Sir Malcolm Arnold; great Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Piers Burton-Page
25 September 2006
Sir Malcolm Arnold
Composer of wit, zest and energy - winner of an Oscar for
his score of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai'
The death of Malcolm Arnold will strike sadness into the
hearts of musicians everywhere, and of wind-players in
particular. There can scarcely be a single one who has not
encountered at some time or another that quintessential
Arnold work, his Three Shanties, and rejoiced over it.
Charming, melodious, graceful, witty; cheeky, even. But it
takes skill, hard work, a fine ear and lots of practice to
write pieces even as innocent-sounding as these shanties -
and they date from the very earliest years of his long
composing career.
Arnold would have been 85 next month; a big celebration was
planned for his home town of Northampton. The day he died, a
ballet based on an old project of his called The Three
Musketeers and using several older scores opened in
Bradford. He had long retired as a composer; many years of
illness had forced an increasing withdrawal from public
life. He received many musical honours, however; in 1970 he
was appointed CBE and (after a campaign led by David Mellor)
he was knighted in 1993. He wrote all sorts and conditions
of music, everything from full-scale symphonies, nine of
them, surely his lasting memorial, right down to television
advertisement jingles.
Malcolm Arnold was born in 1921, in Northampton, a town that
produced two other well-known composers in the 20th century,
Edmund Rubbra and William Alwyn. It is also a centre of the
shoe-making industry, in which Arnold's father held a
responsible position. So the family was comfortably off -
his was not a rags-to-riches story. And there was music in
this family of five children, too - Arnold's mother was
musical, encouraged him to have violin lessons when he was
very young, and recognised his exceptional talent - even
when that talent went off in unexpected directions: jazz,
for instance.
He first heard Louis Armstrong's band in the flesh in a
hotel in Brighton; he collected their records and became an
addict. The results of that addiction were many, and recur
time and again: they include a love of the blues that
surfaces in his own serious music, a belief that rigid
demarcations between different sorts of music are pointless,
a desire to bring something of the collaborative,
free-for-all spirit of jazz into classical music - and an
obsession with the trumpet.
The trumpet became his instrument. He was so good at it that
at the age of 16 he won a scholarship to the Royal College
of Music in London to pursue his studies there. He had also
been bitten by the composing bug from the age of 10; and so
composition clearly had to be the other subject he took.
Sooner or later, of course, these two strings to his bow
were bound to come together, which they did in only the
second orchestral work that he composed. It was an overture
written in the same year as the Three Shanties, and called
rather strangely Beckus the Dandipratt - Beckus is an
evocative name, and a dandipratt is an old word for an
urchin, so this is a kind of musical picture of a cheeky,
high-spirited, rather grubby but cheerful little boy,
represented not by a trumpet, but by its slightly coarser
cousin the cornet. It might almost be autobiographical.
There is an old record of Arnold playing in the work with
his own orchestra, the London Philharmonic. It was something
of a historic recording; it represented a great breakthrough
for a young musician at the start of his career, and it was
a useful visiting-card, as it showed the enormous potential
he had as an orchestral composer. And Beckus is still a
repertoire piece.
Arnold was so outstanding at the trumpet that he could
easily have done that for life and made a good living.
Orchestras were falling over themselves to employ him even
before he had finished his studies with that great teacher
Ernest Hall. But he was also lured by jazz; he even ran away
from the Royal College once and played in a dance band in
Plymouth. And there was the Second World War; Arnold was
torn between his music or joining up or becoming a
conscientious objector. He ended up with what was for him
the worst of all possible worlds, playing the cornet in a
military band. He felt so useless in that role that he
inflicted a wound on himself in order to be discharged. That
surely offers a clue to a more turbulent character
underneath the cheerful façade.
The end of the war found him back in the London
Philharmonic, but more determined than ever to compose; to
order if possible, but, if no one asked, he still wrote
music. There was a serious composer waiting to get out, and
looking for his true voice. We can hear that in a work
written early in 1947, the First Violin Sonata, which had to
wait four years before it was first performed.
His strongest asset was immediately apparent: melody. Arnold
was a profoundly original melodist, both in the sense that
he wrote tunes which really do stick in the mind long after
the event, and also in the sense that he had an unerring
instinct for knowing just what to do with them.
With a big work from a few years later, his Second Symphony,
already opus 40 in Arnold's rapidly growing catalogue, a
word like "tunes" will not quite do. We need to turn to the
more sophisticated concept of "lyricism", and to Arnold's
underestimated gifts as a lyric symphonist. Time will surely
prove Arnold's nine symphonies the solid and volcanic core
of his achievement, erupting periodically in his output as
if no longer containable.
It was this Second Symphony, first performed in 1953, that
put Arnold seriously on the musical map, because within a
short time it had been performed not just widely in England,
but abroad as well. And it was obvious that this was a
composer for whom - contrary to what a lot of people had
been saying around that time - the symphony was by no means
dead as a form.
One of the things about the canonical nine is their
extraordinary variety. None of them resembles any of its
predecessors; the composer does not repeat himself at all.
And, because they are so different one from another, it is
difficult to have any favourite. I love the pastoral
lyricism of number 2; I admire the harsh, Stravinsky-like
energy and the sheer defiance of number 7; I relish the
mixture of irony and optimism in number 8. Number 9, written
in a final burst of creative energy before the silence of
the last years, is a poignant farewell, with conscious
echoes of the symphonic farewells of Tchaikovsky and Mahler.
In retrospect, one of the most significant moments in
Arnold's career came way back in 1947, when a musical
colleague suggested that the young composer should send off
some of his music to the film studios outside London and see
if they could offer him any work as a composer for the
cinema. Little did either of them realise that this would
result in a career as a film composer that threatened at
times to swamp his career as a serious composer, and which
always imposed enormous demands and pressures of its own -
purely because the music was always the last stage in the
making of a film before its release, and therefore had to be
written not only to the very precise requirements of the
film itself, but also against even tighter time deadlines.
But it paid well, and, anyway, Arnold himself never cared
for separating music into respectable and not-so-respectable
categories.
Eventually he was forced to give up writing film music; but
not before he had written something like 130 scores though,
ranging from his first. Avalanche Patrol, in 1947, to David
Copperfield in 1969. Along the way, he collected a Hollywood
Oscar, for his score for David Lean's film of The Bridge on
the River Kwai (1957). Other films on which he collaborated
were I Am a Camera (1955), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
(1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), The Angry Silence
(1960), Tunes of Glory (1960) and Whistle Down the Wind
(1961). Lean, Carol Reed, John Huston, to name but three
directors, would ask for him. Richard Attenborough became a
loyal friend. It was typical of the seriousness of Arnold's
approach that when he worked on the film Nine Hours to Rama
(1963), about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, he should
have visited India to undertake research, and that his score
should have achieved a happy blend of Eastern and Western
musical traditions.
Apart from his huge output of film music during the 1950s,
another strand that went all through this period was his
continued willingness to write music to oblige friends. At
the start of his career, this took the form of chamber
pieces for small groups of instruments; now, with his
confidence growing and his success increasing, he started
writing concertos for them whenever there was an orchestra
available. By the end, Arnold had written 17 concertos and a
handful of other works involving a solo instrument.
In the late 1980s, inspired by performers half his age, he
produced a Recorder Concerto for the Danish virtuoso Michala
Petri, and a Cello Concerto for Julian Lloyd Webber, each as
always perfectly tailored to the style and personality of
its dedicatee. Arnold was a proud champion of youth.
Back in 1954, though, he received a commission from the BBC
that must have made even him pause for thought. After all,
the harmonica or, to give it its vulgar name, the
mouth-organ wasn't generally thought of as a serious
instrument. But a virtuoso called Larry Adler was at the
height of his fame, and he wanted a piece for the Proms; so,
true to his non-snobbish instincts, Arnold set to work. Not
only did he produce a work expertly crafted to the unusual
limitations of the solo instrument, he also paid instrument
and soloist the great compliment of writing them real music.
But, then, Malcolm Arnold was always, in the public mind,
the musical humorist par excellence. He loved jokes in real
life, verbal jokes, practical jokes. Laughter was part of
his character. And it was there in his music too, in many
forms. There is the dry wit of his arrangements of
sea-shanties. There are the rumbustious rhythms of some of
his orchestral dances. There are the affectionate take-offs
of other styles, such as jazz, as in the ragtime finale of
his Second Clarinet Concerto. He loved bizarre effects, as
in the Toy Symphony of 1957, which includes parts for
instruments imitating two birds, the quail and the cuckoo.
Perhaps the most famous examples of Arnold's humour are his
collaborations with Gerard Hoffnung. Hoffnung was among
other achievements no mean tuba-player; he once made an
arrangement of a Chopin mazurka for a quartet of tubas. He
was also an impresario of sorts, and once a year he used to
arrange in the Royal Festival Hall a whole concert of
musical jokes. Hoffnung and Arnold were temperamentally very
similar, and quickly became friends.
Every year the composer would devise some new piece for the
occasion: people still recall in slightly dazed fashion a
piece called The United Nations, which involved amongst
other things a number of military bands marching back and
forth playing the national anthems of the world,
simultaneously. Then there is the Grand Concerto
Gastronomique, opus 76. Described as being "for eater,
waiter, food, and large orchestra'', it typically includes a
movement called "Oysters", and another called "Peach Melba".
Jazz influenced Malcolm Arnold's music on many occasions and
in many forms. It was no coincidence that one of the
composer's closest musical friends over many years should
have shared his obsession with jazz. Enter Julian Bream.
Actually he entered Malcolm Arnold's life a long time ago,
in the early 1950s, at a time when the guitar (thanks to
people like Andrés Segovia, and Julian Bream himself) was
just beginning to become an accepted classical instrument.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that the guitar
isn't an easy instrument to write music for.
Arnold uncharacteristically hesitated before plunging
straight into the full-scale guitar piece commissioned by
his new-found friend. First of all he wrote one of his
radiant miniatures, a Serenade for guitar and strings not
much more than five minutes long. Only then did he feel
ready to take on the challenge of writing a concerto. But he
duly completed one, and Julian Bream gave the first
performance at the 1959 Aldeburgh Festival. It has become an
Arnold classic. There exists a wonderful photograph of
guitarist and composer together. Bream is playing his
guitar, with a wicked grin on his face. Arnold sits,
improbably, at an Elizabethan keyboard instrument called a
clavichord, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The
pair of them are, so the caption tells us, "improvising
jazz!" On that particular combination of instruments it must
have sounded bizarre in the extreme.
In 1966, Arnold decided he had had enough of the hurly-burly
of musical life in the capital. The pressure of a composing
career that embraced serious music, endless films, and work
for radio and television, together with attending rehearsals
of his pieces and even some success as a conductor, was
beginning to prove too much to cope with. Escape seemed the
only answer. Drawn by his love of the Celtic fringe, he
chose to go and live in Cornwall.
Cornwall has always exerted a spell over the artistic
fraternity - painters in particular, but literary artists
and musicians too. Sir John Betjeman loved Cornwall, and
celebrated the county often in his verse. Arnold wrote a
march for brass band specially for the launching of a new
lifeboat at Trevose Head, a spot much beloved of Betjeman,
and the printed score contains a typical comment:
The Padstow Lifeboat has a long and distinguished record.
The new lifeboat station is near Trevose lighthouse, whose
foghorn varies in pitch between middle C and D. For the sake
of musical unity it remains D throughout this march.
So: a nice touch of humour; an unsnobbish willingness to
write for local, amateur musicians; a piece of music
actually serving a defined purpose; and a response to place,
to landscape and seascape, all in that one piece. There were
to be several other specifically Cornish works in Arnold's
output, including the popular Cornish Dances, that
wonderfully evoke the contrasted moods of this most remote
of counties. Several of them were written for local groups
to perform. He even once took over the vast spaces of Truro
Cathedral for a concert to revive the works of a forgotten
Cornish composer, Thomas Merritt.
This willingness to identify with the community in which he
found himself was something of a recurring theme in Malcolm
Arnold's story. I am inclined to see it as part of his wider
concern with humanitarian, sometimes even political issues.
These occasionally surfaced in his music too. As in a work
from 1972, his Song of Freedom. This involved a girls' choir
and a youth band; and, for the words, the composer chose
some poems submitted by children as part of a national
competition, on the theme of freedom: an idea that clearly
appealed to him most powerfully.
The end of the 1970s was a difficult time for Arnold
personally; and some of this gets into his music of this
period, the Seventh Symphony in particular, a masterpiece of
irony but also compassion. The magnificent Symphony for
Brass of 1978 holds the twin poles of light and dark in
perfectly poised equilibrium. After that brass symphony,
Arnold's next work was another piece in that same form, his
Eighth Symphony. After that, for nearly four years, silence.
This was a time of self-doubt, depression, even breakdown;
certainly not a time of creativity.
When he began to pick up the pieces and to start musical
activity again, his language had subtly changed. His music
was more elusive, more compressed than before, with bare
textures and long, angular melodic lines often unsupported
by accompaniment. And he returned to a form that much
preoccupied him in the Fifties and Sixties: the solo
instrumental fantasy. As the name implies, the free fantasy
imposes almost no restrictions except those of the
instrument in question. As for the mood of the music
generated in this way, one of Arnold's last Fantasies, that
for solo cello, is characteristic. The word for the music is
surely "austere"; it is music pared to its essentials. The
single melodic line bears the whole weight of the
expression. Even larger-scale works such as the Cello
Concerto or the song-cycle for Robert Tear conformed to this
pattern of fragmentation and compression.
It would be out of keeping, though, with the zest and energy
of Arnold at his mature best to end on a dark note. Even
music shot through with tragedy and darkness has the
capacity to uplift and inspire; of Malcolm Arnold is this
especially true. His last decade was clouded with illness
and suffering, his pleasures severely limited: his many
friends felt deeply on his behalf. His devoted carer Anthony
Day, who took on Arnold in the mid-1980s, looked after him
in their house in Norfolk where they lived in relative
obscurity until the late flowering of his reputation,
supporting his charge through thick and thin. He deserves a
medal.
Family relationships for Arnold were never easy: the
gregarious extrovert, the public figure, could seem cruel
and even selfish to those closest to him. The evidence,
though, is that he was much loved. By the end, Arnold was
able to look back on a lifetime of music notable for its
variety, its richness, its frequent good-humour, and often,
too, its high spirits. He will surely be remembered as one
of music's great optimists, and pieces such as Tam
O'Shanter, the Cornish Dances, A Grand Grand Overture or the
Fifth Symphony will always be there to recall his
unquenchable spirit.
Piers Burton-Page
Malcolm Arnold, as a trumpeter, was once described by the
music critic John Amis as resembling a Disney creature,
writes Brian Willey.
When he played a solo he would change colour, turning from
pink to all shades of red, through purple to puce then, when
finished, he would regard his instrument with disgust, as
though it had pooped on the carpet.
As a composer, he was early dubbed "one of the great hopes
of British music" and although, at times, he tended to break
with convention he produced music that was tonal,
attractive, witty, high-spirited and, above all, superbly
crafted - he claimed that Hector Berlioz was the greatest
influence on his writing. In person he was an affable chubby
chap, but could suddenly switch to darker moods, as if at
odds with the world. His turbulent life emotionally affected
his writing so greatly that, in his own words, "all of my
music is biographical".
When his reputation dipped, he became withdrawn and an
alcoholic, suffering periods of depression, nervous
breakdowns and attempted suicide. But he continued to write
whenever possible and eventually the wheel turned full
circle, back to acceptance and reverence. In 1985 he
received a second Ivor Novello Award (he had received the
first for the film score for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness
27 years before), this time for Outstanding Services to
British Music; in 1993 his knighthood; and in 2001 a
Fellowship of the British Academy of Composers and
Songwriters, bestowed on the occasion of an 80th birthday
concert in the Wigmore Hall. In 1962 Yehudi Menuhin had
commissioned a double violin concerto which, in 1991, formed
part of his 70th birthday celebration concert in the Queen
Elizabeth Hall.
Malcolm Arnold finally settled in Attleborough in Norfolk in
the care of his companion Anthony Day and, when first there,
used to visit Dunston Hall, a local hotel, where he could
often be found in the foyer playing the piano with his left
hand and the trumpet with the right hand, much to the
fascination of the guests, who had no idea who he was. Upon
entering his ninth decade he no longer wrote or played, by
then suffering from mild dementia and also wheelchair-bound.
He expressed regret at having been ignored by the BBC Proms
this year. "Doesn't my 85th birthday justify something of
mine being performed?" he asked.
There are many concert and broadcast tributes planned for
the occasion of his 85th birthday next month. They will
serve as a reminder that Malcolm Arnold was one of Britain's
great 20th-century composers.
Malcolm Henry Arnold, composer and trumpeter: born
Northampton 21 October 1921; Principal Trumpet, London
Philharmonic Orchestra 1941-44, 1945-48; CBE 1970; Kt 1993;
married 1940 Sheila Nicholson (one son, one daughter;
marriage dissolved 1969), 1964 Isobel Grey (one son;
marriage dissolved 1979); died Norwich 23 September 2006.