CHAN 20292 – COATES IV

Coates: Orchestral Works, Volume 4

Introduction

Contemporaries who met Eric Coates (1886 – 1957) were often surprised by just how ordinary he seemed – and how up-to-date. Arriving in Belfast in March 1936 to conduct a programme of his own music, he was given a thorough grilling by an interviewer from the Belfast Newsletter. ‘His hobbies are photography and motoring’, the paper reported. ‘“I used to play golf”, he said, “but I gave it up because my language was becoming impossible.”’

His status as an orchestral composer with a popular touch made Coates a sort of mediator between highbrow and mass cultures. Here was a classically trained musician who was at ease in the dance hall, on the radio, and (later) on television; living proof that – as Coates’s hero Gershwin had put it – ‘good music is good music, even if you call it oysters’. For Coates, that included contemporary jazz and dance music, genres he loved, and which he assimilated into his own musical language. ‘I have listened to all the dancebands’, he told the Belfast reporter. ‘Ambrose, [Jack] Hylton, all of them. When I first heard Duke Ellington I was quite fascinated.’

For a ‘serious’ musician between the wars, that was a provocative statement. By incorporating syncopation and saxophones into his compositions, Coates crossed a line that outraged purists. His Three Bears phantasy, wrote one critic in 1945, was ‘tainted only by one tribute to trash in the form of a Blues, or something of the sort’. The affection which Coates felt for popular music would see his Four Centuries suite effectively banned from the BBC Proms.

Coates, however – who enjoyed nothing more than a night out dancing with his beloved wife, Phyllis – made no apology. ‘Crooners are not pestilential and dance tunes are by no means cheap music’, he assured his Belfast interviewer.

I love dancing. It keeps me fit. It keeps one young and it keeps one’s music young. There is something in jazz music which has an appeal. Its rhythm, for me, is like a tonic.

For the millions whose spirits were lifted by Coates’s music, it felt more like an elixir.

The Three Bears

Phyllis Coates, recalled her son Austin, ‘told fairy stories with incredible artistry’ – not least at bedtime. Eric seems to have listened in, too: his three fairytale ‘Phantasies’, The Selfish Giant (1925), The Three Bears (1926), and Cinderella (1929), are among his most ambitious orchestral works. In the case of The Three Bears, the commission (said Coates) came directly from Austin himself – ‘he gave me no peace until I had set his favourite story to music’, as Coates told Gramophone – and the score was dedicated ‘To Austin, on his fourth birthday’.

But the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears is so familiar that the piece was assured of success far beyond the Coates household, and when it was premièred – at a Promenade Concert at the Queen’s Hall, London, on 7 October 1926 – the bandleader Jack Hylton was seen dancing a one-man Charleston to the syncopated passages. Coates’s Goldilocks is every bit the flapper. But the supreme accolade came at an Eastbourne performance in November 1926, at which Sir Edward Elgar (in town to conduct his own music) decided to sit in on the percussion section – tapping his feet, nodding along, and causing (Coates recalled) ‘a minor sensation among the audience’. ‘Mr. Eric Coates shows us that even jazz can be made pleasing in the hands of a composer of real taste’, remarked one critic.

‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ intones the full orchestra, and Goldilocks gets up, dresses, and dances off into the woods. She knocks on the bears’ door (percussion), a robin trills a warning (woodwind), but she enters regardless, and – to the strains of a drowsy waltz – falls asleep in the little bear’s bed. The bears enter one after the other (a tiptoe fugato) and pose their question – until, to the crash of a gong, they awaken Goldilocks, who flees. They chase her through the woods, but she is too fast: to a lively foxtrot, the bears (says Coates) ‘make the best of it and return home, in the best humour’. Goldilocks recounts her adventure to grandma – a musical recapitulation – and the bears, meanwhile, ‘put up a notice: “Beware! Three Hungry Bears Live Here!”’

Under the Stars

The music publishers Chappell & Co., of Bond Street, dominated the British music business in the early years of the twentieth century, and the firm’s support gave a crucial boost to Coates’s early career. His contract with Chappell required Coates to provide them with two orchestral works per year, and that might have been the stimulus behind Under the Stars, composed in 1928, published in 1929, and (this was no coincidence) exactly the right length to fit on one side of a 78rpm record. For the first time, Coates’s orchestra includes an alto saxophone, supplying a warm orchestral colour rather than being a nod to jazz. According to his biographer Michael Payne, Coates had praised the saxophone’s ‘beautiful round sweet fullness of tone’ as early as 1926 – adding that ‘personally I feel the saxophone has come to stay as a Symphony instrument’.

From Meadow to Mayfair

In a sense, From Meadow to Mayfair is an autobiographical work. In 1900, the Nottinghamshire mining town of Hucknall, where Coates had spent his childhood, was still surrounded by the verdant countryside of Sherwood Forest. He moved to London in 1906, but (as he wrote in his autobiography)

it was not until we came to live in the heart of London that I was able to shake off my ever-present desire to be wandering about the highways and byways of my native Nottinghamshire.

In August 1930 Eric and Phyllis moved into a new penthouse apartment above Baker Street station and, as he said, ‘the flat, and the view, took hold of me’. In early 1931 he completed his orchestral suite From Meadow to Mayfair, which he ‘intended to be a kind of farewell’ to his Nottinghamshire days. He conducted the première on 21 February that year, with the Eastbourne Municipal Orchestra.

From Meadow to Mayfair is a musical autobiography, as well as a personal one: the lilting, pastoral first movement is the final, nostalgic homage by Coates to one of the heroes of his Edwardian youth, the operetta composer Edward German (1862 – 1936). The central ‘Romance’ wanders far from its tranquil opening, and then back again: an idyll of fond memories and open horizons. And then, to a rising pulse and the sizzle of cymbals, we have arrived in the capital. For Eric and Phyllis, dinner and a dance at a Mayfair restaurant – a short ride by the Bakerloo Line tube from their new digs – were the perfect ‘Evening in Town’, and Coates catches the atmosphere in one of his most soigné concert waltzes.

Footlights

Phyllis Coates was a gifted actor, and in 1923 she played opposite Noël Coward in his comedy The Young Idea. Eric would meet her at the stage door after each show. ‘I always loved watching Phyl on the stage’, he recalled.

In fact, I never tired of hearing her play the same part over and over again. She had a grace and charm of her own.

Throat problems eventually forced Phyllis to retire from the stage, but his concert waltz Footlights – composed in the spring of 1939 and premièred, on BBC radio, on 6 June that year – is a happy reminiscence of those youthful nights which Coates spent watching his own lifelong dancing-partner tread the boards. Originally named Behind the Footlights, it is a life-affirming evocation of the glamour of the inter-war West End, created just weeks before war would dim the lights all over Europe.

I Sing to You

After the outbreak of war, in 1939, Eric and Phyllis were steadfast in their determination to remain in London. ‘I sat on the balcony outside Phyl’s bedroom and looked south east across London to where the summer lightning played fitfully in the gathering dusk’, Coates recalled, in his autobiography.

How little did I realise that soon these silent flashes would give place to the flash of anti-aircraft batteries.

In wartime, as it turned out, the demand for refreshing, morale-boosting music would be higher than ever and it seems that Coates composed his ‘Souvenir’ I Sing to You in early 1940, soon after the (similarly wordless) ‘Romance’ Last Love (CHAN 20164), most probably in fulfilment of his contract with Chappell. It was premièred, on BBC Forces Radio, on 14 March 1940 – the week in which wartime meat rationing was introduced in the UK.

Four Centuries

By May 1941, London had endured the worst of the Blitz, and it was an official requisition order that finally drove the Coateses from their Baker Street flat. The couple duly relocated to a house in Amersham, in the Chiltern Hills. ‘Here I was able to get down to orchestrating a work which had come into my mind during the raids on London’, Coates recalled,

and the next two months saw me day in, day out, working on the score in which I have endeavoured to describe music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning with the Fugue, leading through the Pavane and Tambourin to the Valse, and concluding with present-day Jazz.

Coates’s great champion Stanford Robinson conducted the world première of the Four Centuries suite on 21 July 1942 – he wanted, said Coates, to let the composer sit back and hear how it sounded. As well he might – Four Centuries is the most lavishly scored of all Coates’s orchestral suites (the score including parts for bass clarinet, a trio of saxophones, and jazz percussion), and one of only two to contain four movements. Coates was intensely proud of it, and was indignant when, under pressure from the BBC, Sir Henry Wood refused to perform it in the Proms.

This being Coates, the common thread running through the four centuries depicted is – naturally – dance, a solo flute serving as the spirit of Terpsichore, and introducing each of the first three movements. That magical sound is the first thing we hear in the opening ‘Prelude’, though the dreamy introduction soon gives way to a spry ‘Hornpipe’ for full orchestra. The flute sings again over the melancholy eighteenth-century ‘Pavane’ and returns, peacefully, after the robust ‘Tambourin’. This is Coates in his best period get-up – about as ‘authentic’ as a Gainsborough picture’s melodrama and just as enjoyable.

In the sumptuous ‘Valse’ the flute shares honours with the solo violin and a glinting harp. Coates is in his element here; there has never been a subtler or more stylish tribute to Strauss, Waldteufel, and all those other nineteenth-century waltz kings. Come the twentieth century, though, and the flute steps aside, yielding the dance floor to saxes, drum-kit, and a new kind of rhythm. When the suite was recorded, in November 1944, the players of the New Symphony Orchestra bridled at having to strum their violins like banjos, and share the stage with dance-band sax and trumpet players (recruited to impart the necessary swing). Coates was obliged to explain

at some length that the movement was meant as a joke – and that the effect of a good story was spoilt if you laughed in the telling.

But for Eric and Phyllis, dancing was one of life’s supreme pleasures – and ‘Rhythm’, his irresistibly jazzy homage to the great interwar dance-bands, is Coates at his wittiest and most uninhibited. Four Centuries is dedicated ‘to my dear wife’.

Music Everywhere

Coates’s gift for melody leant itself wonderfully to broadcasting, and when Britain’s first independent TV and radio service, Rediffusion, decided that it needed its own signature tune, Coates was a natural choice as composer. Coates completed Music Everywhere in August 1948 – taking the station’s call sign as his starting point for a march that bustles along in typically light-footed style before swinging into the broad melody of the central trio section. He finishes with a plain brass and percussion statement of the Rediffusion call sign – ready to segue straight into the first programme.

The world was changing: but Coates’s gift proved infinitely adaptable, and Music Everywhere reached a global audience with the Suez Crisis of 1956. As British troops parachuted into Egypt, managers of Rediffusion’s colonial and Commonwealth service, which had been using The British Grenadiers as its signature tune, suddenly felt the need for something a little less martial. Music Everywhere was their choice to defuse the situation – musically, if not politically.