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Literature on the life and music of Edmund Rubbra isn’t huge. Non secular Dimensions within the Music of Edmund Rubbra, a brand new ebook by Lucinda Cradduck, provides an evaluation of the composer’s life and works by the lens of his numerous non secular pursuits. At 250 pages plus references, it’s significantly extra approachable than Ralph Scott Grover’s exhaustive 1993 survey of his output, and provides an appropriate companion to Leo Black’s 2008 research of his eleven symphonies.
The Wilfrid Mellers comment that Rubbra was a person endowed with a ‘peculiar non secular make-up’ typically serves as an introduction to his music. However spirituality is a dangerously nebulous idea, liable to turn out to be a fuzzy stand-in, a catch-all for the ineffable. It’s to Cradduck’s credit score that she foregrounds it right here, and unpicks the assorted strands of non secular affect in Rubbra’s life with care and erudition. It turns into clear that Rubbra was a widely-read and curious man who took non secular concepts critically, and as listeners of his music, so ought to we.
She attracts out a nuanced image of Rubbra’s place in Twentieth-century British musical life, starting with the early, Theosophy-infused affect of Cyril Scott and Holst and his work with progressive dance and theatre teams. His artistic responses to Asian musicians equivalent to Ali Akbar Khan and the dancer Madame Menaka complemented an mental engagement with Japanese non secular traditions.
She identifies features of nature mysticism too – Rubbra lived for many years within the Buckinghamshire countryside, and related to artists and thinkers whose worldviews had been formed by Medievalism and the Arts and Crafts motion. The evaluation of the bewitching Canto from the sixth symphony is especially compelling right here, as is her nuanced reply to the query of Rubbra’s place within the English ‘Pastoral’ custom, one thing typically lazily equated with nostalgia within the wake of industrialisation and conflict, however which, in Rubbra’s case, arguably manifests itself extra as a progressive splendid for a humane and spiritually fulfilling existence.
What emerges is that Rubbra was as prone to be influenced by what he learn and noticed because the music he heard. He fed his thoughts on poetry and novels, and it was a library ebook that first launched him to the esoteric Theosophy motion as an adolescent. The colors and moods of Italian spiritual artwork impressed him, as did the idiosyncratic evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin. He adored the tranquility of Abbeys, and regardless of his considerably chaotic love life, thought-about becoming a member of a lay order. Whereas he was finally obtained into the Catholic Church, he retained a lifelong curiosity in Buddhism – and even needed to defend himself for it, when it was made recognized to a church music society who had commissioned him.
Cradduck’s use of musical evaluation is intensive, with loads of scored examples. I discovered it most enlightening when drawing on the natural qualities of his music – the way it expresses the concepts of divine interconnectedness, the fusing of opposites, and the innate expressive powers of sure intervals. Her identification of ‘golden sections’ and numerical sequences, then again, I discovered extra speculative than convincing, and arithmetic at all times makes for heavy studying. However general, this ebook is an admirably severe try at grappling with the manifestation of non secular concepts as dots on the web page, one thing which is not any straightforward process. That it consists of a few of his unpublished, unrecorded and unfinished works is especially worthwhile context for the Rubbra fan.
Cradduck avoids the temptation to bang the drum for Rubbra as an unjustly uncared for composer – her method all through is to light up the specifics of his life and works, one thing which I really feel truly makes the case for his music extra powerfully than direct pleading ever might. Nonetheless, her remaining abstract attracts comparisons to the favored, spiritually-influenced composers James MacMillan, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener, and so the query of why Rubbra’s music will get comparatively few performances nonetheless hangs unsaid within the air.
Additionally implicit on this ebook is one other absence – that of a real biography of Rubbra aimed on the common reader. Oliver Soden’s current ebook on Tippett and Leah Broad’s model new Quartet have proven publishers turning to Twentieth-century British composers as ripe materials for the mass-market biography, in each circumstances to important acclaim. May Rubbra someday obtain related remedy? Whereas Cradduck’s worthwhile research succeeds by itself phrases, it additionally suggests a life eventful sufficient, and related to sufficient vibrant personalities and mental actions, to make a worthy addition to this style.
Non secular Dimensions within the Music of Edmund Rubbra is accessible from Routledge.
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