Music Monday ~ UK and USA Sharing a Tune

After the weekend's post highlighting what might "shock" an American visitng the UK, for Music Monday drawing the "cousins" together, is something that shocked me in my early years in the USA.

In the UK, one of Sir Edward Elgar's famous pieces Pomp & Circumstance March has lyrics added to produce a patriotic song, Land of Hope & Glory. The same piece of music, without lyrics, is used universally in the USA as accompaniment when students walk their graduation walk across a high school or college stage. This fact shocked me to the core when, years ago, I attended the graduation of one of husband's grandsons!

My full blog post, from 2014, about Sir Edward Elgar and his music, is HERE.

So...



Patriotic songs from both sides of the Atlantic do bring on the cringes for me. It's not often that dear Vera Lynn is cringe-worthy, but here she inches a little nearer to it! I much prefer her singing White Cliffs of Dover- a hopeful song from World War 2.

Music Monday ~ Nimrod : Word, Music, Why We Cry

Nimrod, the classical piece, part of Elgar's Enigma Variations, used in countless movies, most recently in the final scenes of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, raising lumps in many throats. The piece is also played every year on Remembrance Sunday at the London Cenotaph, and is often heard during funeral services.

Who or what is, or was, Nimrod?

Once upon an Old Testament Time Nimrod was a mighty hunter, leader, founder of the city and tower of Babel and, rebel "against the Lord". He was son of Cush; grandson of Ham, and great-grandson of Noah. There's a good read about him, written by Shaul Wolf in a lighthearted style: The Life and Times of Nimrod the Biblical Hunter. I've mentioned Nimrod myself in an archived post about Sir Edward Elgar HERE.


In more recent times the name Nimrod has been given to ships and a fighter plane; but has also, overtime
gathered moss and become somewhat less "mighty". In modern American English the term nimrod has come to be used to describe a dimwit or stupid person, thanks in great part to cartoon character Bugs Bunny. Bugs ironically refers to hunter Elmer Fudd as "nimrod", as being an incompetent hunter (I guess!) Personally I have never heard the term used in this way exactly....except, perhaps, that a very dear one of mine, now long gone, did occasionally, and I should add affectionately, call me "Nimrod" as a nickname. I was unaware, at the time, of the name's origins and - I'm guessing - so was he!

Back to Nimrod the music. It's a piece that evokes emotion, not only because of the circumstances of its use, but due to something within the form of the music itself. I found partial explanation on the internet via "Guardian Answers". I hope I'm not overstepping fair use regarding copyright rules by including here two answers, from newspaper readers, to the question: Why do some tunes, like Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations, make you want to cry?

SOME music arouses sad or happy emotions because of past events that we associate with it (the 'Listen, darling, they're playing our tune' syndrome) but this doesn't account for the fact that some tunes seem to have the power to affect different individuals' emotions in an apparently similar way, even when the people concerned have no shared history of experience to account for this reaction. Music scholars and philosophers have long disputed whether or not music actually 'means' anything, and if so, what. The late Deryck Cooke comes closest, in my view, to explaining this contentious area of musical aesthetics. In his book, The Language of Music (OUP, 1959), Cooke suggests that all composers of tonal music from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century have used the same 'language' of melodic phrases, harmonies and rhythms to evoke the same emotions in the listener. If true, this could account for the fact that Nimrod seems to communicate the same feeling of melancholy to different people. This is a hideous oversimplification of Cooke's complex theory. He argues that it should be possible to compile a dictionary of musical idioms and their corresponding 'meanings' to identify which sequences of notes convey joy, grief, innocence, erotic love, etc. (Linda Barlow, Reading, Berks.)

IT IS a very rare tune which would cause a listener to want to cry. But a harmonised piece of music can very easily do so. Music often depends for its interest on creating and resolving tension. Tension is given to a passage by, for instance, moving away from the key in which the piece started. When the 'home' key is returned to it comes with a feeling of resolution. The classical sonata form is basically an exercise in waiting for the return of the tonic key. Composers started to use devices such as a long dominant pedal (signalling that we are about to return to the home key) and then delaying the final resolution longer than expected, giving added weight to the home key when it is finally reached.

Another way of creating and resolving tension is through dissonance. Two or more notes that do not sound pleasant together are changed for some that do. The more dissonant the interval, the more it can make you physically tense up (I find my neck and shoulders tightening). And probably the simplest trick of all is like a rhetorical device much loved by Hitler - start quietly and get louder. If you're really out to milk the emotions you are more subtle and reach the loudest point about nine-tenths of the way through and subside back to peacefulness.

Nimrod uses all of these tricks. The theme itself is harmonised using dissonances (some of which resolve into further dissonance, heightening the effect); it starts quietly and gradually builds up; just before the final statement of the theme there is a long roll on a timp while the brass extend the feeling of 'here we go back to the tonic key' by waffling in the dominant, and after the loudest bit of all it recedes to a quiet conclusion. Music can also make you cry if it is crap. (P S Lucas, Birmingham 18.)

And so...here's the version of Nimrod used in the movie Dunkirk, now doing the rounds, and which I blogged about last week HERE. The movie's full original score was composed by Hans Zimmer, who arranged Elgar's iconic piece to fit in seamlessly for the final scenes.

Music Monday ~ Sir Edward Elgar - Pomp & Graduation

Sir Edward Elgar was born this day,
2 June, in 1857, in Worcester (pronounced, Wusster) England, the city lies somewhere between Stratford-on-Avon and the Welsh border, in the county of Worcestershire famous for.....sauce.

In Britain, lyrics added to one of his compositions have caused it to become a secondary national anthem (Land of Hope and Glory), while in the USA the same composition is played routinely as students walk their graduation walk across a stage - a fact which shocked me to the core when I attended the graduation of one of husband's grandsons. See Tom Reeder's blog for detail on origins of that "theft".

Edward Elgar, son of a piano-tuner, became self-taught composer of numerous grand marches, a couple of symphonies, and some chamber music. He is, these days thought of in far more affectionate terms than he ever was in his own day. Many of the elite of the music world, back then, despised him and all his works. He probably didn't help himself by his attitudes. From what I've gleaned during internet searches, it appears he was something of an enigma - how appropriate that he should have composed the Enigma Variations! He was described as "rude, prickly, artistic, Bohemian, aspiring to nobility". (BBC Talk)

A long essay by Dr David C.F. Wright, "Elgar Unmasked" has him pegged as a rather nasty, somewhat perverted womaniser. I shall not quote from that piece due to a rather severe copyright notice at its end. I suspect there's too much vitriol within it, though, for it to be 100% reliable, even if there is a sliver truth in there.

Elgar was knighted before he was 50, awarded the OM (Order of Merit), became Master of the King's Music, a baronet and GCVO (Grand Cross of the [Royal] Victorian Order [knight]). And he pulled strings to try to get a peerage. Seems he was an adept social climber! However, he was also a "mercurial outsider" (appropriate description considering he was born with Sun in Gemini, ruled by Mercury!)

"A tall, thin man with his bully moustache, the countenance of an ascetic atop a footballer’s body—the son of a piano-tuner, completely self-taught, “from harmony to fugue,” an early biographer wrote, hurried and self-divided, always in and out of love with music, always tossed between exuberance and despair, and forever obsessed with ciphers, riddles, and word tricks, not to mention his passion for “public mysteryfication,” as music critic and his longtime friend Ernest Newman put it.

He was keen on, and fairly expert in the use of, ciphers. He once wrote a note in cipher to a lady friend nicknamed by him Dorabella, "consisting of 87 glyphs unevenly spread over three lines. It contained 24 different symbols that featured one, two, or three cusps or curves. The glyphs were tilted in what appeared to be eight various angles. In a glance it gave the sense of seagulls, or sheep, or bits of stubble. Dora looked at it, couldn’t figure it out, put it in a drawer, and didn’t draw it out again for 40 years."

See here
..........Julian Lloyd Webber, an acclaimed cellist, and younger brother of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber:

has come to see the cipher, and all the other aspects of Elgar’s affinity for mystification, as the heart of the brilliant composer. “I think he set out to intrigue and puzzle people, knowing that they would talk about him—at the time the works were written and also long afterward,” “There was also a mischievous side to him. He liked playing tricks on people, and one of those tricks might have been to send that poor girl that thing that was completely undecipherable and he knew it.”

(See here and here.)

The end of the Great War (in 1918) brought a backlash. Elgar was regarded in influential quarters as a sentimental jingo mindlessly celebrating empire and war, a view promulgated in an influential (and notorious) article by E. J. Dent. Critics characterized his music as overblown "loose, baggy monsters," incoherent as a three-volume Victorian novel. This colored Elgar's reception for decades. To his friends he came over as a jovial companion, fond of making puns and playing practical jokes., who might have been puzzled by the Elgar who said he always knew God was against art, lost his religious faith and said of the First World War: "The men and women can go to hell - but my horses! Let God kill his human beings but - how can he? Oh, my horses."
Knowledge of the complexity of Elgar's personality, with its tendency towards manic depression, led to an appreciation, only rarely perceived earlier, of the anguish and loneliness to be heard in much of the music, especially in the symphonies, the violin and the cello concertos and The Music Makers.
"Stately sorrow" and "heroic melancholy" are phrases rightly applied to his music and they can be heard in most of it

From the UK's Telegraph.



Does Elgar's natal chart match up to what I've discovered above? I haven't used the time of birth that's available at Astrodatabank because it has been rated DD (very unreliable). The 12 noon chart below is sufficient for a quick look.

 Hat-tip to blog HERE

Hmm. Elgar's chart reminds me of Sir Stanley Spencer's - a 2-sided personality indicated by clusters of planets in adjoining signs making up the bulk of the chart. In Elgar's case Gemini and Taurus vie for attention, with Saturn getting in on the act from Cancer in semi-sextile (30*)to his Sun/Mercury/Mars stellium. Moon out on a limb somewhere in Libra is the main outlier, Neptune in Pisces, oddly doesn't have a lot to do, unless it happened to have been close to the ascending degree or mid-heaven, which can't be known without a time of birth. I'd have expected Neptune to be prominent, especially in view of Elgar's love of ciphers and mystification.

Gemini's eloquence and social fluency and a hint of Trickster too, along with artistic gifts from Taurus and Libra, on the surface would seem like an abundance of goodies - yet Elgar had trouble, it seems, in coping comfortably with this blend. Repeating from one of the quotes above:

....hurried and self-divided, always in and out of love with music, always tossed between exuberance and despair, and forever obsessed with ciphers, riddles, and word tricks, not to mention his passion for “public mysteryfication...

Gemini = Mutable Air, Taurus = Fixed Earth. Narrowing it makes the conflict more understandable, and with Saturn chiming in from Cardinal Water sign Cancer, the mix became too much to handle, at least some of the time, resulting in what outsiders saw as described in that quote.

Without a reliable time of birth to assist, further insight evades me.


Here is another of Elgar's well-known pieces, it's the Ninth Variation of the Enigma Variations and is titled "Nimrod" after the biblical reference to Noah's great-grandson of the same name who was a gifted hunter. It pays tribute to Elgar's great friend Augustus J Jaeger (whose surname in German translates to 'Hunter') who managed to keep Sir Edward's hopes up while he was still trying to make his mark on the world of music.
(More detail HERE)

I've chosen a video with more interesting "cosmic" visuals than watching members of the orchestra. The piece is played here by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. I find it "goose-bumpy"!