Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten.

MARK, CHRISTOPHER

Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten. By Mervyn Cooke. (Aldeburgh Studies in Music, 4.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998. [xx, 279 p. ISBN 0-85115-579-0. $81.]

The influence of Asian music on Benjamin Britten is widely known through two major works: the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1956), which recreates Balinese gamelan music in key passages, and the first "parable for church performance," Curlew River (1964), which was inspired by the Japanese Noh play Sumidagawa. Mervyn Cooke is not the first to have attempted a detailed investigation of such influences; Donald Mitchell, for example, examined gamelan techniques in the earlier of these works in his article "Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land" (Tempo 146 [1983]: 13-24). But Cooke is the first to offer an extended survey of what turns out to be an aspect of Britten's development far more vital than has generally been appreciated, and one with ramifications beyond those works whose subject matter is clearly of oriental provenance. A reworking of Cooke's dissertation ("Oriental Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten" [University of Cambridge, 1989]), the book offers full documentation of Britten's visits to Indonesia and Japan during his 1955-56 world tour, drawing on sources that include the diaries of two of his traveling companions, Peter Pears and Prince Ludwig of Hesse and the Rhine, as well as previously unpublished correspondence between Britten and various friends and collaborators (most notably William Plomer, librettist of Curlew River). Britten made transcriptions of gamelan music in Bali as well as recordings of gamelan and Indian music; six pages of the transcriptions are reproduced as (sometimes rather faint) plates. The composer also had recordings made of gamelan and Sumidagawa performances, and excerpts from these are usefully included on an accompanying compact disc. Cooke's documentation is an invaluable resource for Britten scholars, but the book's readership deserves to he far wider. The author's brief survey of orientalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western music and his discussion of the role of gamelan and Nob musics within the societies that created them makes Britten and the Far East an ideal case study for undergraduates; nor is Cooke's discussion of technical issues so demanding as to dissuade the general reader who is able to follow the music examples.

Cooke's central theme is Britten's increasingly fruitful interaction with oriental materials and techniques of structuring, in particular an increasing synthesis between East and West that culminated in Britten's last opera, Death in Venice. From the beginning of his professional career, Cooke claims, Britten's "compositional style was undeniably well suited to the admixture of more explicitly oriental material, and the success of his combination of Eastern and Western elements [later in his career] was undoubtedly made possible by a degree of inherent stylistic affinity" (p. 2). Cooke argues that such affinity, which enabled Britten to absorb oriental influences fluently and quickly, is seen in a number of early contexts. Two of these are "Rats Away!" from Our Hunting Fathers, which contains a heterophonic treatment of the five-note "motto" of the work, and the vocal line of the first of the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, which uses the anhemitonic pentatonic scale. As with most of Cooke's other supporting examples at this stage in his argument, however, these are isolated events, which, though irrefutably showing the qualities that Cooke identifies, are not entirely convincing as central aspects of Britten's style. Even less convincing are those cases in which Cooke goes further, suggesting the possible influence of oriental materials and techniques at this stage in Britten's career. One of these is "a curious passage" from "Being Beauteous" in Les illuminations, which Cooke sees as employing the Indonesian selisir scale (p. 36). Yet this song, completed on 16 March 1939, predates Britten's introduction to gamelan music by Colin McPhee in September of that year (after which the work as a whole was completed); and in any case, the pitch material is easily assimilated within a solidly Western framework (the Phrygian mode).

Cooke is on much surer ground with the heterophonic passage in Paul Bunyan (1941) that symbolizes the moon turning blue (p. 40, ex. 2.8) and with the layered textures of the "Sunday Morning" interlude in Peter Grimes, which, as David Matthews first pointed out, has a strong resemblance to one of McPhee's gamelan transcriptions. But Cooke is most engaging and convincing in chapter 3, where he turns to Britten's visit to Bali. Britten's sense of discovery is well captured through Cooke's skillful use of his sources, especially the composer's telegram to Ninette de Valois about his new ballet for Covent Garden, The Prince of the Pagodas, which he had left behind incomplete, having reached an apparent impasse: "CONFIDENT BALLET READY FOR MIDSEPTEMBER LOVE BRITTEN" (p. 74). Cooke wisely assumes that many of his readers will have as little knowledge of Balinese musical culture as Britten himself when he left England, and Cooke provides detailed descriptions of the instruments and the role of music in Balinese soci ety, as well as a map of the island. He also discusses some of the scale forms Britten jotted down, one of which was the basis for Tadzio's music in Death in Venice.

Chapter 4 is concerned with documenting the circumstances of the composition of The Prince of the Pagodas, whose magical events Britten portrayed by reworking for Western orchestral instruments some of the gamelan music he had transcribed. Cooke traces the processes involved, highlighting Britten's "intuitive grasp of the structure and instrumentation of gamelan music and [his] astonishing ear for percussion sonorities" (p. 105). He notes some significant departures from gamelan practice (such as transposition) and places where "Britten treats the Balinese elements more flexibly" (p. 111). Disappointingly, though, there is little on the interaction between the gamelan material and the material in Britten's more customary style, and only half a page (p. 109) is devoted to the effect--the dramatic function--of the former.

If Pagodas seeks to emulate its models, Curlew River, as I mentioned at the beginning of this review, seeks to recreate them in Britten's own terms. As with Pagodas, Cooke prepares the ground for a close investigation of how this comes about with detailed documentation of Britten's visit to Japan (chap. 5), which the composer regarded as "far the strangest country we have yet been to" (p. 113); indeed, he found it difficult at first to respond to Sumidagawa with anything but humor (p. 119). Cooke outlines the conventions of Noh theater in chapter 6 (which also includes a very useful annotated diagram of the Noh stage) before getting down to what is, for me, the most interesting part of the book--the fascinating story of the evolution of the libretto. Here we discover that several of the features most associated with the first church parable emerged well after the initial draft, notably the quasi-liturgical framework, the East Anglian medieval setting--at one stage Britten writes to William Plomer, "we might get a very strong atmosphere ... if we set it in pre-conquest East Anglia ... or in Israel, or south Italy" (p. 143)--the title, and the use of the plainchant Custodes hominum for the climax at the tomb. Cooke's discussion of the "musical style" of Curlew River is also enlightening, especially concerning the gagaku influence, which turns out to have been more important musically than Noh; heterophony (the technical aspect of Curlew River which has drawn the most attention), for example, is not a Noh but a gagaku technique. Having considered Curlew River, it makes sense for Cooke to proceed to the ensuing parables, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son, noting the greater departures from the Noh conventions. But there is a sense of duty being pursued here rather than enthusiastic engagement until Cooke discloses the use of Indian material in the latter parable; again, he elucidates this in detail with the help of plates of Britten's transcriptions.

Since, as mentioned above, it is the synthesis of East and West that Cooke views as Britten's signal achievement in his dealing with Asian materials and procedures, the success of the book as a whole must rest with the penultimate chapter, "Stylistic Synthesis: Death in Venice." Backtracking a few years, he sees Songs from the Chinese, for example, beginning to "achieve a workable synthesis between those Balinese elements employed as a special effect in Pagodas and compositional procedures more typical of Western music" (p. 221). Meanwhile, the War Requiem employs gong or cymbal strokes "as colotomic punctuation" (p. 224), and A Midsummer Night's Dream frequently recalls gamelan sonorities (and so on: there are many more examples). Addressing Death in Venice itself, sonority and scale forms are inevitably to the fore, and with regard to the dance scenes in the opera, Cooke notes the transplantation of the Balinese attitude toward dance as "almost a state of being, a feeling rather than an action" (p. 230). I t becomes clear that what Cooke means by "synthesis" is the transformation of Balinese source material on contact with Britten's more chromatic language: there is little sense of Balinese music further transforming Britten's style at this stage. But if the work is a true synthesis, a unique language has surely been created. While there is much assertion about synthesis having been achieved, Cooke provides little genuine investigation; more protracted analysis is required in order to demonstrate his thesis convincingly.

Another problem is Cooke's ascribing the growing importance of horizontal and vertical equivalence in Britten's music (the use of the same pitch material for melody and harmony, which climaxes in the church parables) solely to the influence of Asian music, at the expense of an obvious Western source: Arnold Schoenberg's "unity of musical space"--a principle Britten applies (albeit in a limited way) in as early a piece as his opus 1. Cooke ignores this principle until the penultimate page, when he quotes (though doesn't really take on board) Hans Keller's statement that "serial thought ... was the conditio sine qua non of all later heterophonic developments" (p. 256). Others may judge that the association between gamelan sonorities and homoeroticism is given short shrift, with only a nod in the direction of Philip Brett (pp. 248--49) and no reference to Clifford Hindley. But these drawbacks should not be allowed to deflect from the historical and documentary achievements of this elegantly written and handsome ly produced book.