Malcolm Arnold Catalogue

FM174-Malcolm4ppCover 18/12/03 4:32 pm Page 1 Sir Malcolm Arnold The complete catalogue of published works FM174-Malcolm32ppText 18/12/03 4:34 pm Page 1 Sir Malcolm Arnold The complete catalogue of published works CONTENTS THE MUSIC OF MALCOLM ARNOLD .........................2 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE..............................................................6 List of published works ...........................................8 INDEX Abbreviations ...............................................................................8 Stage Works............................................................................... 10 Orchestra................................................................................... 10 Solo Instrument(s) & Orchestra .............................................. 15 Chamber Orchestra .................................................................. 16 String Orchestra........................................................................ 17 Chamber Ensemble................................................................... 19 Instrumental.............................................................................. 20 Piano.......................................................................................... 21 Choral........................................................................................ 22 Vocal .......................................................................................... 23 Brass Band................................................................................. 24 Brass Ensemble ......................................................................... 26 Wind Band ................................................................................ 26 Educational Music .................................................................... 30 Arrangements of Music by other composers .......................... 31 Untraced Scores ........................................................................ 31 Unpublished Works .................................................................. 31 Publishers & Contacts ............................................... Back Cover 1 FM174-Malcolm32ppText 18/12/03 4:34 pm Page 2 Sir Malcolm Arnold The complete catalogue of published works Working on the THE MUSIC score for the film, A Prize of Gold OF MALCOLM (1954) ARNOLD Two pictures of Malcolm Arnold appear on the dust jacket of Piers Burton-Page’s biography. The contrast between them is startling. On the back is Gerard ❛❛ Few contemporary Hoffnung’s cartoon of Arnold conducting: a robust, gleeful Falstaffian composers can communicate figure, his sizeable frame squeezed into a dinner jacket and white waistcoat, so directly with an audience ❜❜ baton raised triumphantly, legs Emma Johnson apparently executing a can-can. The photograph on the front cover shows an older, much thinner face, framed in darkness. The lips are tightly closed, the corners of the mouth turned down – no laugh-lines around the eyes this time. As for the eyes themselves, they are troubled, severe: of a piece, it seems, with the black background. At first sight it seems hard to reconcile these two images. But their juxtaposition tells us something crucial about Arnold the composer. Hoffnung’s inspired musical comedian and the austere, haunted face of Fritz Curzon’s photograph are two sides of the same coin – just as Schumann’s vigorous Florestan and dreamy, sensitive Eusebius are clearly two facets of the same artistic personality. Readers who are familiar with Arnold’s vast output – or just a sizeable fraction of it – will have no difficulty matching those dust-cover portraits to specific works. The Arnold of Hoffnung’s cartoon is clearly the composer of A Grand, Grand Overture, written for the anarchic 1956 Hoffnung Music Festival and scored for organ, full symphony orchestra, three vacuum cleaners, floor polisher and four rifles. It’s one of the few pieces of pure musical humour that is genuinely, irresistibly, excruciatingly funny – not just for its bizarre sound effects, but for the way Arnold wickedly teases the listener’s expectations: weird clashes of key, or a big tune during which the gramophone needle suddenly seems to get stuck in a groove. It was perfectly tailored to Gerard Hoffnung’s subversive sense of fun. No wonder the critic William Mann described Arnold as ‘the nearest lunatic creative artist to Gerard that could be imagined without actually being Hoffnung’. Then, at the other extreme, stands the Seventh Symphony – a work that baffled, even angered, critics at its first performance in 1974. This is violent, bleak, bitter music. The first movement is an immense dance of death, which far from progressing, developing – as symphonic first movements are supposed to do – circles obsessively, combining and re-combining fragments of motifs, as though the creative mind were unable to shake off Arnold as conductor, rehearsing for the London premiere of his 2 First Symphony (1951) 3 FM174-Malcolm32ppText 18/12/03 4:34 pm Page 4 Sir Malcolm Arnold The complete catalogue of published works the thoughts, images and feelings that torment it. The dance is punctuated by recurrences of another ‘big tune’, at once heavy with pathos and cruelly ironic. The composer seems to be trying to pour out his heart and in the same moment savaging himself for doing so. The only modern composer I can think of who explores similar ❛❛ My string quartets and symphonies emotional territory is the Russian-born Alfred Schnittke, in whose works pain, grief, sarcasm and hopeless absurdity often coexist. Interestingly, Schnittke too found little are the story of my life ❜❜ favour with British critics in the Seventies, but now his music is seen as emblematic of Sir Malcolm Arnold a particularly modern consciousness: a state of mind in which fragmentation, isolation and spiritual emptiness hold sway. Here’s a thought: could Arnold, in his Seventh Symphony, have been writing ahead of his time – more so, in fact, than many of the Arnold’s score for another David Lean picture, The Bridge on the River Kwai, drew this so-called ‘progressive’ composers with whom he was once unfavourably compared? extraordinary tribute from Lean himself: ‘God, what a gift you have, dear Malcolm. What But as one becomes more familiar with the music of Malcolm Arnold, the gulf between size. What sensitivity. What guts. You didn’t miss a bloody point – and the way you sneak these seemingly irreconcilable worlds begins to narrow. Comedy and tragedy, ebullience in the march theme when old Nicholson wins and starts to do up that button on his tunic and despair confront each other in so many of his works – even in that grim Seventh is sort of miraculous and fills me with a sort of wonder... The way the music builds up from Symphony. Of course there are pieces that seem to have been conceived as pure jeux the above-mentioned moment – all sorts of undercurrents, question marks, suppressed d’esprit: the ever-popular orchestral Cornish Dances and Scottish Dances, for example. excitements – and then – boom! – out it all spills, falling over itself, fulfilling itself, But even the lighter Arnold has his darker moments. I remember seeing an audience building and building and laughing and proud and crying and as unpompous as Punch!’ of children in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall transfixed by his Tam O’Shanter overture, Undercurrents, question marks, suppressed excitements, laughter and crying... Lean could with its vivid depiction of drunken Tam’s terror-stricken flight from a coven of enraged have written the same about almost any of Arnold’s major orchestral or chamber works. witches – Robert Burns’s poem recreated in music almost line by line. The children Now that it’s no longer routine for critics to use the words ‘film music’ as a term of abuse – visibly loved the musical jokes, the almost cinematic story-telling and scene- painting. now that great film scores are recorded and admired in their own right – perhaps we are But children are notoriously resistant to anything they find patronising. Part of the better able to appreciate the ‘serious’ Malcolm Arnold. Just as the songs of Schubert, Mahler, appeal of Tam O’Shanter – as with all good supernatural stories – lies in the fact that Schumann and Shostakovich can lead us to a deeper penetration of their symphonic works, the terror is real. Towards the end of the overture, Tam’s desperation (expressed in so perhaps a less prejudiced appreciation of Arnold’s cinema music can help us find new atonal violin and high woodwind shrieks and the cutting thwack of a whip) stops being ways into his seemingly abstract concert works. It can help us to see how those two funny. Comedy wins in the end, with a brief mock-serious epilogue and a rousing ‘That’s apparently irreconcilable faces – the comedian and the tragedian – are in constant creative all folks!’ final cadence. But for a moment, we’ve been in Tam’s place, fleeing for relationship to each other: setting up the ‘undercurrents’,‘question marks’ and ‘suppressed our lives from something unimaginably terrible. That is why the comedy still excitements’ Lean identifies. It can also help us to understand the function of those ‘big works, nearly half a century after Tam O’Shanter was heard for the first time. tunes’ which are a unifying feature – perhaps the unifying feature – of Arnold’s work, from Listen to any of Arnold’s magnificent film scores and you will find the same cinema to concert hall. They can turn up in the most startling places: after the tense, nervous double-edged

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