New Publication!
Jonathan’s essay on Herbert Howells’ Elegy for Viola, String Quartet and String Orchestra has been published in the collection ‘Music, Mortality, Memory‘ from Brill.
The Elegy is both historical artefact and living ritual. Each performance re-enacts a “performative utterance against death,” accumulating new meaning over time. Rather than rupturing with tradition, it evolves late Romantic concertante form for new commemorative purposes — not mourning the past, but empowering the present through collective remembrance.
Abstract
1917 saw the first performance of a touching tribute from one student at the Royal College of Music to another. Herbert Howells, referred to as ‘the future of English music’, commemorated his departed friend, Francis Purcell Warren, in an elegy that incorporated a solo viola part, thereby making the lost viola player present within his own memorial. Warren was killed in the early days of the Battle of the Somme and his body was never found. His name is memorialised on the Thiepval Memorial and in the opening dedication of Howells’s Elegy for Viola, String Quartet and String Orchestra.
This chapter presents analysis of the musical score and its performance context. Reflecting on interdisciplinary perspectives from the theologian Douglas Davies (the Elegy functions as a death rite “against death,” substituting for a funeral in the absence of a body, and transforming grief into collective empowerment), the cultural anthropologist Aleida Assmann (the work encodes collective memory, teaching future audiences how to mourn and bridging personal and national identity), and the musicologist Christopher Small (performance as “musicking,” creating desired relationships between the living and the dead). The Elegy is presented as a ‘site of memorialisation’ which places Warren in death and in memory, and in doing so, acts as a death rite in the absence of the body. A key element of this is the role of the memorial concert as a new form of performance ritualism; a nexus for the simultaneous transformation of funeral rites, concert hall formality, and nineteenth-century concertante form.
Dr Jonathan Clinch 