Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten (review)

Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten. By Mervyn Cooke. (Aldeburgh Studies in Music, 4.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998. [xx, 279 p. ISBN 0-85115-579-0. $81.]

The influence of Asian music on Benjamin Britten is widely known through two major works: the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1956), which recreates Balinese gamelan music in key passages, and the first "parable for church performance," Curlew River (1964), which was inspired by the Japanese Noh play Sumidagawa. Mervyn Cooke is not the first to have attempted a detailed investigation of such influences; Donald Mitchell, for example, examined gamelan techniques in the earlier of these works in his article "Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land" (Tempo 146 [1983]: 13-24). But Cooke is the first to offer an extended survey of what turns out to be an aspect of Britten's development far more vital than has generally been appreciated, and one with ramifications beyond those works whose subject matter is clearly of oriental provenance. A reworking of Cooke's dissertation ("Oriental Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten" [University of Cambridge, 1989]), the book offers full documentation of Britten's visits to Indonesia and Japan during his 1955-56 world tour, drawing on sources that include the diaries of two of his traveling companions, Peter Pears and Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine, as well as previously unpublished correspondence between Britten and various friends and collaborators (most notably William Plomer, librettist of Curlew River). Britten made transcriptions of gamelan music in Bali as well as recordings of gamelan and Indian music; six pages of the transcriptions are reproduced as (sometimes rather faint) plates. The composer also had recordings made of gamelan and Sumidagawa performances, and excerpts from these are usefully included on an accompanying compact disc. Cooke's documentation is an invaluable resource for Britten scholars, but the book's readership deserves to be far wider. The author's brief survey of orientalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western music and his discussion of the role of gamelan and Noh musics within the societies that created them makes Britten and the Far East an ideal case study for undergraduates; nor is Cooke's discussion of technical issues so demanding as to dissuade the general reader who is able to follow the music examples.

Cooke's central theme is Britten's increasingly fruitful interaction with oriental materials and techniques of structuring, in particular an increasing synthesis between East and West that culminated in Britten's last opera, Death in Venice. From the beginning of his professional career, Cooke claims, Britten's "compositional style was undeniably well suited to the admixture of more explicitly oriental material, and the success of his combination of Eastern and Western elements [later in his career] was undoubtedly made possible by a degree of inherent stylistic affinity" (p. 2). Cooke argues that such affinity, which enabled Britten to absorb oriental influences fluently and quickly, is seen in a number of early contexts. Two of these are "Rats Away!" from Our Hunting Fathers, which contains a heterophonic treatment of the five-note "motto" of the work, and the vocal line of the first of the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, which uses the anhemitonic pentatonic scale. As with most of Cooke's other supporting examples at this stage in his argument, however, these are isolated events, which, though irrefutably showing the qualities that Cooke identifies, are not entirely convincing as central aspects of Britten's style. Even less convincing are those cases in which Cooke goes further, suggesting the possible influence of oriental materials and techniques at this stage in Britten's career. One of these is "a curious passage" from "Being Beauteous" in Les illuminations, which Cooke sees as employing the Indonesian selisir scale (p. 36). Yet this song, completed on 16 March 1939, predates Britten's introduction...