Part I. Introduction

WHILE THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS in this study explored literary characterizations of the experiences of American soldiers who fought in overseas wars in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Southeast Asia, as well as the aftereffects of these wars on both the soldiers themselves and on those who remained at home, this chapter focuses on representations of what happens when the front lines actually come home—when the American domestic space itself becomes the target of violent foreign assault, as was the case in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. Not surprisingly, as happened with other major US wars, a robust body of American literature has grown up in response to the attacks specifically and to the global War on Terror more generally. And literary critics have not lagged far behind, with at least eight fulllength, single-authored studies and at least three collections of essays focusing on 9/11 literature and film published in the fifteen years following the attacks. The destruction of the Twin Towers, as several of these critics point out, was the first time since the 1812 war with Great Britain that the American mainland had been invaded, its borders significantly penetrated. (The bombing of Pearl Harbor is often discussed as an attack on a military institution on America's periphery and thus significantly different from the direct assault on the US civilian population in New York City and Washington, DC, in September 2011). No wonder, then, that much of the criticism that examines artistic responses to 9/11 focuses on the way that this literature is formally or thematically new or innovative, different from past American literature, as it reacts to a wholly new crisis, especially to what is frequently described as the “unspeakable” trauma of 9/11.

It is this sense that language itself is inadequate to describe the scale and suffering of the events of 9/11 that many critics point to as chief among the defining characteristics that make this literature feel and seem so different from previous American literature. Kristiaan Versluys, for instance, begins his book, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, by offering a long list of critics who argue that 9/11 is “unrepresentable,” that the terrorist attacks exist “outside the bounds of language,” and that they cannot be made sense of using conventional linguistic means (2).

Jacobitism and New England make seemingly strange historiographical bedfellows, though this need not be the case. A handful of recent works have addressed the curious relationship between the two, noting the frequency of accusations of Jacobitism in New England in the early eighteenth century. although generally arguing that the accusations were a reaction to an ‘imagined’ threat or simply ‘rhetorical hysteria’. Jacobitism provided a foil and played ‘an essential role in constructing the Protestant interest's identity’. Such studies, while noting important elements of a transatlantic dialogue and demonstrating support for the Protestant succession, posit the absence of real Jacobites or Jacobitism in New England. By doing so, they isolate New England from elements of British political culture, implicitly articulating a belief that Jacobitism was a movement or culture that could not survive an Atlantic crossing.

This chapter argues that Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism were fundamental elements in religious controversies and in the transatlantic political culture of colonial New England from 1702 to 1727. This in turn further suggests the lasting significance of Britain's ‘rage of party’ throughout the British Atlantic world. In many respects, the controversies concerning Jacobitism in New England best reflect the changing nature of Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World. In New England, as in England and Scotland, Jacobitism was a vital element in overlapping local and transatlantic political cultures. The integration of New England into the larger British political world, a process encouraged by imperial wars, controversies involving the Church of England, and the intensification of Atlantic communications, created an environment in which Jacobite sympathies or antipathy towards Jacobitism could be expressed in a colonial context.

Accusations of Jacobitism levelled by Congregationalists at their political or religious enemies are indicative of the changing face of Jacobitism throughout the British Atlantic: from a French Catholic threat to a British nonjuring or High Church Toryism. Nevertheless, it was not solely fears of Jacobitism which illustrate the significance of Jacobitism in colonial New England. Expressions of Toryism or High Church Anglicanism ‘shade equivocally’ into Jacobitism, and thus provide reminders that Britain's pan-Atlantic political culture was dynamic and multi-faceted. Thus, the eruption of crypto-Jacobite debates about passive obedience in New England arguably exemplify expressions of an evolving transatlantic British political culture shaped by struggles between Whigs and a conspicuously Jacobite–friendly Tory party.

THERE IS NO TYPICAL Simon Holt piece, but it is characteristic of his artistic temperament that each work should address itself to listeners in an uncompromisingly direct way. The audience is often approached forcefully, even vehemently, but also with an undeniable intimacy. As a listener, one detects an urgency of voice; the tone may be confessional or expressionistic, quietly meditative or extrovertly theatrical. Holt's titles have a way of drawing one in immediately to musical worlds that are fantastical yet strikingly precise in referents. Holt's taste for shadowy and nocturnal realms is pronounced, from the early Goethe setting Lunas Zauberschein (1979: H 1) all the way through to an icicle of moon, for orchestra (2014). His attraction to the macabre or grotesque is no less palpable: Era madrugada (1984), for chamber ensemble, takes its Spanish title phrase (‘it was between night and day’) from a Lorca poem whose central image is of a dead man lying in the street with a knife in his chest. The title of the early piano piece Tauromaquia (‘Bullfighting’) denotes ritualised combat, and more specifically alludes to the series of etchings by Goya.

To observe Holt's interest in building pieces around a central image is to speak in fairly literal rather than metaphorical terms. The music somehow communicates, translates or embodies, in its own sounding language, specific images from other arts – poetry, painting, sculpture or film. When translating verbal or pictorial images (or plastic forms) into sound, though, the composer (and his critics, too) will face the obvious separation between the physicality of visual surfaces and objects and the temporality of musical forms. ‘Images’ in sound, my central concern in the present chapter, will remain translations from another artistic sphere, because paintings are confined (in Lessing's formulation) to ‘a single moment of ever-changing nature, and … a single point of view’. The absent spatial or temporal dimensions of musical or visual media do not preclude our recognising the precision with which images might be defined for their respective audiences of listeners and viewers. Approaching the images in Holt's scores, I shall focus first on their time-bound nature, i.e., their definition as figures of rhythm and tempo. The other dimensions of the sounding image to be explored here involve ‘colour’ – a category that in music engages questions of both harmony and of timbre (‘tone colour’) or instrumentation.

In this chapter I would like to consider how medieval audiences are likely to have responded to and read animated sculptures as they performed the character of Christ in liturgical, paraliturgical, other ritual, and/or theatrical contexts. In particular, I would like to consider the Boxley Rood of Grace as both performer and performance. The Rood was an English mechanical1 crucifix removed from Boxley Abbey near Maidstone in Kent during the Dissolution of the monasteries; it was decried as a Catholic mammon and publicly destroyed. I take inspiration from Richard Schechner, who, in Between Theater and Anthropology, offers readers an analogous performance for consideration, inviting us to ‘Think what an event it would be if the Pope played Christ at Oberammergau.’

I will argue that performance of the Christ-figure in the Boxley Rood of Grace offers insight into the following conditions: 1. the perceived relation of medieval performer to performance; 2. an important alternative mechanism allowing and effecting the transmission through time of performance practice, which differs from the transmission of dramatic text; 3. the relationship of what I describe as individual ‘innovation’ within local performance to more widely meaningful medieval traditions and general praxis. Finally, I will consider the history of the Boxley Rood of Grace as both ‘transportation’ and ‘transformation’ performances (as articulated by Schechner) and its status and skill as centrally important readings of these two kinds of ‘events’.

Schechner does not develop his idea of a Christ-playing pope at any length. Instead, he focuses on defining and contrasting two types of performance which help to illuminate the Rood of Boxley's particular representation of the character of Christ over its long history. Schechner compares what he calls ‘transportation performances’, i.e. those that leave their actors unchanged over the course of a production with ‘transformation performances’ which effect change in or re-define their actors, such as initiation rites that transform boys into men. Lead performers in transformation performances take focus primarily because of their identity or ‘status’. Boys participating in initiation rites, for example, are of central importance because of their marginal and changing status, and likely do not sing or dance as well as the older men guiding these rites, for whom the performance is transportive and not transformative. In contrast, performers in transportation performances most often create focus because of their skill, although this is not always the case.

THE AIM OF THIS APPENDIX is to render Simon Holt's compositions clearly visible in an authoritative form, annotating them consistently for reference purposes. The entries are chronological. It remains for others to compile a bibliographical catalogue including publication details. From 1995 Holt's publisher was Chester Music, whose contract with the composer lasted up to Fool is hurt, H 77. Chester Music are responsible for issuing all the most accurate and up-to-date scores available up to H 77. They took over the twenty-five pieces that Holt published prior to 1995 with Universal Edition and have also issued revised and corrected scores of certain works that appeared first with UE. These include Syrensong, H 12, and Nigredo, H 25, which was the last of the original series from UE. At all stages of his career, Holt's revisions have concerned orchestration, notation and local details (whether small cuts or small extensions) but not basic design.

Additional dates of performances, with Holt's programme notes (quoted below), those by others, alternative genre groupings and some consultable scores in pdf. format, are found on the publisher's website (www.musicsalesclassical. com/composer/works/Simon-Holt).

Commercially released recordings are mentioned under individual pieces. BBC broadcasts kept at the National Sound Archive are also noted, primarily (though not exclusively) when no commercial recording exists (referenced with ‘NSA’ below: may be heard at the British Library). Dates quoted refer to the original broadcast.

Entries below sometimes make reference to Holt's four cycles of works. All their component works are self-standing, but ought (eventually) to be programmed as sequences. The only cycle so far to have been heard complete is the first, which Thierry Fischer (see Chapter 11) conducted at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival on 20 November 1998.

3 for Icarus, or the Icarus trilogy

Icarus Lamentations (H 20); Minotaur Games (H 21); Dædalus Remembers (H 26).

These pieces for related instrumental ensembles of different sizes originated between 1992 and 1995. They are discussed by Edward Venn in Chapter 4.

a ribbon of time

Sunrise’ yellow noise (H 30); Two movements for string quartet (H 33); Boots of Lead (H 35); Clandestiny (H 31); startled Grass (H 34).

These pieces are based on Emily Dickinson's poems, and on two texts drawn from her letters: they were composed between 1999 and 2002.

HALF A LIFETIME AGO, in the late spring of 1973, Peter Maxwell Davies and I drove up to Manchester to help John Manduell, as Principal, set up his School of Composition at the newly created Northern (later Royal Northern) College of Music, the only English conservatoire to offer ‘firststudy’ Composition at the time. Exactly four years later I received a note from Max, as he was always known, recommending a bright new talent from Bolton, at the time studying art, named Simon Holt. Evidently he had approached the RNCM a month or so before, but his application had been disallowed due to lack of a music A-level or the equivalent. In any case, we had just accepted four very promising new composition students, leaving no places for any more that year. Nevertheless, Simon dropped by for what we called an ‘advice audition’, and I was struck by the freshness, variety and absolutely non-academic nature of the music he brought with him. For administrative reasons he was advised to wait a year before making a formal application, so it was in in the spring of 1978, on the strength of a powerful portfolio of works and a clear sense of commitment, that he was accepted on a course specially set up for this obviously gifted student who lacked the academic prerequisites. These highly focussed four years would enable him to concentrate entirely on the subject in hand. And concentrate he did.

Unfortunately, because I'd already agreed to go to Sydney for a year to help the terminally ill Don Banks re-fashion the Composition department at the New South Wales Conservatorium, I was unable to work with Simon until September 1979. In the meantime, however, under the guidance of visiting Czech composer Petr Eben, he had already written one hauntingly beautiful song for mezzosoprano and bass flute, Lunas Zauberschein (Goethe), showing the sense of gently exploratory line, poise and timing that became notable features of his work for decades thereafter. What was interesting, though, was that certain features characterising the pieces he had submitted for his audition, particularly gesture and texture, were now far less to the fore. Evidently Petr Eben found his approach to composition too unconventional and tried a little gentle re-steering.

THE PAINTING Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Figure 4.1, p. 84), attributed to Pieter Bruegel the elder, has inspired numerous ekphrastic responses, including poems by William Carlos Williams and Michael Hamburger and, musically, Brian Ferneyhough's La Chute d'Icare (1988). W. H. Auden's account of the painting in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) provided both stimulus and titles for Simon Holt's everything turns away for piano quintet (2010) and expensive delicate ship (the fourth movement of 3rd Quartet, 2013). But Holt's most sustained engagement with the Icarus myth and the art it has inspired can be found in his earlier trilogy 3 for Icarus: Icarus Lamentations for chamber ensemble (1992), Minotaur Games for orchestra (1993, rev. 2008) and Dædalus Remembers for solo cello and chamber ensemble (1995, rev. 1997). Though the titles of these three works might appear to signal a return to mythic origins, Holt's response to the Icarus legend was nevertheless mediated significantly by Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In the way that the individual works respond to extramusical stimuli, along with the compelling, fantastically detailed and concentrated designs that emerge through this musical engagement, the trilogy surely ranks among Holt's most significant achievements.

In common with Holt's many titles inspired by the other arts, those given to the individual pieces comprising 3 for Icarus ‘only partially illuminate the truth of the music’. In this context, Holt's brief programme notes for the component pieces in 3 for Icarus are revealing. For the first, his account of the Icarus tale is prefaced by the comment that ‘[t]he shape of the piece doesn't necessarily follow the exact line of the myth but attempts to shed light in an almost cinematic way on various aspects of the story using a kind of “jump cut” technique’. For the second and third, there is even less apparent connection between mythical plot and musical design: Holt's programme notes pithily summarise the legends to which the titles refer, with no mention of the actual music. Titles and programme notes alike thus serve not as explanations, but as opening gambits in a narrative act in which composer and listener are complicit.

SUCH AWARENESS of the developmental needs of living beings may seem basic to a twenty-first-century observer, but it was a radical concept in 1890s America. Nonetheless, the expected ‘proper’ functions of women, and their resulting status, were a matter of increasingly fervent challenge by campaigners for social equality. This characteristically blunt declaration formed part of an appeal for women's suffrage by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, four years after the publication of her semi-autobiographical text, ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, in 1892. More famous in her lifetime as a public intellectual than as a fiction writer, Gilman wrote over 200 short stories: ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ has become a classic of the feminist literary canon. It relates the descent into madness of an unnamed Woman who is suffering what today would be diagnosed as postnatal psychosis. Gilman herself experienced bouts of depression throughout her life and underwent a ‘rest cure’ in 1877, two years following the birth of her daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson. During this period she was forbidden all mental and creative activity, and later wrote that the effect of such enforced constraint was to push her ‘so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over’.

Simon Holt first came across ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ in 1981 and found it compelling. In his words, ‘the way the story is told is utterly uncompromising and, considering when it was written, the courage of it is extraordinary’. He remained ‘haunted’ by the tale, but composing a musical response to it proved challenging. Thirty years later, Holt was commissioned to write his concluding piece as Composer-in-Association for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and ‘felt that this was finally the time to deal with it’.

Holt's composition (H 67) is a thirty-minute scena scored for solo soprano, six female voices and a reduced orchestra. Intended for the concert platform, it is a dramatic work allied to secular cantata and operatic traditions, but it belongs in neither category. Nor is it a song cycle, but rather a through-composed psychological study comprising nine short scenes, allied to a music-theatre tradition exemplified by Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King.