Alan Rawsthorne: Portrait of a Composer (review)

Alan Rawsthorne: Portrait of a Composer. By John McCabe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [xvii, 311 p. + 1 CD. ISBN 0-19-816693-1. $70.]

The late 1990s witnessed a revival of interest in the English composer Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971). Through a succession of new commercial recordings and reissues, international audiences discovered Rawsthorne's distinct musical style once little known outside Britain. John McCabe's monograph, the first on Rawsthorne's life and works, complements these efforts by focusing upon the composer's musical language, and invites a readership interested in mid-twentieth-century compositional techniques, in addition to enthusiasts of British music.

A contemporary of Constant Lambert, Michael Tippett, and Dmitri Shostakovich, Rawsthorne composed primarily in standard orchestral genres, with three symphonies, two concertos each for violin and piano, and a diverse corpus of chamber music and film scores to his credit. Rawsthorne's music differs drastically in style from the folksong-inspired works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and other contemporary composers with nationalist interests, and his chromatic vocabulary draws frequent comparison with Hindemith's. Neither the academic conventions of serialism nor the language of neoromanticism suited Rawsthorne, and instead of seeking innovative forms or exotic sounds, he crafted a concise, modernist style using traditional orchestral forces. Although his music found considerable favor in its day, it never enjoyed a lasting reputation commensurate with that of other composers of the same period.

John McCabe's monograph, however, strives to invert this antipathy by targeting listeners of music in addition to academics. Structured as a standard "life and works" biography, McCabe's book aptly bears the subtitle "portrait," a word appropriate to both the biographical sections, that use personal testimonies to chronicle Rawsthorne's relationships and confront his alcoholism, and the musical analyses, which engage Rawsthorne's musical individuality. A "complimentary" accompanying compact disc contains a selection of complete works and excerpts tracked in roughly chronological order from the Theme and Variations for two violins of 1937 to the Second Symphony of 1959. Clearly cross-referenced in and integrated with the text, the recording supplies an aural confirmation of McCabe's in-depth analyses of musical style. The program also succeeds independently of the text as an enjoyable compilation, and includes the Street Corner overture, Rawsthorne's only piece to remain in the repertoire. Unfortunately, the seventy-four minute recording excludes pieces from the 1960s which would have exemplified the austere textures Rawsthorne favored later in his career. Nevertheless, musicologists should note the effectiveness of this multimedia format, to date more common in the ethnomusicological literature.

McCabe discusses the harmonic vocabulary and basic reception history of practically every Rawsthorne composition in chronological order using well-chosen language accessible to readers with only a rudimentary knowledge of music theory. The analyses focus on formal considerations, the harmonic and textural attributes common to specific pieces, or Rawsthorne's style in general. For example, the discussion stresses the use of Neapolitan key relations, the melodic "signature" F-F-G-A, bitonal harmonies, and an original method of developing variation as consistent traits of Rawsthorne's style. Although McCabe does not refrain from criticizing Rawsthorne's shortcomings by exposing problems such as the Finale of the First Symphony, he shares his enthusiasm for this music with the reader in what ultimately amounts to a companion to the composer's complete oeuvre, although not the final word on any particular work. Music theorists who find some of McCabe's analyses cursory will welcome the eighty-four substantial musical examples providing the specialist with a wealth of source material to study. This rarely-encountered luxury, inevitably connected to the fact that Oxford University Press was Rawsthorne's publisher, renders McCabe's analyses meaningful and verifiable.

In his preface, McCabe refers to Rawsthorne as "a composer's composer" (p. vii). Who, then, would be a more appropriate biographer than John McCabe? A prominent composer in his own right, McCabe brings insider knowledge of the institutions of modern music-making...