The Music of Herbert Howells ed. by Phillip A. Cooke and David Maw (review)

Herbert Howells (1892–1983) is best known as a composer of Anglican church music. He wrote over thirty settings of the Morning and Evening services, not to mention some fifty anthems, motets, and Masses, works frequently heard today in English and American churches. Yet, as this new book on Howells is at pains to point out, his career as a “church musician” began as a kind of sideline midway through his life. A prodigious talent and the favorite pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music (RCM), he made his initial mark with large-scale chamber and concert works, and throughout his career produced a steady stream of keyboard music for piano and clavichord (the latter an outgrowth of his interest in early English music). Professor of composition at the RCM from 1920, tireless adjudicator at university examinations and music competitions throughout the country, a fixture at the annual Three Choirs Festival (where a number of his works were premiered), Howells was a pillar of the English musical establishment. Even so, it seems that he never quite measured up to expectations. The big works—the symphonies, the operas—never materialized, and it was the uncertain reception accorded his orchestral works and concertos in the 1920s and 1930s that prompted him to turn to the established church, where his smaller-scale liturgical offerings found a ready audience.

The argument could thus be made that Howells, like Gerald Finzi (as portrayed in Stephen Banfield’s biography of Finzi), embraced the model of the “minor English composer”: content to work in the shadow of more important figures, avoid the compositional limelight, and concentrate on the creation of exquisite miniatures instead. Some of the essays in the volume appear to endorse this view insofar as they focus on Howells’s songs, services, and smaller-scale keyboard music. But this is to misread the intention of these essays, and indeed of the book as a whole, which pointedly treats Howells as a major, not minor, artist whose music is worth examining using the analytical techniques and research methods of mainstream musicology. Thus Paul Andrews subjects Howells’s thrice-written String Quartet No. 3 (In Gloucester shire), to a sophisticated source analysis that reconstructs the complex compositional history of the work and makes shrewd critical judgments about the relative merits of the different versions. (Andrews’s now-standard catalog of Howells’s works concludes the volume.) David Maw employs the most up-to-date analytical techniques of modern-day music theory to uncover the stylistic influences and formal innovations of Howells’s “phantasy” works. (This genre, loosely modeled on the Tudor and Jacobean fantasy, was the brainchild of the twentieth-century chamber-music enthusiast W. W. Cobbett, who funded a long-running competition for such works.) Fabian Huss makes an equally convincing case for the oboe and clarinet sonatas while focusing in more generalized terms on large-scale compositional strategies of repetition and contrast. Lewis Foreman’s crisp survey of the early orchestral music refreshingly highlights Howells’s colorful orchestral palette, gleaned from his close study of Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky.

The essays on the slighter genres, cited above, are no less thorough. Jeremy Dibble dissects the solo songs and uncovers a remarkable subtlety of motivic interconnection and tonal argument. Lionel Pike’s detailed bar-by-bar analysis of the motet Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing reveals a mind-boggling unity of design. In her study of the Six Pieces for organ, Diane Nolan Cooke nicely toggles back and forth between generalized discussions aimed at the nonspecialist and the detailed technical analyses of the professional musical theorist in order to explore the “dialectic of technique and aesthetic” (p. 39) at the heart of Howells’s complex yet accessible music. Paul Spicer’s study of melisma in selected songs and church works makes stimulating claims about the centrality of this technique...