US - Aaron Copeland - UK - Vaughan Williams

November 14^th – What do you find is the most irksome thing in modern movies and TV? You know…the thing that really winds you up to the point where, if it weren’t for the entrance or licence fee you’d bloody-well walk out…but you don’t, probably because, if you’re anything like me, you’re a cheap-skate.

There’s probably a list spinning round you’re head: those people who spend more time looking at their passenger than out the windscreen when they’re driving along a crowded highway at 90mph; people who never turn room lights on when they come home in the dark…………and when there’s a triple-digit serial-killer in the neighbourhood; people who always find a parking slot right outside the place they want to go to……… that their car fits into perfectly………which they never lock……..and which is always there when they come back out; those kind of annoying things that make you roll your eyes and shout out;

Oh, FFS!

What is it that sums up quintessential England for you? For some, I believe, it’s the start of the domestic football season, although I have to admit I never thought, over the past ten or fifteen years that the football ever comes to an end but, let that pass…the start of the domestic football season, for others it’s the sound of lawnmowers on a sunny Sunday morning or of shattering glass as the bonny, wee bairns welt in the side window of that BMW that the owner foolishly left a briefcase on the back seat of; in some cases its the smell of autumn bonfires that people still insist on lighting even though they know the damage we’re doing to the planet…ooopppsss, political, sorry, slipped out…said the art mistress to the gardener. All those last are tangible things; what about music? If you had to name a form of music that reminded you most strongly of your heritage what would it be; and don’t you dare say, ABBA. Three things; it’s trite; it’s schmaltzy; it’s Swedish.

For me, I’d have to say its pretty-well anything written by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Pastoral Symphony, In The Fen Country or Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis are compositions that immediately spring to mind and mighty works they are too, but for me it has to be his concerti, Lark Ascending which contains all the ingredients that make me know my nationality. The smells, sights and sounds he conjures up are unmistakably Shropshire (for me) and I have always considered that county to be the heart of England, the space that, in their mind’s-eye, soldiers fought to preserve and poets eulogised over. I know, I know, Wordsworth waxed lyrical about the Lake District…but I like to think that, in the back of his head, he was as much influenced by the march counties; Dorothy Wordsworth too. BTW, if you have the time, the opportunity to concentrate and have a liking for choral music, do have a listen to Mr. Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music – for Sixteen Solo Voices and Orchestra; it is sublime.

If I was American my guess is that I’d choose anything by Aaron Copeland who was born on this day in 1900. Some of his work crosses easily into the category of Mr. Vaughan Williams’ territory as it’s as descriptive, as heartbreaking and as uplifting as anything Mr. Vaughan Williams wrote; it aint English but it is very American. His composition, Appalachian Spring is a breathtaking musical description of a vast and wild country and his works, Billy the Kid and Rodeo (both ballets) are a whimsical and exciting take on the American dream. But it was Mr. Copeland’s ventures into film that concerns me most here; for me, in this discipline, he’s my hero.

Full cirlcle. One of the things that wind me up most in movies is what I call musical overkill. Where every gesture, emotion, statement or turn of the head is staccato-ed to death by musical punctuation telling us how to emote, what to feel, as if we, the watcher, lack the intellect to create our own sensory soundtrack just by watching the actor. That sort of stunted understanding may be true in the US (the home of foreign film remakes ‘cos the average American can’t be arsed to read subtitles) but not in the UK. What is also anathema to me is excessively loud music that plays throughout the movie; music that accompanies every scene, ebbing and flowing with the action and drowning out any conversation that’s conducted in anything less than a bawl. For his musical contribution for the film, Of Mice and Men (wonderful, wonderful, wonderful novel and stage play) Mr. Copeland was nominated twice for an Oscar, best score and original score and he said, in typical modesty;

I was lucky. Here was an American theme, by a great American writer, demanding appropriate music.’

I beg to differ. Your compositional abilities and your American interpretive brilliance were tailor-made for this film; spot on. But where he stands head and shoulders above the present-day blockbuster, blaring musical accompaniment is his pioneering of…silence. When writing a score, Mr. Copland kept silent during intimate screen moments only beginning the music as a confirming motive toward or at the end of a scene. Fuckin’ ‘A’! My kinda guy.