparent within

Australia’s classical music heritage. Given the acknowledged importance of the First World

War upon the development of Australian society and identity, surprisingly few Australian

composers have written music that grapples with our wartime past.

One reason for this apparent lack of compositional engagement with the war could be the

difficulty in constructing a musical language that captures life in the trenches; the terror and

chaos, the camaraderie, and the grief. This paper will examine works by a number of

Australian composers, both contemporary to the War and more recent, that have used the

Great War as a point of reference for their creative output. By way of doing this, I will

discuss the ongoing development of my own compositional procedures as I create musical

works imbued with my family’s connection to World War One. I have specifically

concentrated on ‘art music’; I’m aware of research into Australian popular music of World

War One, and compositions for ensembles such as brass bands. These works are outside the

scope of this investigation.

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On April 23rd, 1915, two days before the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli, the English poet

Rupert Brooke succumbed to septicaemia brought on by an infected mosquito bite, and died

aboard a French hospital ship moored in the Aegean Sea. Brooke and a group of friends,

including Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly, had volunteered for the Royal

Naval Reserve at the outbreak of the war. Brooke’s body was buried in an olive grove on the

island of Skyros. Kelly – affectionately known as ‘Cleg’ to his friends – stayed behind with

some others close to Brooke and built a funeral cairn over his grave. Kelly felt Brooke’s

death heavily. He later noted in his diary: ‘For the whole day I was oppressed with the sense

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of loss…[before] the sense of tragedy gave place to a sense of passionless beauty…’1 Kelly

composed a homage to his literary friend – Elegy for String Orchestra; In Memoriam Rupert

Brooke – two months later in Alexandria, whilst recuperating from wounds sustained at

Gallipoli.

The depth of Kelly’s musical eulogy was immediately recognized as ‘no mere expression of

personal grief or loss, but, a symbol, rather, of the continuity of life…’2 More recently it has

been described as ‘a haunting memorial to both Brooke and to the losses sustained in the

Dardanelles Campaign’.3

The power of the work lies in its simple beauty. Kelly begins the work with a short

unadorned melody in the D Dorian mode. It is built entirely around stepwise motion, save for

two consecutive leaps; a minor third and perfect fourth.

Fig. 1

Within this motive Kelly lays out his compositional materials for the piece, and provides a

blueprint for their intended affect. Looking back upon Kelly’s diary entry, the ‘passionless

beauty’ that he refers to is implied in the stepwise movement that is heard in many of the

short phrases prescribed to the strings, often in rhythmic unison. By contrast, Kelly

emphasizes his grief – his ‘sense of loss’ – through the expansion of the initial leap of a

fourth to a perfect fifth. Beginning at bar 30 and continuing through to bar 50, this short

gesture begins with an ascending fifth, evoking a cry of despair before returning to the

tranquility – and futility – of stepwise motion and a descending minor third.

                                                                                                               1  F.  S.  Kelly,  Race  against  time  :  the  diaries  of  F.S.  Kelly  /  selected,  edited  and  introduced  by  Thérèse  Radic,  ed.  Thérèse  Radic  (Canberra:  National  Library  of  Australia,  2004).  p.  382.  2  John  Buchan,  ed.  Balliol  College  War  Memorial  Book  1914-­‐1919,  vol.  1  (Oxford:  Balliol  College,  1924).  3  Frederick  Septimus  Kelly,  Music  from  the  Great  War,  ed.  Bruce  Steele  and  Richard  Divall,  Limited  to  100  copies:  1st  ed.  (Melbourne:  Marshall-­‐Hall  Trust,  2005).  

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Fig. 2

Frederick Kelly remained at Gallipoli until the conclusion of the campaign, winning the

Distinguished Service Cross for bravery and a promotion to the rank of Lieutenant. He was

transferred to France in May 1916, commanding B Company of the Hood Battalion. Kelly

was killed on November 13th, during the final days of the Somme, leading an attack on a

machine-gun post at Beaucourt-sur-Ancre, He composed other music whilst in active service;

indeed he left behind quite a number of unfinished chamber and orchestral pieces, including a

Sonata in F minor that received its first publication in 2005.4 These works reflect no overt

commentary on Kelly’s war involvement, and are ‘essentially conformist’5 in style.

Can Australia claim Cleg Kelly as its great wartime composer in the manner that England

reveres Elgar or Vaughan Williams? Probably not: his diaries reinforce the fact that he was

firmly ensconced within British society, and did not demonstrate any apparent desire to

highlight his Australian heritage. Unlike the more famous Percy Grainger who ‘saw himself

as an Australian…[and] an outsider’6, Frederick Kelly enjoyed the trappings of a comfortable

English life. Furthermore, his compositions reflect a conservative musical mind that was

wary of the modernism of continental composers such as Debussy. It is therefore reasonable

to question, in the words of musicologist Glenn Watkins, ‘where is the war?’7 when

examining Kelly’s small oeuvre.

Yet in his defence, Eric Saylor’s study of English ‘pastoral’ music by Elgar and Vaughan

Williams allows Kelly’s Elegy to be aligned with a broader musical movement that he was

surely influenced by. Saylor maintains that pastoral music contemporaneous to the war                                                                                                                4  Ibid.  p.  26.    5  Rhian  Davies,  "Kelly,  Frederick  Septimus,"  in  Grove  Music  Online.  6  Kelly,  Race  against  time  :  the  diaries  of  F.S.  Kelly  /  selected,  edited  and  introduced  by  Thérèse  Radic.,  p.  11  7  Glenn  Watkins,  Proof  through  the  Night  :  Music  and  the  Great  War    (Berkeley:  University  of  California  Press,  2002).  p  7.    

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modified ‘its conventional signifiers in ways that were relevant to contemporary culture…and

therefore exemplif[ied]… pastoralism’s engagement with modernity’8. Kelly’s use of modal

harmony, a narrow dynamic palette and lyrical melodic gestures in the Elegy indicate that

whilst he was not looking to the ‘High’ modernism of Europe, he was still hoping to achieve

a contemporary work that would ‘evoke the unsettling stillness war leaves in its wake – the

barren fields [and] the silent dead’.9

The decades following the war saw the creation of a small number of ‘art music’

compositions that dealt with the war. Henry Tate’s 1929 solo piano piece The Australian

examined a number of perspectives on the war, in various movements with titles such as The

Mother, Youth’s Unrest, Surge and Spindrift. Tate ended the work with a choir hidden

offstage, singing an a cappella chorale entitled Gallipoli Threnody.10 In 1931 the ANZAC

Fellowship of Women established the ANZAC Festival Committee to ‘emphasise the value

of the Arts in helping to foster the ANZAC tradition’.11 A competition was run as part of the

festival, which included, amongst others, a prize for the best musical setting, for voice or

voices, of an original poem about ANZAC history. The competition ran from 1931 to 1941,

and was reinstated in 1950. The standard of the competition winners was varied, however

when the prize was awarded for the final time in 1957, Miriam Hyde, rapidly becoming one

of Australia’s most important composers, had won it three times throughout the 1950s with a

series of lyrical art songs.

Martin Mather’s large-scale work ANZAC Requiem, composed in 1967 and premiered in

1976, was the first real attempt by a composer since Henry Tate to deal with the war in an

extended fashion, with large forces. Following bravely in the footsteps of Britten’s 1961

extraordinary War Requiem, Mather’s composition was inspired by ‘the notion that a new

image for Anzacs had been long overdue in the arts’.12 His work suffered the unfortunate fate

of being composed at the height of the Vietnam conflict, at a time when the ANZAC tradition                                                                                                                8  Eric  Saylor,  ""It's  Not  Lambkins  Frisking  At  All":  English  Pastoral  Music  and  the  Great  War,"  The  Musical  Quarterly  91,  no.  1-­‐2  (2008).  p.  45.    9  Ibid.  p  50.    10  Henry  Tate,  The  Australian:  cycle  for  piano  solo,  ed.  Richard  Divall,  unpublished  ed.  (Canberra:  National  Library  of  Australia,  19-­‐?).  11  "Trove:  ANZAC  Fellowship  of  Women,"  National  Library  of  Australia,  http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-­‐468893.  12  "Martin  Mather:  Represented  Artist,"  Australian  Music  Centre,  http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/mather-­‐martin.  

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was perceived as being at odds with a modernizing Australia. In Australian classical music,

composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Larry Sitsky and Richard Meale were defining a new set

of aesthetics and creating a fresh sonic landscape. Redeploying the question of ‘where is the

war?’, Mather was criticized for being anachronistic. His late-Romantic compositional

language utilized ‘a musical idiom that died with World War 1’13. How could he ‘approach

the dislocation of war in the comfortably secure idiom of a past era?’14 And whilst it was

acknowledged that the ANZAC Requiem displayed some compositional technique – albeit

unfashionable and antiquated – it was suggested that the texture of the work was ‘so full that

the detail was lost’15 and could be improved by ‘cutting out many notes on many pages’.16

Composed thirty-two years later, Helen Gifford’s Choral Scenes: the Western Front, World

War 1 takes a starkly different approach to Mather. Gifford utilizes a tightly controlled

compositional vocabulary to underscore with pathos and poignancy the various war texts

heard in the work. Written for speaker, choir and 10 instrumentalists, it is arguably the finest

example to date of an extended Australian work that deals with World War One. Gifford’s

background as a theatre composer strengthens the dramatic tension she develops throughout

the piece. Her use of a minimal, almost barren, texture punctuated by stark dissonant gestures

and subito dynamic changes achieve a powerful emotional affect, displaying ‘Gifford’s skills

in text setting and her profound connection with the Great War’.17

The scoring of Charles Vildrac’s Reléve, the twelfth movement of her work, reveals the

composer’s astute understanding of text-music interplay. The poem describes the anxiety and

anticipation of soldiers waiting to be relieved of their duty in the trenches, and their joy as

they finally arrive safely beyond the terror of the front line, back to some semblance of

normality. The piece begins with a solitary ominous Db on the tuba, calling the men to arms.

A rich 6-note harmonic response from the choir immediately recontextualizes this note as the

root of a chord, invoking a momentary sense of calm. The tuba breaks this respite by

                                                                                                               13  Warren  Bourne,  "Mather's  Requiem  60  years  too  late,"  Adelaide  Advertiser,  November  12  1976.  14  Ibid.  15  Ralph  Middenway,  "Requiem  swamped  by  sound,"  Australian,  November  16  1976.  16  Ibid.  17  Rosalinda  Appleby,  Women  of  Note:  The  rise  of  Australian  women  composers    (Fremantle:  Fremantle  Press,  2012).  p.  62  

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sounding another single melancholy note – an Eb – triggering the beginning of the poem18

and reinforcing the reality of the troops. The composer further intensifies this tension by

transitioning from the tuba to solo cello with a descending tritone interval.

Fig. 3

As the narrator describes the drastic measures the soldiers must undertake to flee the

trenches19, the cello returns to the opening tuba’s note – C#/Db – this time as a series of

percussive repeated semiquavers. This recurring rhythm fuels the sense of the soldier’s

urgency further, spurring them on to take their chance. Gifford conveys the soldier’s sense of

dread – ‘each man picking his moment, trusting to nerve and instinct and his star’20 – by

gradually slowing down the pulse of the cello’s repeating C#.

Once the men have made it away from the firing line, the instrumentation changes markedly

to reflect their happiness. With this next stanza21, a flute plays a rapid phrase, almost

                                                                                                               18  ‘  A  notre  place/  On  a  pose/  Des  soldats  frais/Pour  amorcer/La  mort  d’en  face’.  [In  our  place/Fresh  troops  have  come/Sent  up  the  line/As  bait  for  death/Met  face  to  face].  Translation  by  Christopher  Middleton,  supplied  by  composer  in  score.    19  ‘Il  a  fallu  toute  la  nuit  pour  s’evader.  Toute  la  nuit  et  ses  ténèbres/Pour  traverser,  suant,  glacé/Le  bois  martyr  et  son  bourbier/Cinglé  d’obus’.  [We  needed  all  night  to  make  our  escape/All  night  and  its  darkness/Sweating,  frozen,  to  cross/The  martyr  forest  and  its  swamp/That  shrapnel  scourged.]  20  Helen  Gifford,  Choral  scenes:  the  Western  Front,  World  War  1    (Sydney:  The  Australian  Music  Centre,  1999).  21  ‘Mais  passé  le  dernier  barrage/Mais  hors  du  jeu/sur  la  route  solide/Mais  aussitôt  le  ralliement  Aux/lueurs  des  pipes  premières/Then,  mates,  O  lucky  winners’.  [But  beyond  the  

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imitating bird-song. In contrast to the rhythmic monotony of the cello’s C#, the flute’s phrase

bursts forth, quasi-improvised. A clarinet soon joins the flute, and together they enter into a

humorous dialogue that imitates the textual description of men happily meeting together, and

lighting their pipes on the road after reaching safety.

Fig. 4

These compositional techniques demonstrate the composer’s affinity with the text and her

ability to set the spoken word to music. As a complete work, Choral Scenes is a fine example

of Gifford’s compositional style, creating theatrical and musical drama using ‘delicate

textures [and] tensions…through percussive and vocal counter-effects’.22 Gifford has also

composed a second smaller work for solo piano entitled Menin Gate. This piece was inspired

by the painting Menin Gate at Midnight by Will Longstaff and was premiered in 2005.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       last  entanglement/Out  of  it  all,  on  the  firm  road/Met  together,  with  no  delays/In  the  glow  of  the  first  pipes  lit/Then,  mates,  O  lucky  winners].    22  Thérèse    Radic,  "Gifford,  Helen,"  Oxford  University  Press,  http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/subscriber/article/grove/music/11114.  

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Finally, I’d like to briefly discuss my own examination of the war from an artistic

perspective. In 2011 I was commissioned by Australian pianist Zubin Kanga to write a piano

piece that reflected my family’s connection to the Great War. The title of the piece, ‘The

drumfire was incessant, and continued all night with unabated fury’,23 is a quote from British

historian Newton Wanliss’s harrowing account of the Battle of Pozieres.24 The Battle of

Pozieres occurred between July and August 1916 as part of the Somme Offensive. The

composition focuses on the days leading up to August 9th, 1916, when my great-great uncle

Private Leslie Robins, an infantryman in the 14th Battalion, was shot and wounded.

In the early stages of writing the piece, whilst conducting preliminary research into the Battle

of Pozieres, I was struck by the disparity between the British High Command’s notion of

formulating a ‘plan’ for the battle, and the actuality of what occurred once soldiers ‘went over

the top’ into no-man’s land. This dichotomous concept – exerting control over an inherently

fluid and dynamic situation – I found to be most intriguing. It fitted in well with my aesthetic

explorations of the role of improvisation (a dynamic process) within a larger notated context

(a controlled environment). I decided that this dichotomy would play a fundamental role

within the piece.

The composition is made up of three distinct parts; the main notated section, and two

structured improvisations; Counterattack 1 and Counterattack 2. The work begins with a

sombre march, reminding us of the fear that filled many soldiers as they made their way

towards the firing line. The march is abruptly subsumed by a torrential rhythmic onslaught,

symbolising the artillery bombardment that both the Allied and German soldiers endured

throughout the Battle of Pozieres. The bombardment is brought to a jarring halt as

Counterattack 1 gets underway. After a brief period of introspective respite following

Counterattack 1, the bombardment returns, building to a crescendo before giving way to

Counterattack 2. In the aftermath of Counterattack 2 the melancholia of the opening march

returns, serving as a poignant reminder of those that fell during the battle.

                                                                                                               23    Andrew  Harrison,  'The  drumfire  was  incessant,  and  continued  all  night  with  unabated  fury'    (Sydney:  The  Australian  Music  Centre,  2012).  24  Newton  Wanliss,  The  history  of  the  Fourteenth  Battalion,  A.I.F.    (London:  Naval  and  Military  Press  &  Imperial  War  Museum,  1929;  reprint,  2010).  

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The Counterattack sections seek to capture some of the pandemonium and chaos of hand-to-

hand combat. Once the soldiers went ‘over the top’, any concept of working to a plan was

eradicated, as the reality of close-range fighting became apparent. Structured improvisation is

employed in each of the Counterattacks, leaving the overall shape of the section to the

pianist’s discretion. Each Counterattack section is cued in with the blow of a whistle from a

designated person seated in the audience. The entry point of each Counterattack is variable,

adding an element of unpredictability to each performance. In other words, in theory, the

pianist is never quite sure of when they will move to the structured improvisation. The

following excerpt from Counterattack 1 exemplifies the flexible notation approach used

within the structured improvisations.

Fig. 5

With the 2015 centennial anniversary of the ANZAC landing approaching, a new repertoire

of Australian music inspired by the Great War is beginning to emerge, such as Andrew

Schultz’s 2012 August Offensive for orchestra. His piece contributes to the growing number

of works, often smaller choral pieces, created in the last decade. The manner in which

musicians reflect upon the war from a distance of 100 years will make for fascinating inquiry,

and I look forward to engaging in this process, both as composer and scholar.

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Works cited:

Appleby,  Rosalinda.  Women  of  Note:  The  Rise  of  Australian  Women  Composers.  Fremantle:  Fremantle  Press,  2012.  

Bourne,  Warren.  "Mather's  Requiem  60  Years  Too  Late."  Adelaide  Advertiser,  November  12  1976.  

Buchan,  John,  ed.  Balliol  College  War  Memorial  Book  1914-­‐1919.  Vol.  1.  Oxford:  Balliol  College,  1924.  

Davies,  Rhian.  "Kelly,  Frederick  Septimus."  In  Grove  Music  Online.  Gifford,  Helen.  Choral  Scenes:  The  Western  Front,  World  War  1.  Sydney:  The  Australian  

Music  Centre,  1999.  Harrison,  Andrew.  'The  Drumfire  Was  Incessant,  and  Continued  All  Night  with  Unabated  

Fury'.  Sydney:  The  Australian  Music  Centre,  2012.  Kelly,  F.  S.  Race  against  Time  :  The  Diaries  of  F.S.  Kelly  /  Selected,  Edited  and  Introduced  

by  Thérèse  Radic.  Edited  by  Thérèse  Radic.  Canberra:  National  Library  of  Australia,  2004.  

Kelly,  Frederick  Septimus.  Music  from  the  Great  War.  Edited  by  Bruce  Steele  and  Richard  Divall.  Limited  to  100  copies:  1st  ed.  Melbourne:  Marshall-­‐Hall  Trust,  2005.  

"Martin  Mather:  Represented  Artist."  Australian  Music  Centre,  http://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/mather-­‐martin.  

Middenway,  Ralph.  "Requiem  Swamped  by  Sound."  Australian,  November  16  1976.  Radic,  Thérèse  "Gifford,  Helen."  Oxford  University  Press,  

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/subscriber/article/grove/music/11114.  

Saylor,  Eric.  ""It's  Not  Lambkins  Frisking  at  All":  English  Pastoral  Music  and  the  Great  War."  The  Musical  Quarterly  91,  no.  1-­‐2  (2008):  39-­‐59.  

Tate,  Henry.  The  Australian:  Cycle  for  Piano  Solo.  Edited  by  Richard  Divall.  unpublished  ed.  Canberra:  National  Library  of  Australia,  19-­‐?  

"Trove:  Anzac  Fellowship  of  Women."  National  Library  of  Australia,  http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-­‐468893.  

Wanliss,  Newton.  The  History  of  the  Fourteenth  Battalion,  A.I.F.  London:  Naval  and  Military  Press  &  Imperial  War  Museum,  1929.  Reprint,  2010.  

Watkins,  Glenn.  Proof  through  the  Night  :  Music  and  the  Great  War.  Berkeley:  University  of  California  Press,  2002.