"Aha" - The Penny Dropped!

A 16th century idea of Archimedes in his bath.
Notice the crown on the floor at the bottom
right!

I suppose a scientist researching some important scientific phenomena must get a real thrill when he or she makes a breakthrough and realises that they have made an important discovery. Equally a detective must smile quietly to himself when he puts two and two together and realises who has committed the crime. In Ancient Greece, Archimedes must have felt the same way when, according to legend, he leapt from his bath and ran naked down the street shouting “Eureka” (I’ve found the answer)  having been struggling with the King’s order to find a way of testing that the royal crown was of pure gold and not a mixture of gold and base metal.

Similarly, we’ve all experienced the moment when we’ve realised something to be true or untrue or we’ve suddenly seen the answer to a problem of some kind or we’ve suddenly mastered some new skill after much struggling. At times like this we say “the penny dropped”. I remember when I was at teacher training college these events were often described as “Gestalt moments” named after the German psychological behaviourist  Gestalt Theory. “Gestalt moment” simply means “the moment of realisation”. Gestalt is German for seeing the whole of something – in other words when it all makes sense to you. I can still remember sitting in a psychology lecture at teacher training college and hearing one of the lecturers, describing a Gestalt moment as an “Aha Moment” – just like Archimedes’ “Eureka!”  In a classroom it’s great when one of your pupils gets that “Aha Moment” – when they’ve “got it” and I suppose an inherent part of your job as a teacher is ensuring that the right steps are put in place to ensure that children at some point are lead to the stage where they can make the final connection and  “get it”. It’s the basis of learning theory.

If you are in the Ruddington area next Saturday
drop in and enjoy the concert!

Well, a few days ago I had an “Aha moment”. It wasn’t a great scientific discovery or an important part of the development of humanity. It was just a satisfying realisation that something I had long known was “connected” to something else  - and it pleased me. Suddenly it all made sense. It was the sort of useless information that might be worthy of the game “Trivial Pursuits” but for me it rounded things off nicely or in other words, “the penny dropped”.

Over recent weeks Pat has been putting together her programme for the next concert to be given by her choir – The Ruddington and District Choral Society. I always help her with this task and do a bit of the research required to complete the programme notes on the various composers and pieces to be sung. Next week’s concert  will comprise of Mozart’s mighty Requiem, arguably the greatest of all requiems and certainly one of the world’s very great pieces of music, and a smaller piece by the English composer Benjamin Britten – Rejoice in the Lamb. This year is the centenary of Britten’s birth and throughout the year his music is being celebrated up and down the country and throughout the world – by small local organisations like Pat’s and by national and international orchestras, choirs and opera companies. Britten is often considered to be the greatest of English composers after Henry Purcell and although his music is more modern it is amongst the most highly internationally acclaimed.

Writing the notes for Mozart’s Requiem  was easy – it is often sung. The story of Mozart’s life is so well documented and the mysterious and chilling tale of the Requiem is the stuff of musical legend. No matter how many times I hear the Mozart’s final work, written on his death bed, the hairs on my neck still stand up – and I know that I am not alone in that. Britten, however, was less known to me. Like most, I knew basic information about him – how he settled in the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh with his partner Peter Pears, I knew a little about his great operas like Peter Grimes, I was familiar with his more accessible  and renowned music such as The Young person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and Pat and I have visited the world famous concert venue created by Britten at Snape near Aldeburgh (see blog    http://www.arbeale.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-right-stuff.html ). But beyond that the man and his music was a bit of a mystery – so finding out about him was a worthwhile and enjoyable experience.

Britten was born in Lowestoft, the son of a dentist. He was heavily influenced by his mother and began composing his first works at the age of five. Later, he was a boarder at the Gresham’s School in Norfolk - a period of his life he hated. He disliked being separated from his family and often commented that his lifelong pacifist beliefs were rooted in the bullying and stern discipline that he witnessed there. He studied at the Royal College of Music and first came to public attention with his choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934 but with the premiere of the opera Peter Grimes in 1945 he leapt to international fame. The recurring theme in all his work is the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society, and the corruption of innocence.

Benjamin Britten

One of his first jobs was composing for films produced by the GPO. Through this he met the poet W.H. Auden with whom he became a lifelong friend. At the end of the war he and the violinist Yehudi Mehuin toured German concentration camps, performing for the survivors.  What they saw so shocked Britten that he refused to talk about it until towards the end of his life, when he commented that it had coloured everything he had written and thought since. It further confirmed to him his pacifism and his anti-war feelings show prominently in his monumental War Requiem – a piece in which he uses some of the 1^st World War poetry of Wilfred Owen. In 1942 Britten registered as a conscientious objector and settled in Aldeburgh where, after reading the poem "The Borough" by George Crabbe he wrote his great opera Peter Grimes a piece that with the War Requiem would be his defining work.

Britten died at the sadly early age of sixty three and was the first composer to be given a life peerage and became Baron Britten of Aldeburgh. As I researched, the more that I found out about Britten, the more I warmed to him. He was a quiet, retiring individual whose anti war views and pacifist beliefs seemed to match my own. Like me he loved gentle, bleak and beautiful landscape and big skies of the Suffolk coastline, seemed a gentle individual and, although I don’t know his music well seemed to reflect humanity in it. No jingoistic, militaristic, pomp and circumstance music of the Elgar type – but more like that of Finzi and Vaughan Williams – to do with the essential Englishness of the nation, the country side and the common man.

The mail train about to pull out of London

A few days after completing my research on Britten I happened to be reading a review of a book about the poet WH Auden. The review mentioned that Auden, as I had written in the programme notes, had worked with Britten on a GPO film in 1936 – and suddenly, the proverbial penny dropped – I had my “Aha, I get it” moment, my Gestalt!!

I suddenly realised that the GPO film was, in fact, something that I knew well from my childhood and that the words it contained were some that I had used time and time again in the classroom in my life time of teaching. The words were those of a poem – Night Mail - that I can quote great chunks from because I have used it so often in school. It is one of those invaluable poems that children can understand and that when read aloud gives them the real feel for the rhythm and sound of poetry. I quickly went to Wikipedia to check if I was right – I was!  This is the stuff of trivial pursuits – but it pleased me!

From the film - the mail sorters on the train

In the programme I had noted that: “One of his first jobs was composing for films produced by the GPO. Through this he met the poet W.H. Auden. The GPO film I realised is one I can remember watching often on the old black and white TV we had at home in the 50s and 60s. Parts of the film were used as a break, an interlude (remember those!) between programmes. It showed a steam train thundering along through the night whilst busily on board letters were sorted as the mail train journeyed from London to Scotland. As the train passed various stations sacks of mail were dropped off or collected. It was all very thrilling stuff for a ten year old  at the time and as the film flickered on there was stirring music in the background and over the music, the voice of a man reciting the words of “Night Mail” using the rhythm of a train hurtling along the tracks as the metre. You can see a short extract from the half hour film and hear Britten's music and Auden's poem in the video below. In the years since I have used the poem so often in the classroom and each time that I did I remembered that old black and white film I used to enjoy as a child - but never knowing that it was a “combined effort” between the poet and one of the country’s greatest composers:

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:

The gradient's against her, but she's on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder

Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes

Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,

Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;

They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,

But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends,

Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs

Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,

Letters of joy from girl and boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or to visit relations,

And applications for situations,

And timid lovers' declarations,

And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

News circumstantial, news financial,

Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,

Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,

Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,

Letters to Scotland from the South of France,

Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,

The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,

Dreaming of terrifying monsters

Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

But shall wake soon and hope for letters,

And none will hear the postman's knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

This was where Britten and Auden joined forces for the first time – Britten providing the music, Auden the poem. Suddenly, the whole thing made sense to me!

Britten and Auden were two of the towering figures of 20^th century music and literature and my little Gestalt moment encouraged me to find out more. I already had information on Britten – and as I said above, I had increasingly warmed to the man as I found out about him. Auden, however, was less well known to me, but as I researched I noticed some interesting parallels between Britten and the poet. The collaboration between the two that started with that 1936 film began a relationship and similarity of outlook and history that lasted throughout their lives.

WH Auden

Both men had attended Gresham School in Norfolk – although not at the same time, Auden being a few years older that Britten. Both were politically and philosophically on the left, both died relatively early (63 and 66), both had fathers who were in the medical profession – Britten’s father was a dentist and Auden’s father a doctor. Both had mothers who were ambitious for them – indeed Britten’s mother often said that her son would be the fourth “B” in music – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms.......Britten.  Both were from a Christian background (both Auden’s grandfathers had been senior Church of England vicars) but both largely rejected formal Christianity as they grew up. Britten became increasingly sympathetic to the radical social theology propounded by the Bishop of Woolwich in Honest to God  whilst Auden became driven by the significance of human suffering and man’s response to it rather than worship of a “God figure” – a theology  powerfully voiced by the German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed by the Nazi’s. And finally, both Auden and Britten were homosexual.

Reading about each man suggests that both largely rejected the musical and literary mainstream – Britten spent much of his life in the remote town of Aldeburgh and Auden, although a traveller who spent much of his life in the cultural maelstrom of New York, very much did his “own thing” – he was often regarded as the enfant terrible of literature. The work of both reflects a similarity – much of Auden’s poetry and Britten’s music is underpinned with issues related to morality, ethics or politics. Britten’s War Requiem or his opera Peter Grimes or his Sinfonia da Requiem – or many other of his works - reflect his beliefs about humanity and morality. The same is true with Auden with many of his works such as Musée des Beaux Arts or Fleet Visit or The Unknown Citizen exploring political,  religious and ethical themes.

But finally, and in a perverse way they both became best known for single works that seemed to touch the public’s imagination in a more populist way. Despite the great musical works that Britten composed, despite his undoubted talent and ability to garner huge praise from the musical establishment, to the man in the street it was a small work, almost an aside, which brought him into the wider public consciousness – his “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” . Written in 1946 for an educational documentary film about music it is based on part of Henry Purcell’s seventeenth century music for Abdelazer  and is intended to show off the sounds, tones  and capacities of the various instruments and sections of the orchestra. Since the day it was written it became a much played piece and part of the schooling of millions of school children in the UK and further afield. There are probably very few people who have not at sometime heard it. And for Auden, too, his work was brought to the wider public consciousness in a way that he probably could never have imagined (or, knowing Auden, approved of!) when he wrote it. Night Mail  is one of the great English poems but this was eclipsed some years ago by the 1994 Oscar nominated film Four Weddings and a Funeral. In the film Auden’s poem Funeral Blues is read as part of a funeral service - see video clip below. It rapidly became known as Stop All the clocks...... the words of its first line - and since then has been a much used item at funeral services - the film made Auden's poetry instantly accessible to everyone:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong
The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The power of words and music are basic to the human condition - indeed it could be argued that they are two of the essential ingredients that make us human and which separate us from the animal kingdom. From the advent of time man has thumped out a rhythm, sung and danced to the sound of some simple instrument, listened to and sung sacred words uttered by priests and poets, thought in words and expressed his emotions through words and music. Music and poetry are manifestations of humanity.

The wonderful shell sculpture on Aldeburgh beach. The words
around the edge "I hear those voices that will not be
drowned" are from Britten's "Peter Grimes" but could be
a metaphor for the beliefs of Britten and Auden

Britten and Auden like other composers and poets had the capacity to speak powerfully through their words and music and when I had my little “Aha moment” I suddenly realised that the two came together in things that had been part of my life since childhood. An old black and white film, a poem much loved and recited, pieces of music that I had long known and a composer and a  poet who I had always thought of as separate but who were in fact part of the same whole – like a jig saw they all fitted together. In other words the same whole, the same  Gestalt! And I liked that – it might be a trivial bit of information but it pleased me!