The beginning of the Bax Edition – Symphonic Variations and Spring Fire
An Interview with George Owen

Editor’s Note:  I was fortunate to attend Ashley Wass’s Naxos recording of Sir Arnold Bax’s Symphonic Variations with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at Lighthouse Poole in 2008 and I recall the extraordinary efforts made by the musicians to read their parts from an indecipherable hand-written manuscript that had been partially damaged during a WWII London blitz attack.  Ashley Wass told me he’d love to program the Symphonic Variations for concert performances, but he said no orchestra would schedule the work due to the extra rehearsal time required for the musicians to read their parts.   Hearing that, I became determined to find a way to finance a complete restoration of the Symphonic Variations score and I initiated at Go-Fund-Me campaign in 2011 to raise funds for that purpose, but my efforts fell short of the £6,000 required for the project.  A question I frequently received from would-be contributors was why a public effort to fund a restoration of a score under copyright to Warner Chappell – who would ultimately be the beneficiary of the project?   I had to explain that Warner Chappell had given its approval for a new score but was unwilling to finance the operation.   So, the campaign died when only a fraction of the amount required to restore the score was raised.

Then in 2019, I was contacted by a Swiss pianist who had read of my Go-Fund-Me campaign and inquired about the status of the Symphonic Variations score.  I had to inform him it remained in a sorry state, and he said he’d be willing to finance a restoration as he would someday like to perform the work.  I immediately put this pianist in touch with Graham Parlett, the renowned Bax authority, and he commissioned Graham to restore the score and provide the new parts.  Progress was slow as Graham had many other projects going on at the time and he only got as far as inputting all the notes when he fell ill and, tragically, passed away leaving the project unfinished.  The challenge then became finding someone who could complete the work Graham had started.   It occurred to me to ask the composer John Pickard, who is Professor of Composition and Applied Musicology at Bristol University and who I had interviewed previously for an article on Bax.   I suspected John may know of someone who could complete the work Graham Parlett had started and John recommended one of his students and a young composer, George Owen – who has his own orchestration and engraving business.  George’s involvement in this project has been hugely beneficial and what follows is my interview with him about his involvement with Bax’s music including the restoration of the Symphonic Variations and other Bax scores.  

 

Richard Adams:  When John recommended you for completing the restoration of the Symphonic Variations project, he said he thought your experience as a composer made you an ideal candidate for the job.    What is it about being a composer that assists you with editing other composers’ scores? 

George Owen: Firstly, it’s an understanding that us composers are fallible, and quite lazy (or maybe that’s just me?). There will be errors to rectify, but there will also be mannerisms to amplify and clarify. What makes Bax ‘Bax’? What compositorial techniques did he use to construct the music from the ground up? It’s like an architect studying the plans of a building, looking carefully at the foundations, at the steel superstructure, and how the roof has been nailed on in order to understand how best to decorate the exterior walls. You need to have built a composition to understand how someone else has built theirs.

I’m also a professional instrumentalist with decades of experience playing orchestral music, so I know what the music should look like from the player’s perspective. I also conducted the University of Bristol Chamber Orchestra, so I know what conductors need to see. All my experiences feed into this editing and typesetting process – what is needed to make this music sound as good as possible? Noting, that if the music sounds good, the orchestra look good, the conductor looks good, and the composer looks good, and everyone goes home satisfied.

So, I’ve been pioneering a hybrid edition – on the one hand totally focused on the players’ expectations of music that is good enough to be performed well (a performing edition) – and on the other hand, one that debates the mistakes and notes down every single correction or change that I have enacted (a critical edition).

 

RA: You also came to this project with some familiarity with Bax’s music, is that correct?

GO: My first experience of Bax was listening to David Lloyd-Jones’ recording of the First Symphony. It blew me away with its orchestration and its bountiful melodies. Here was a proper, British, composer, who could sum up the wild nature of my native isles with a romantic, emotional outlook and an overwhelming sense of yearning and nostalgia thrown in for good measure. It really resonated with me, and still does, in a way that few pieces can.

I have performed Bax twice under the baton of John Pickard with the Bristol University Symphony Orchestra. We had a good go at the Fifth Symphony and followed it up the next term with Tintagel. I still have vivid memories of both performances from the cello section. Bax also made it into John’s module on 1920’s British composers that I undertook in third year, and I ended up analysing the opening of Bax’s Sixth Symphony and Walton’s First Symphony as part of my submission – I must dig that out…

 

RA: What were your initial thoughts when John asked you if you’d be willing to complete Graham Parlett’s work on the Symphonic Variations score? 

GO: John has been very encouraging of my passion for typesetting music and I can’t thank him enough for asking me. I have suffered from ill health these last few years and struggled therefore with my freelance performing career, so I have been looking to focus more on music that can be done ‘sat down’ and do it at the highest level; having this vote of confidence from someone I admire immensely was a huge boost for me. There was definitely an air of excitement and intrigue with Symphonic Variations – which will be explained in future questions – and some trepidation as I would be doing all of this work by myself for the first time. I didn’t expect it to blossom in quite this way and as the seriousness and scale of the larger task at hand (typesetting and editing all the orchestral works – funding permitted) became clear an eagerness set in.

 

RA: How far had Graham progressed in inputting the notes and from that point, what was left for you to do? 

GO: Graham had input all the orchestra, all of the solo piano, and the first 61 bars (of 1400ish) of the piano score (an orchestral reduction playable by a second pianist). It was split into four files, which I stitched together. Almost all the dynamics had come ‘loose’, so they had to be deleted and put in again. Graham had clearly begun proofreading against another source as he left a number of questions in the file and I wrote those all down into a document to answer later on.

What he hadn’t done was write down everything he had changed of Bax’s. He was also an editor keen to preserve all of Bax’s idiosyncrasies, even if they were wrong or annoying, so I have had to change things like the beaming of semiquavers and the placement of slurs. I have had to proofread the entire document again in order to ascertain exactly what has been changed and why. I will also need to produce the orchestral parts, proofread them, and construct the piano score and the full orchestral score. There is a mountain of tasks awaiting me.

At this stage (early March 2024) I am tidying up the piano score whilst working on proofreading. My wife, also a composer and instrumentalist, has been assisting me as she is excellent, just so diligent, at proofreading, and that helps speed things up. Somehow, she can decipher Bax’s handwriting!

 

RA: While you were working on the Symphonic Variations score, an opportunity arose to work on another major Bax score, Spring Fire.   How did that come about? 

GO: John Pickard let me know that he had heard from John Wilson, who had a very long list of questions about Spring Fire. JW has made about 500 editions in his career, mostly of whatever he has conducted and been unhappy with, and he was planning on doing the same to Spring Fire.  Coincidentally, I had just been commissioned (by you, Mr Interviewer!) to tackle Spring Fire, so I offered to complete the project with the intention that JW would perform it, knowing that someone as busy as JW would struggle with the two-month turnaround. My wife and I put in a monumental shift and finished the project on 23^rd December, about a week before it was due to be with the BBC Librarian team, who would distribute it to the players of BBC Philharmonic.

Because this was the first project to be completed, and because it was due to be played by an orchestra, we had to very quickly learn how to print, bind, and tape the score and parts. I was let down at a very late stage by someone who promised they could punch holes in my score at the correct pitch and had to source a holepuncher and binding machine big enough and at the correct pitch. Thankfully, due to the horrors of globalisation, I was able to buy one online and get it delivered before Christmas – a weird present, they must have thought. I also had to source A3 plastic coils and some very special tape. My dad made me a board on which I could line up the loose sheets accurately, and a friendly BBCNOW librarian (Katie Axelsen) kindly gave me a crash course in taping music together. We also had to design a front cover that we felt could stand the test of time, and that was a lot of fun. We made it a rich, dark green – similar to the bound scores that Graham Parlett had collected – and placed artwork from old Irish painters in the middle in homage to Bax’s love of Ireland: I selected three designs and asked a few friends at university for their opinions on them. My wife designed a beautiful border. Everything came together at just the right time, and I was delighted to reveal to the world the first of the critical Bax scores on the very day he became public domain.

 

RA: So you were working on two Bax scores simultaneously and both from early in Bax’s career as a composer. What is your opinion of both scores?

GO: They are very different pieces, despite not being that far removed in time. Spring Fire has this innocence, and raw, passionate outpourings that seem reminiscent of teenage love, but with all the maturity of construction that a 28-yr-old Bax would have had. Symphonic Variations feels more wizened, ponderous almost, and very exploratory, but more philosophically than adventurously. Symphonic Variations is also thinner – and obviously centered around the soloist – and he doesn’t use the full orchestra much; Spring Fire is full-blooded. A few people have commented that Symphonic Variations is hard to listen to in one go due to its length, and I understand why Harriet Cohen performed a cut version for so many years. But I would personally cut the piece differently if I had to. Spring Fire needs no cuts and is perfect as it is.

 

RA: What were the conditions of the manuscripts you had to work from in restoring both Symphonic Variations and Spring Fire?

GO: Working on Spring Fire was complicated only due to the lack of sources to work from, meaning that I and my wife had to find the mistakes ourselves through analysis and an understanding of Bax’s style, rather than simply comparing different versions. However, I’ve recently been in touch with someone who has Mark Elder’s set of parts from when he performed Spring Fire with the Halle and with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and I reckon there’ll be a few surprises in there. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get these in time for the first performance but I’ll do a second print run of scores soon and I’ll make some errata lists for the first set of parts.

Symphonic Variations is more complicated in general. The autograph manuscript caught fire during an air raid in WWII, and the back dozen pages or so are half-destroyed. Thankfully, I didn’t have to work from the fragile, disintegrating original, as Graham Parlett had masterfully photocopied it. But it does raise questions about what actually happens in those passages that are destroyed. Graham has input notes – but how did he know which ones to input? I currently have Chappell’s published 1963 piano score on my desk, but it contains little to no orchestral detail. Chappell also published a full score around the same time, but Faber (who run Chappell’s classical music section) only have a few pages of it to help with the damaged pages and they didn’t seem to know where the rest of it has gone. It appears I will need to make a trip to the British Library to find what they have on Symphonic Variations, but they suffered a massive cyberattack recently and months on are still to be fully recovered. I hope to make the journey at some point before completion in May/June, however.

 

RA: You had an opportunity to assess your own work on Spring Fire when you were present for the BBC Philharmonic’s rehearsal and performance of the score conducted by John Wilson.    What was that experience like and what did the orchestral players and John Wilson have to say about your new score?

GO: John Wilson marched into the studio, pointed at me, and said he’d found one mistake. I countered and said I’d found three already! He’s jovial and straightforward (a blessing in a conductor) and I’m always happy to get straight to business. The orchestra found another dozen or so errors after poring over it for three hours – all very minor, thankfully! I made my rounds during breaks in rehearsal and all the players were happy to raise wrong notes they’d discovered and I could compare to the manuscript and to the full score and clarify and/or change things as needed. The orchestra were extremely pleased at how legible my parts were – I think of them as my specialty due to my performing background. And John Wilson was also very pleased with it all: certainly, it was preferable to the “nightmare” parts (his words) he could have hired from elsewhere.

I worry I’m the person who knows Spring Fire the best in the world and could pick apart a performance of it, but the concert performance was thrilling. Every detail was exquisite, and I really look forward to hearing it on BBC Radio 3 in a few months’ time. I don’t think I will want to listen too closely, because the memory in my head is so perfect, but I will listen many times just to check there aren’t any final oddities to iron out.

It was one of the most special moments of my career so far. I know a lot of the players get to experience the thrill of high-level performance day-in-day-out, but us editors and composers only really surface every few months, so to be thrust into that situation and come out smiling counts as a success to me.

 

RA: The Symphonic Variations is a quasi-concerto so the piano writing is very complex.  I know you’re a cellist by training.   What’s it been like editing the piano part for this score?

GO: The last year or so I have been challenging myself during my Composition PhD to learn to write for piano, and have been writing my own concerto as part of that. But I’m not a pianist and never will be. Bax was a pianist, and by all accounts an excellent performer, especially of orchestral works (which he read from full scores like only a genius could or madman would). But the same rules apply to piano writing as they do to any other kind of instrument – clarity is king. It is only harder in that there are simply more notes happening at once, and there begins a struggle with spacing them out neatly. The trap one can fall into is manually moving things outside of their default positions, as you will inevitably click a button and all the positions reset. Piano music feels less rule-based and more instinctive, which is about as exciting a feeling one can get as an editor. I will run the whole project past a friendly pianist just in case, though.

 

RA: You’ve announced that you’re intending to edit more Bax scores in the future.   What is the reason for that and what are your immediate plans?  

GO: It’s just the right time to do it. Bax is now in the public domain so he is now free from the shackles of the big publishers, so there are few, if any, legal concerns about it. Plus, Bax is slowly but surely gaining traction amongst British audiences: audiences love Bax because of the melodic content. Other composers are getting the special treatment of fresh engravings, and I’m a firm believer that Bax needs playing, and that the best way is through high-quality music (my hybrid performing-critical editions being key). There will undoubtedly be other people working on new editions of Bax’s music, but only I am editing critically – and that enables future study of Bax’s work to a much greater degree than a performing edition can and hence adds an academic value that is sorely needed. The three great biographies of Bax (Foreman, Sutherland, and Russell’s film) are comprehensive, yes, but not recent, and they do not get into the music in any deep way, nor do they compare Bax’s music with his contemporaries in any quantitative way. So these critical editions will be the base for future academic work on those topics by whoever wishes. I certainly think a comparison of Bax to his contemporaries, largely those in the English Pastoral School, the Second New England School, and the Frankfurt Group, but also English and Irish composers active at the same time, would be very interesting to conduct and would aid an understanding of Bax. But that book is likely five or ten years in the future.

In the short term, after Spring Fire and Symphonic Variations, there are a few more projects that Graham Parlett was close to completing that I will bring in line – namely, the Violin Concerto, Winter Legends, his orchestration of Red Autumn, and the Tamara Suite. I also want to tackle the Seventh Symphony, and eventually the other six symphonies will join the pot. Bax wrote an infinite number of tone poems, some of which are hard to find, so releasing them will enable more orchestras to perform them. I have a rough schedule for these through 2024, 2025, and maybe 2026. But funding is the hardest aspect, as doing my work to my standard is time-consuming.

I’m in the process of resurrecting the Arnold Bax Society, and when that is running there will be memberships available and other donation options too, all of which will be put towards these projects. Hire fees and sales of scores will also contribute to the longevity of this mission.

 

RA: I know you’re an incredibly busy man with multiple projects going on at a time.  What other musical projects do you have going on at this time?  

GO: As mentioned, I’m studying a PhD in Composition, so I’m currently writing a lot. I have a piano concerto whose first movement is standing around 15 minutes so far, plus two 5-minute pieces for small ensemble, which will be performed in April and May at the Bristol New Music Festival and the university’s Postgraduate Composers’ Concert (which I am running and performing in). Then, I have recently finished a piece each for the University Music Society’s Chamber Choir and the Wind Orchestra which I’m looking forward to hearing and working on with them. I play in three New Music Ensembles – one specialising in student works but which also play difficult things like Saariaho and Takemitsu, another which features a plethora of East Asian instruments like the Sheng, Erhu, and Shakuhachi, and the final one features works that blend contemporary classical music with more popular genres like jazz, rock, blues. I’m aiming to write compositions for each of those within the year as well. So that’s pretty much all the composition dealt with!

Performance wise, apart from the groups listed above, I also perform in the University Symphony Orchestra – we have two symphonies by Martinu and Shostakovich to play this month; I also have a duo with my wife with occasional performances in South Wales – we recently did two sets at a Chinese New Year celebrations, playing traditional music as well as some Cantopop to the Hong Kong community in Newport, and we have a more relaxed concert this weekend.

Back at university, I’m also teaching some undergraduate composition classes and I run the student-led Composition Network and host the weekly meetings. There’s a passionate core of composers at the university, all of whom have exciting and unique voices and an unbridled passion of creating, so harnessing that and channeling it towards successful performances is a key role of mine.

There’s also other engraving work. I’ve recently set compositions by Martyn Brabbins and Havergal Brian, and done odd little things for the National Children’s Orchestra like turning the bassoon parts into tenoroon parts!

I’m sure I’ve missed things off this long, long list. I enjoy my life – it is full of different things that excite me in different ways.

 

RA: I wouldn’t say that your music sounds like Bax but you both share a love of nature and evoking natural surroundings. Do you agree?

GO: As I said earlier, Bax is a romantic at heart, with a love of the outdoors, a propensity for melody, and a desire to write densely chromatic harmonies. That sounds a bit like me! Though what he doesn’t do is counterpoint – I think I spotted a fugue in one of the symphonies, but that’s it.

My two major works for orchestra, Silent City and Seaguard, are definitely both inspired by outdoors. I was living (or trapped) in a city centre during the Covid lockdowns and Silent City was my ode to the colour and vibrancy of my parents’ garden in summer – they love wildflowers and have several fruit trees too. It blended a number of pastorale works (like Grainger’s In A Nutshell, Beethoven’s Sixth, Mahler’s Sixth, and Smetana’s In Bohemia’s Woods and Fields among other pieces) in the middle, a nightmarish collage that builds to a Mahlerian head before disintegrating. Seaguard is a prelude and fugue about the raging waves and the mythical, ancient hero who protects us from the worst the sea can bring. There’s other pieces much further back in my catalogue too, about nature.

I have been wondering why I write in this way, and some of it stems from wanting to communicate and share moments in my life that I enjoy. I grew up near the sea and learnt to swim there. I also like writing about journeys I’ve undertaken, and historical events I’ve learnt about. I like the connections between reality and my music and I treat music really as just another language I’m fluent in that I can use to talk to people with.

Both Silent City and Seaguard can be heard on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@owenorchestration

 

RA: Finally, can you tell us more about OwenOrchestration.com and the various services you provide in addition to editing and restoring old scores?      

GO: I set it up upon graduating to sell sheet music of arrangements I had done for windband. Two had been played by the University Symphonic Wind Band and I figured there was a decent market for new arrangements, and that no-one had really tackled the hardcore classical repertoire beyond the most basic Beethoven or Brahms pieces. I arranged Tchaikovsky’s charming First Orchestral Suite and a whole pile of Chopin Mazurkas, plus Debussy, Grieg, Moszkowski, and Ravel. The experience I gained writing for winds and brass, as well as typesetting all that music, gave me a big boost when it came to more serious projects.

I will arrange anything classical for any size of ensemble; I will typeset things, with a specialty of typesetting orchestral parts, and I’ll compose on demand, too. I recently took a popsong and added a string quartet to it that blended elements of Corelli and Vivaldi since the plot of the song takes place in the Age of Enlightenment, and I was really pleased with the result.

It feels strange having to turn my hand to so many different things as it never feels like I have any stability or structure, but that’s given me an adaptability and concentration that I like. Like I said earlier, music is starting to feel like something I’m fluent in.