Stravinsky

David Drew
British writer, editor, music publisher, recording producer

Annual Records 1930-50
London-Berlin-Campbeltown, School and National Service, Satie & Messiaen

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Putney Hill - 1930 viewed from the High Street

1930 b. Putney (London), 19 September. Son of Mary Hicklin (née Drew) and Reginald Hicklin, who is currently employed in the Berlin office of Lintas. D in Berlin from November 1930 until his return to Putney in the last week of April 1931.
1932 July: Mary Hicklin petitions for divorce. The suit is undefended. Reverting to her maiden name, she is temporarily based at Ivy House, the riverside home in Barnes acquired by her late father, a Richmond Estate Agent.
1933 M.H. marries the Campbeltown-born and Edinburgh-trained solicitor, Charles Mactaggart, now senior partner in the long-established Campbeltown firm of C. & D. Mactaggart, Solicitors.

Campbeltown in the early 1930's is by no means immune to the effects of the world-wide depression, and there will be no recovery until World War 2 , when the authorities recognise the advantages of a superb natural harbour with access to the Irish Sea and the North Atlantic, and ample space near Machrihanish for a large airport (later to become a major NATO asset). In the early 1930s the local economy is based on herring fishing (the fleet is one of the largest on the West Coast of Scotland) and dairy farming. The whisky boom, which at its peak had supported some twenty local distilleries, is long past, and the open-cast coal mines at Machrihanish - eighty miles from the nearest mainline railhead - rely upon local trade, and coal boats (the legendary 'Puffers') from Campbeltown to the Clyde coast. Until its closure in 1931, the Campbeltown & Machrihanish Light Railway Co. ran a passenger and a freight service from the weigh-house at the head of the Old Quay.

Campbeltown & Machrinhanish Light Railway


1933 D's new childhood home - in due course also to become the home of his younger sister and her brother - faces south across Campbeltown Loch, and is a short walk from the town centre and the Old Quay. Entrance to MacTaggart home
1935 Photo (right) showing Campbeltown Loch from the entrance to Charles and Mary Mactaggart's home - a view that is theirs, unchanged, for exactly half a century (they move to Edinburgh in 1983).
1935 World politics: Stalin's show trials continue in Moscow (January); Hitler announces the 'Nuremburg laws' (15 September); Mussolini invades Ethiopia (28 October).
1937 D is prepared for his school entry exam by a medical student and general tutor from Hawick, Rory Hamilton, who awakens his interest in current affairs by helping him map the progress of the Spanish Civil War, week by week, in colour.
1938

September: begins school in Yorkshire.

R.M.S.Dalriada


1938-43 First piano lessons (1939); first meeting (1942) with a professional composer (and a considerable though now forgotten one) - Geoffrey Bowyer. Two remarkable teachers of English: the poet Patric Dickinson (returned wounded from active service) and Lyford Pike, who requires his pupils to write an essay on Beethoven's Fifth, and learn by heart a poem by Carl Sandburg - the latter considered by some to be cause for official complaint (which is duly registered). The silence of Yorkshire nights is occasionally disturbed by the rumble of German planes heading for the Clydeside or straggling back. A senior master morosely declares that the ultimate victor and the major world power will be the Soviet Union.
1943-48 School in Harrow (Middlesex).
1943-44 Some lessons in the random objectivity of missile and rocket attacks on London and the Home Counties.
1945 Oboe as second instrument.
1946 The past year's harmony exercises (Macpherson!) are at last alleviated by strict counterpoint in the Palestrina style (the Alan Bush primer).
1947-54 Copious attempts at composition (settings of modern poetry and prose including Sandburg, Logan Pearsall Smith, Adelaide Crapsey, Edward Thomas; piano pieces; a fragment for cello, percussion and piano; incidental music).
1947 30 March: Hears Ansermet conduct the British premiere (BBC broadcast, introduced by Lennox Berkeley) of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, and is overwhelmed. (Had begun collecting Stravinsky's pre-war recordings on the Columbia label when a specialist shop opened in Newport Street in 1946.) D's classics teacher, E.V.C. Plumptre, is a gifted musician, and together with his housemaster Lance Gorse (a scientist, recently ordained), becomes an important musical friend and mentor. Gorse introduces D to the music of Sibelius and Hugo Wolf (whole albums from his large record collection), and views his interest in composition and in contemporary music with friendly tolerance. The performance at a school concert conducted by Henry Havergal of Britten's Les Illuminations, with Sophie Wyss as soloist, proves a key event. Meanwhile, Plumptre, a gifted cellist active in the chamber music society and in the school orchestra, is a keen supporter of D's interest in contemporary music and takes him to the first postwar performance in the UK of Pierrot Lunaire, directed from the piano by Peter Stadlen. The newly published full score of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, and the two-piano arrangement of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, are among the gifts from Plumptre which will still have a special place in D's music library more than half a century later.
1948 Hears a BBC broadcast of the symphonic suite from Roberto Gerhard's Don Quixote; while visiting Cambridge University for entry-exam purposes, introduces himself to the Spanish-born composer (and former Schoenberg pupil) at his Cambridge home.

During his last year at school D absents himself permanently from geography classes after an exchange of views with the teacher, and is allowed by Gorse to make up the time with extra music lessons. His piano-teacher is so censorious about the volume of Bartók's Microcosmos which he has asked to study, and so insistent that the only 'foreign' composer of the day worth taking seriously is Ernest Bloch, that he walks out and asks the head of music to find him another piano teacher. To his delight he is assigned to Ronald Smith, then a composer as much as a (virtuoso) pianist, and easily diverted from the lamentable inadequacies of his pupil to the much more fertile ground of contemporary music and his own work-in-progress (a tone poem and a violin concerto). In the third and fourth years of Attlee's Labour Government, long-dormant political interests are awakened by Henry Lillingston and Herbert Harris (both brilliant and unorthodox teachers in their respective disciplines of History and English), and by Richard Crossman, an impressive guest speaker in the school's most prestigious lecture series. Leaves school at the end of the summer term. Plumptre attends the first Summer School in Music at Bryanston (director, William Glock) and returns with a vivid account of the terrors of attempting to write fugues for Hindemith.
1949-50 National Service. Three months infantry training in Kent; three months at the Education Corps centre near Bodmin; posted, with rank of Acting Sergeant, to the Headquarters of the RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) at Blackdown.

National Service



On detachment from Bodmin and temporarily billeted at a country house near Devizes, listens to the recently released recording of Vaughan Williams's D major Symphony, and discovers a second modern British composer (see 1947) in whose music he will retain a lifelong interest (Elgar will follow in due course). Through Ravel rather than Debussy (a later discovery), has already reached back to Satie and collected much of his music. Together with Hans Seelig, a fellow serviceman and budding composer, mounts a Satie concert at the Bodmin camp. Concert poster designed and executed by David Gentleman.





 
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Material Copyright © 2002 David Drew.