Symphonic England

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Michael Kurek’s English Symphony is his third symphony and perhaps his best, surpassing even the magic and majesty of his second and, as its name suggests, taking the primary world of England as its creative wellspring.

When Britain had an Empire

The sun would never set,

But the sun set over England

And Englishmen forget

That greater than the Empire

Are the rolling Yorkshire moors,

And more glorious the Dales

Than all the Empire’s wars.

I wrote these lines, entitled “Sunset”, many years ago as an expression of my conversion from being a Great Britisher to being a Little Englander. This conversion from an imperialism, which admired the greatness of the British Empire, to a mere love for my country’s smallness and beauty was part of the more important conversion from belligerent agnostic pride to a belief in Christ and His Church. Both conversions were in some sense the rejection of pride as the prerequisite for the quest for humility.

These lines of poetry and the quest that they signify came to mind as I listened to Michael Kurek’s English Symphony. This is Kurek’s third symphony and perhaps his best, surpassing even the magic and majesty of his second, which was entitled “Tales from the Realm of Faerie”. Whereas the preceding work had taken the secondary worlds of fairyland, including Middle-earth and Narnia, as its inspirational source, this new work takes the primary world of England as its creative wellspring. Yet the two works have much more in common than might be imagined because there is something mystical and magical about the England that Kurek’s Muse invokes. This can be seen in the title of each of the four movements: “Upon a Walk in the English Countryside”, “Stonehenge”, “The Lady of Shalott”, and “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest”. Each of these movements evokes the mystique of Merrie England; its timeless landscape; its ancient and mysterious past stretching beyond the very dawn of history; its Arthurian myths and its legendary heroes. Such an England is itself a fairyland, a mystic realm where history and fantasy meet. There is, therefore, a unity between the Second and Third Symphonies, which can be said to be one in wonder.

The first movement, “Upon a Walk in the English Countryside”, has none of the imperial pomp and circumstance of Elgar’s majestic musings on the might of Empire. Instead, we hear echoes of Vaughan Williams’ aural English landscapes or those of George Butterworth, whose own rurally idyllic Muse, muted mortally at the Battle of the Somme, has been championed by Kurek. As my own literary sensibilities are always drawn irresistibly to analogies between Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and Shelley’s great poem, “To a Skylark”, I found myself pondering Coleridge’s poem “The Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison” as I listened with my mind’s eye or ear to Kurek’s walk in the English countryside. Coleridge, suffering with an injured foot, was constrained to sit in the shade of a lime-tree while his friends left him to go on a walk across a landscape that he knew well but was unable to revisit through circumstances beyond his control. Instead, he allowed his mind to wander after his friends, imagining the views that they were experiencing in his absence. Similarly, I found myself revisiting favourite landscapes on fondly remembered walks as I listened to Kurek’s evocation of his own fond recollections of England’s green and pleasant land. Though, like Coleridge, I was constrained by circumstance from experiencing the landscape physically, my mind was transported metaphysically and melodiously across the ocean by the beauty of Kurek’s tone poetry.

With the commencement of the second movement, the scene switches from serenely undulating hills to the solemn silence of Stonehenge, which Kurek describes in his notes on the symphony as “an embodiment of pure enigma, a longing for meaning, and a somber pendulum of timelessness”. Such words reveal that Kurek is a poet who paints with words almost as sublimely as he paints with notes. What exactly is a pendulum of timelessness? Is it something that keeps time without apparently being subject to it? Is the mystery of Stonehenge something that is not merely antediluvian but divine? Does it not merely point to the heavens in the solitude of each solstice but to Heaven itself and to the God in Heaven? Words of the poet Roy Campbell come to mind, speaking to the sun in a sonnet as Stonehenge speaks to the sun in silence:

Oh let your shining orb grow dim,

Of Christ the mirror and the shield,

That I may gaze through you to Him,

See half the miracle revealed….

Approaching this very ineffable mystery which the presence of Stonehenge presents, Kurek speaks wordlessly of things that are themselves unutterable. He marks what he calls “the mysterious and unknowable nature of the eons of time” by a slow and solemn three-note ostinato. It is as though he is seeking to let the stones speak to us in the silence in which the voice of God can be heard.

The inspiration for the third movement is the story of the Lady of Shalott, marking a transition from a meditation on time and timelessness to the contemplation of love and lovelessness. We are still in the realm of mystery and indeed in the realm of faërie, the Lady of Shalott being a damsel in distress in Arthurian England who falls fatally in love with Sir Lancelot. The story is told in Tennyson’s famous poem and is depicted in the equally famous Pre-Raphaelite painting by John William Waterhouse, both of which are cited by Kurek as influences and both of which are called to mind as the movement meanders melodiously to its culmination in the Lady’s lovelorn swansong and the gliding silence of her death.

The final movement, “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest”, returns to the meditation on time and timelessness. This famous tree, which is believed to be almost a thousand years old, might have sheltered Robin Hood and his Merry Men from the elements or it might have hidden them from the Sheriff of Nottingham and his wicked minions. It might have witnessed young Robin making merry with Maid Marion in the springtime of its life and theirs. Robin Hood and his Merry Men passed away but the tree remained. Merry England passed away but the tree remained. The old oak has seen decades pass like a mere daze of days and centuries slip away, one after another, either into the future or into the past, for who can say in which direction time slips?

Although the apparent timelessness of the Major Oak reminds us of the apparent agelessness of Stonehenge, inviting us to see the temporal in the light of the eternal, there is an important difference between the two movements. The stones are dead or, if they have life, it is the metaphorical life that Kurek breathes into them. The tree, on the other hand, is alive. It breathes life and is the breath of life symbolically. It is metaphorically the tree of life because it is the tree of tradition, which Chesterton called the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn. There are indeed few things more alive than tradition. In this sense, as Kurek says in his notes on the symphony, the fourth movement has more in common with the first movement with its “anthropomorphic view of nature” than with the second movement. Even more tellingly, he confesses that his desire to “personify” the Major Oak of Sherwood Forest is a deferential nod in the direction of Tolkien’s Ents. The old tree is, therefore, the presence of an ancient wisdom, which is tireless because it is timeless. It has no more need to be hasty than have Tolkien’s Ents because it has seen countless fads and fashions come and go. Mighty rulers wax and wane. Dynasties disintegrate and disappear. Only the permanent things remain.

As for the final moments of this finest of symphonies, it seems from maestro Kurek’s own words that the composer himself hands the baton to the entish tree of tradition to bring things to satisfactory creative fruition:

All the elements are tied together during the last few minutes, as if the symphony is being conducted by the great tree itself, with its branches acting like many arms holding many conductor’s batons, and the music intensifies into what I think is the most climactic ending in any of my works.

If this listener were to have the last word on this latest of Kurek’s compositions, he would not hesitate to say that the Third Symphony is as ripe for the plucking from the tree of classic works inspired by England as those by Kurek’s illustrious and aforementioned forebears, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth. They hang side by side from the same tree because they are fruits of the same tradition. This listener will not have the last word, however, because that belongs to the greatest, perhaps, of all Englishmen. If music be the food of love, as Shakespeare suggests, may these musical fruits be plucked and played, and may they feed the soul of those who hunger for the beauty that nourishes the soul.

Michael Kurek’s Third Symphony is released on February 7. It can be preordered here.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay. The image of “The Lady of Shalott” (1888) by John William Waterhouse is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.