Abstract
Mazey explores the varied use of choral voices in British film scores, and relates these to the heritage of the British choral tradition and to the work of composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Brian Easdale. This chapter analyses how choral sonorities are employed on film soundtracks and the particular spiritual effect they create. It takes account of the Christian associations of choral music and goes on to consider the broader mystical qualities of wordless choral sonorities and the way they are often associated in British cinema with natural forces, notably in the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
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Notes
- 1.
The choral societies and the choral festivals nurtured the tradition of choral music in Britain, and led to the commissioning of works that are now mainstays of the choral repertoire. Hubert Parry’s Scenes from Prometheus Unbound was premiered in 1880, and followed in 1887 by Blest Pair of Sirens. Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius (1900) was written for the Birmingham Festival, as were the two completed oratorios of the composer’s planned trilogy: The Apostles and The Kingdom. Vaughan Williams’s choral Sea Symphony was first performed at the Leeds Festival in 1910; Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast in 1931 again in Leeds. In more recent times, Young (1962, 278) identifies a strand of ‘“ethical” cantata’ in which modern music seeks to address contemporary matters; into this category may be placed Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem (1936), Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time (1944) and Britten’s War Requiem (1962).
- 2.
British Film Institute Special Collections, Music Cue Sheet MUS-1140.
- 3.
The reference in the name ‘Maddalena’ to the redeemed sinner Mary Magdalene is appropriate given the character’s dual personality and the constant danger of her slipping back to her less respectable side.
- 4.
Lane also suggests the probability of one of the singers being Irving’s wife, who would later perform a similar vocal role on the soundtrack of Scott of the Antarctic (2008, 13).
- 5.
Lord Berners composed a waltz to accompany the séance scene, and it is played on the piano diegetically by Davies (Esmond Knight) during the sequence. Used in truncated form in the film, Berners titled it Valse and published the whole piece as part of his complete piano works (Lane 2008, 13). The use of a waltz for the séance invites comparison with the shimmering waltz theme that Richard Addinsell provides for the ghostly Elvira in Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945), herself summoned back to an earthly plane by the séance in Lean’s film.
- 6.
Jumeau-Lafond writes: ‘“silent” voices are often used to illustrate those privileged moments in the score which endow nature with a sacred quality’ (‘des voix “silencieuses” pour illustrer un moment privilégié de la partition, et où s’exprime une sacralisation de la nature que l’on rencontrera bien souvent’, 1997, 266, my translation).
- 7.
The music cue sheet for Captain Boycott includes ‘God Save Ireland’, ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’, ‘The Heights of Alma’, ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ and other Irish melodies and dances arranged by William Alwyn (Music Cue Sheet MUS-195, BFI Special Collections).
- 8.
Margaret Ritchie originated roles in the Benjamin Britten operas The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947) and appeared as the soprano Adelina Patti in Pink String and Sealing Wax (Robert Hamer, 1945).
- 9.
The theme of a spiritual journey is found in the composer’s settings of the poems of Walt Whitman in the song for chorus and orchestra Toward the Unknown Region (1907) and the Sea Symphony (1910), and in his fascination with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Vaughan Williams produced incidental music for a stage performance of Bunyan’s allegorical work in 1906, as well as a one-act pastoral The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains in 1922, before completing his own operatic adaptation in 1949, first performed at Covent Garden in 1951. Ottaway notes the ‘borrowings’ from the Bunyan music that are to be found in the composer’s Fifth Symphony (1972, 35–6). Eric Saylor (2013, 171–4) details Vaughan Williams’s settings of Bunyan, and Grimley notes a connection with the Pastoral Symphony (2008, 172).
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Mazey, P. (2020). Choral Music: Christian and Pantheistic Mysticism. In: British Film Music. Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33550-2_5
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