7 - ‘From “Merry-Eye” to Paradise’: The Early Orchestral Music of Herbert Howells

Summary

Many years ago, in the 1960s, when even Howells's chamber music was little known, the present author attended a rehearsal of the Piano Quartet (HH 66), which bears the dedication ‘To the Hill at Chosen and to Ivor Gurney who knows it’. The music was unfamiliar to the performers, and the pianist read this dedication out to his colleagues and they all smirked in a condescending way before going on to play the music quite beautifully. Certainly there was a time when such an association by a composer would not be treated seriously, yet landscape had a profound impression on Howells's early music and we need to consider quite what he meant by such statements in respect of these evocative scores. Writing to his brother in 1922 he asserted that he could translate a feature of landscape ‘into musical terms, and be so expressed’. In an article on Howells in 1920 the critic Edwin Evans wrote about his music: ‘the Gloucestershire countryside is a better school than any academy’, finding a ‘sense of open-airishness combined with a feeling for distance that engenders a strain of mysticism’.