Parry's Creative Process

In the last twenty-five years, a number of British composers-Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie-have (happily) been reassessed after a period of neglect since the First World War. This reassessment has been hard-earned, for many battles to establish the importance of their work have been fought against careless criticism and prejudice, based, incredible though it may seem, on a limited knowledge of the music in question. Bernard Shaw's critiques of Parry's Judith and Job, by virtue of their humour and erudition, have been quoted ad nauseam (though without the effort to deconstruct them) and have become established in the canon of popular invective along with the views of others, such as Delius, who plainly knew little of Parry's work. Michael Allis's extremely detailed and specialized book, Parry's Creative Process (which began life as his doctoral thesis at London University) finds its raison d'être precisely in the erroneous acceptance of Parry as academic pedant, conservative, and high-class amateur, who was too prolific to be self-critical (see H. C. Colles, The Growth of Music (rev. Eric Blom, London, 1956), 166, and Eric Blom, Music in England (Harmondsworth, 1942), 163-4)—an unreliable topos that, as Allis states, has not been levelled at other prolific composers. Yet such generalizations and impressions of Parry the avuncular, 'lazy', back-slapping amateur have formed a pervasive image which is echoed in writers from Ernest Newman and Alexander Brent-Smith to Frank Howes and Gerald Abraham, and until the late 1970s was regarded as a standard view in the literature on British music of the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Through a reasoned and varied approach to the surviving primary sources, and by a select but thorough assimilation of the secondary sources, Allis has been able to construct, with notable success, a picture of Parry that refutes many of the lackadaisical clichés, and he has debunked decades of what Howells once referred to as 'loose scorn' with regard to Parry's attitude to the orchestra. First and foremost, Allis demonstrates that, contrary to those who dismissed him as uncritical, Parry was not only professional in his craft but that his creative mind was entirely disposed to the notion of constant revision, almost to the extent of neurosis. More to the point, it seems that Parry was rarely satisfied with the 'finished article', as can be understood in the methods he exercised in the genesis of all his works, whether vocal or instrumental. Allis attempts to explicate this process systematically by clarifying the significant differences between those stages of the 'sketching process' where varying levels of detail are evident. In the songs, which were invariably subjected to many stages of revision, he makes a distinction between 'pre-draft sketches' (the initial stage of the compositional process) and 'draft sketches' (those which 'intersperse the succession of drafts in the solo songs') and, with examples such as 'A Fairy Town' and 'When the Sun's Great Orb', proceeds to show how these form part of the larger process.

In the instrumental works (generally a more neglected area of Parry's output) the initial notated ideas are categorized as 'concept sketches' since they invariably appear in black ink or pencil on two staves and, often bearing scoring indications, relate to the opening of a work. Out of the concept sketch emerged 'developed sketches', which ranged from paragraphs to entire movements, though again such sketches remained confined to two staves with varying textures. Such sketches consisted of either continuous composition or as an 'amalgam of revisional blocks' which could be used in a different order depending on the nature of the material. Allis makes the point that, even from an early stage of creativity, Parry worked in a hierarchical manner, and though the process of 'developed sketches' may have altered in his later works (where such sketches are largely absent), the schematic nature of his thinking was already well established, and it was a process that 'was flexible enough to accommodate [his] revisional procedures' so common in his mature oeuvre.

In terms of the 'notational' process of Parry's compositional method, Allis's fourth and fifth chapters represent the core of his study. He presents further definitions of his systematic scrutiny of Parry's drafts, which, he asserts, are important for the purposes of chronology. The 'draft proper' is a stage of the work where the material is in a 'relatively fixed state' (though one where further revisions were made, often extensively), whereas the 'rough draft' lies between the sketch and draft stages where Parry's determination to make a draft seems to have been superseded by the desire to make further sketches. Such rough drafts often begin in a clear fashion but deteriorate (often rapidly) into skeletal ideas written in pencil rather than pen; this is demonstrated in the fine setting of Byron's 'There be none of beauty's daughters'. The reason for distinguishing between these two types of draft is made clearer by Allis's conclusion that, by 1892-3, Parry's procedures for drafts began to follow a strict pattern, which, in chronological terms, is vital. Allis shows that before 1892 Parry made drafts on both rectos and versos of his manuscript paper. After this date, drafts proper of solo songs, unison songs, part-songs, keyboard works, choral works, small-scale chamber compositions, and theatre works appeared on rectos only, with versos being reserved for draft sketches, while a separate and limited group of rough drafts appeared on rectos and versos. Allis points out, with some force, that it was 'a sudden attack of self-consciousness, a real awareness on Parry's part of the methods he was employing in the craft of composition; it is almost as if he began to set out his ideas not only for his own benefit, but for posterity'. As for the reason why Parry adopted this method, Allis suggests that it may have derived from Parry's own reading of Nottebohm's work on Beethoven's sketchbooks (Beethoveniana: Aufsätze und Mittheilungen (1872), Ein Skizzenbuch von Beethoven aus dem Jahre 1803 (1880), and Zweite Beethoveniana: Nachgelassene Aufsätze (1887)), which the reading list of his 1892 diary shows that he read.

Having established this modus operandi, Allis discusses in some depth the nature of Parry's individual drafts, which varied in number between at least two and as many as six before a final version was reached. An illustration of how this process developed is shown by the Songs of Farewell and particularly the first and fifth motets ('My Soul, There Is a Country' and 'At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners'), where the salient parts of the work—the openings, climaxes, and endings—were often changed radically before achieving their final forms; these attributes, together with issues of thematic alteration and structural definition, are subsequently applied to the mature published and unpublished chamber works, all of which were subjected to extensive revision. Allis reserves his most detailed assessment of Parry's sketches and drafts for chapter 8, in which he shows, essentially, how his 'system' of definitions might be applied critically to one song, a setting of Christina Rossetti's 'A Birthday'. Here a list of no fewer than eighteen sketches and drafts is presented and appraised in order to show how a song of only forty-four bars was finally completed after much rumination; it was also a process which 'travelled' from sketches of vestigial thematic elements and harmonic progressions to drafts where slight yet quintessential details of texture, harmonic nuance, and rhythm were altered and crystallized. Such an exhaustive self-critical process was hinted at in the introduction to the volume of Parry's songs edited by Geoffrey Bush for Musica Britannica (vol. 49 (1982)), but here Allis has confirmed, in graphic manner, that Parry's attention to detail was not only meticulous and painstaking but also agonized and often frustrating.

In other chapters Allis extends Parry's revisionary mode of thinking to the processes of scoring, and to the practical experiences of rehearsal, performance, and publication, all of which provided further opportunities for the composer to change his mind. Again, contrary to popular belief, and to the somewhat nonchalant remarks of C. L. Graves and R. O. Morris, Parry was exceedingly careful in his approach to instrumentation. Works like the overture Guillem de Cabestanh (1878-9) show a method whereby a draft full score in pencil was followed by a fully notated score in black ink, a process also echoed in the case of the First Symphony, which shows pencil inked over. More important, however, in the draft and final version of Guillem de Cabestanh, Allis shows that Parry was still dissatisfied with aspects of his work, for numerous details of rescoring and alteration of figuration appear throughout in red ink, a habit he was to bring to later full scores with detailed (indeed, as Allis states, 'documented') annotations of changes. In later orchestral works, such as the unfinished Elegy for Brahms (1897), Allis constructs an intriguing and largely convincing theory of Parry's attitude to scoring (which bears a striking resemblance to Bruckner's methods in his Linz period), in which treble and bass lines were written first, and the remainder of the strings were then completed, followed by wind and brass. It is a theory supported by Parry's own observation in Style in Musical Art where he considered that the greatest problems of scoring lay in the distribution of wind and brass; moreover, it is significant, as Allis points out, that most of Parry's own revisions to scoring are located mainly in the wind and brass sections. Although many of the revisions took place before the works had been placed before performers, there is no doubt that Parry also leapt at the chance of making alterations during rehearsals and after premieres. In addition, those rare surviving proofs of full scores, such as those of the Second Symphony and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, reveal that he was still minded to make changes, and the discrepancies between surviving autograph manuscripts and the published versions of chamber works (such as the Piano Quartet) and songs confirm that further revisions must have taken place at proof stage.

The main emphasis of Allis's study is the tracing and extrapolation of Parry's creative process from the wealth of sketch, draft and autograph manuscripts (i.e. final versions) that have survived (principally at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and Shulbrede Priory). There are, however, two chapters which, though they lie outside this central thesis, are nevertheless useful in enhancing an understanding of the 'science' of Parry's compositional procedures and the chronology of his manuscripts. The second chapter is an important reference guide to the entire range of materials (which includes notebooks and Parry's fifty-four years of diaries as well as manuscripts), and their provenance and locations. Allis provides a detailed account of the early sketchbooks (which goes much further than the catalogue Emily Daymond attempted to prepare in the 1920s), and, thanks to the fact that Parry provided dates of composition and completion, he provides an internal chronology of the first three; but most of the chapter is devoted to an examination of the physical nature of the manuscripts themselves, notably the paper and, to a more limited extent, the writing materials. One of the most frustrating features of Parry's music is that, after being more assiduous in his early sketchbooks, he failed to provide dates for his later works. Given his predilection for revision, sometimes over many years, a knowledge of paper types that Parry used can, to some extent, provide an indication of when works were probably composed and rewritten. His use of 'Carbonel' paper for works such as the Concertstück, the song 'Love and Laughter', the Suite in D minor for violin and piano, and the Fantasia and Fugue (all 1877) helps to provide a likely date for the undated revision of the Violin Sonata in D minor (recently published by Musica Britannica), and the mapping of Parry's extensive usage of the different forms of 'LardEsnault' (including its later form, 'H. LardEsnault, Ed. Bellamy') provides an illuminating reference guide, made all the more valuable by Allis's contextual comparisons with the same manuscript paper used by other composers between 1880 and 1914.

In chapter 7 ('Attitudes to Text') Allis comes to Parry's creative process from an entirely different angle in that instead of concerning himself with manuscript source materials, he concentrates on Parry's approach to and manipulation of text. Part of the discussion is reserved for a survey of poets used in the song settings, and of Parry's choice of words from the Bible (refuting, incidentally, Delius's curt dismissal that Parry might have set the entire Bible to music had he lived long enough). But of greater interest and significance is the consideration of Parry's ability as an editor and creator of texts for his choral works. This is instructive in showing how he attempted to generate a balance between literary cohesion and musical structure. Moreover, the methods he employed, which included sweeping powers of excision (be they in dramatic contexts such as Shelley's Prometheus Unbound or philosophical allegories such as Job) tell us much about the composer's ethical preoccupations filtered through the amalgam of Ruskin, Darwin, and Spencer, and about his own desire to project more experimental musical canvases. This is evident not only in Judith and the highly novel structure of Job but also in the series of 'ethical oratorios' culminating in The Vision of Life (1907), where, pace Elgar's admiration, Parry's own poetry, uncomfortably dated as well as frequently banal in sentiment, feels distinctly incongruous within the more discursive symphonic ambience of the musical content. Parry was most often successful when setting the words of others, a decision he must have reached himself after the lukewarm reception of his last ethical oratorio, Beyond These Voices There Is Peace (1908); but, as Allis shows, he was by no means an easy partner in collaborative projects, a fact supported by his problematic relationship with Robert Bridges in Invocation to Music (1895) and by the disaster of his one operatic venture, Guenever, with Una Taylor.

Given that Allis prefaces each chapter with an important epigraph from Parry's musicological writings, it seems inevitable that he should choose to make the connection between Parry's methods of creativity and his wider artistic credo at the conclusion of his study. Most of the quotations are taken from Parry's three most popular and influential writings, Studies of the Great Composers (1887), The Art of Music (1893), and Style in Musical Art (1911), though it is also evident that Allis's purview of Parry's literary work extends to lesser-known articles and papers (such as 'Things that Matter', published in the Musical Quarterly in 1915) and the unpublished, overamplified, but nevertheless quintessential work of his last years, Instinct and Character. That we should find plentiful evidence of Parry's organic, generative style in his working methods comes as no surprise. It is plain to see from his writings that he held Beethoven (even more than Brahms) in the highest esteem, and the fact that his own system of working should emulate his idol serves to underline the Beethovenian eulogies of his published writings and (teste Vaughan Williams) unpublished leetures. On a deeper level, however, Parry's creative process, with its inherent sense of intellectual and democratic duty, chimes with a sense of moral responsibility in which 'refinement', 'reassessment', and 'self-criticism' were seminal watchwords. These, Parry implicitly believed, were germane human values, and ones which, if carried through with sincerity and dedication, could be conveyed to audiences through the medium of music.

At £47.50 for 262 pages this book is perhaps a bit expensive, and it is a pity that it includes no glossy photographs or facsimiles, the latter of which would have been a helpful contextual addition to the generous number of music examples as well as an important visual aid to the understanding of Parry's hand and the 'physical' properties of the paper and ink. The music examples are well placed in the text, easy to follow, and neatly laid out. The text is supported by extensive but entirely relevant footnotes, a wide-ranging bibliography, and, in addition to a standard index, there is one for works which undoubtedly enhances the book's usefulness for reference purposes. As an addition to the literature on Parry, the book serves not only to complement more recent biographical and musical studies but also to accentuate the fact that Parry's music is fertile ground for research from both musicological and editorial points of view.