For brass band musicians, a fair amount of the musical year is given over to preparing for contests. Sometimes, bands are invited to put together a programme of their own choosing, but, more commonly, all the bands in a particular section (they are graded like football teams) perform the same test piece, and adjudicators pick a winning performance. While this makes for a strange spectacle for the neutral, the commissioning of challenging test pieces helps to keep standards high, and has resulted in much of the best music in the repertoire. Cloudcatcher Fells was commissioned for the 1985 National Finals. It was an instant hit with bands and audiences, and has gone on to become the composer’s most performed and recorded piece.
A couple of years earlier, McCabe had a more bruising encounter with the brass band world, when the top-level bands were assigned his Images as the test piece for the regional rounds of the 1983 National Championships. The piece went down badly in the often musically conservative band world. The negative reaction surprised the composer, who had never thought of himself as a troublemaker: “It was highly amusing, having been regarded for years by the concert classical world as a bit reactionary (unfairly I think!), it was very entertaining suddenly to be cast in the role of revolutionary criminal.” (1) Listening again now, there is nothing in Images that would alarm anyone familiar with a smattering of early 20th century classical music, although it is certainly a tougher nut than Cloudcatcher Fells, which is generally less dissonant throughout. McCabe was adamant this change of tack had nothing to do with the reception of Images: “None of this had any impact at all as far as Cloudcatcher was concerned. I simply wrote the piece I wanted to write.”
Cloudcatcher Fells is a celebration of the Patterdale area of the Lake District, a part of the world which meant a great deal to the composer. As a small child, McCabe was badly burned in an accident at home, and, as a result, he was frequently ill. On medical advice, the McCabes spent the Summer of 1949 in a Lake District cottage, giving the young John some much-needed fresh air and exercise. A walk up to Angle Tarn made an especially strong impression. McCabe would go on to describe Angle Tarn as his “favourite place in all the world” (2), and his musical impression of this stunning mountain lake would later form the “slow movement” of Cloudcatcher Fells. Ten years after that first visit to the Lakes, when McCabe was a student in Manchester, he returned to the same cottage with his Mum. It was during this time that he sketched the short score of his first violin concerto, a piece which would receive a run-through by the Hallé Orchestra, and set him on the path to becoming a professional composer.
The title Cloudcatcher Fells comes from a poem by David Wright, Cockermouth. McCabe's piece lasts between around 15 and 18 minutes, and falls into four clear “movements” (broadly slow/fast/slow/fast). Great Gable, Grasmoor and Grisedale Tarn form the opening section, before a more jagged, unpredictable, scherzo-like passage (Haystacks/Catchedicam) leads to a powerful climax. In its wake comes the magical Angle Tarn, before a “finale” which tracks a challenging walk up to the mighty peak of Helvellyn, via Striding Edge.
Cloudcatcher Fells was my introduction to McCabe’s music. It was a piece which fascinated me from an early age, and was quite unlike anything I’d heard before. Over the years, I’ve taken time to get to know a lot more of his music, and now, re-listening to Cloudcatcher, I hear many of his familiar musical fingerprints. The gorgeous added-note harmonies are always apparent, as are the “sustain pedal” textures, built from short, overlapping phrases, often underpinned by slower-moving bass lines. There are also, as always, beautiful, distinctive melodies, such as the lovely, lilting dance of Grisedale Tarn, or the winding themes which emerge from the bitonal mist above Angle Tarn.
Beneath the busy, Tippettian surface, McCabe’s music is always tightly organised. He had a fascination with variation and ground bass forms, which he traced back to his unusual early years: “The first piece of musical repertoire I heard which made a big impact was the Brahms St Antoni Chorale Variations, which they were playing on the record player one night; I was sitting on the stairs, listening, when I should have been asleep. It only occurred to me recently that my fascination with passacaglias goes back to that experience, because it was the passacaglia above all else that fascinated me." (3) McCabe once spoke of his “delight in exploring to the utmost a small group of motifs” (4), a habit he suggests came from Alan Rawsthorne, a composer he greatly admired. This joy in working with the raw materials of music is evident throughout Cloudcatcher, where so much stems from the opening nine-note theme, baldly stated on the three tenor horns. McCabe describes the piece as a series of free variations on this theme, as well as the harmonies associated with it. Some reapparances of this material are obvious, as with the reshaped glances back to the opening in Angle Tarn, or the awesome, primary colour statement at the summit of Helvellyn. Other presentations are subtler, sometimes buried in those teeming textures, waiting to be discovered.
McCabe’s approach to scoring for brass band is refreshingly thoughtful. Writing in his programme note for Cloudcatcher, he points to a desire to “try and avoid the constant massed sound of the band which, with repetition, can become wearying, to my ears at least.” (5) This goes for performers too: anyone who has played in brass or wind bands will be familiar with the kind of thickly scored music which can make concerts a hard, ungrateful slog. McCabe instead treats the band as “several instrumental choirs”, which is perhaps what helps him to find the often ignored subtle colour contrasts between the similar but different instruments that make up the band. He gives each instrument a separate part, and keeps the four tubas (called “basses” in brass bands) unusually busy, which adds to the strength and depth of those passages where fast-moving ideas bubble up from the bottom to the top of the band. McCabe expressed frustration with the brass band’s “lack of a real top register”, which perhaps accounts for the many divisi passages for the cornet choir. It may also explain his fondness for perilous Eb soprano cornet parts - Cloudcatcher puts everyone through their paces, but the soprano player is really tested, especially in that final, effortful ascent to the peak of Helvellyn.
The Black Dyke Mills performance above is something of a brass band classic. It’s a superb account, by a band at its 80s peak. My favourite recorded performance, however, is by the Britannia Building Society Band, under former London Symphony Orchestra principal trumpet, Howard Snell (Snell directed two bands in the 1985 national finals). It’s a slightly swifter performance than Black Dyke’s, with a more modern, “orchestral” band sound (particularly when it comes to the more sparing use of vibrato). It also features some stunning soprano cornet playing by Tracey Redfern, now a trumpet professor at the Royal Northern College of Music. The Britannia disc has the added advantage of an all-McCabe programme, including all of his wonderfully varied band music up to that point (1995).
There would be one final piece for brass band, The Maunsell Forts, commissioned for the 2002 British Open Championships. It was inspired by a visit to the strange, imposing anti-aircraft forts situated in the Thames Estuary (see here). McCabe had not expected to write any more works for band, "partly out of disillusion with the brass band world, which has certainly gone back 30 years in depth of musical appreciation", but something about the combination of message and medium clicked, and he persisted. He did so knowing the piece he wanted to write would go down badly with bands: "I warned them all that (a) it would begin and end quietly and slowly and (b) as a result, all the bands would hate it. Well, not all the bands did hate it and it got some good performances (not all of which were placed by the adjudicators!) but most people did hate it. But it was a piece that I had to write and I'm not somebody who wants just to churn out yet another loud, fast collection of thousands of notes." It's another terrific piece, and a touching tribute to those who manned the forts. There is a fine 2010 performance by the Cory Band on the NMC disc War Memorials, and another, prize-winning Cory performance here.
(1) From an excellent interview on the brass band website, 4 Bars Rest. All quotes from here unless stated.
(2) Britannia Building Society Band CD liner note.
(3) Toccata Classics website.
(4) Chamber Music For Strings chapter (Guy Rickards) in Landscapes Of The Mind - The Music of John McCabe, ed. George Odam.
(5) McCabe's website.
