Bedford: Star Clusters, Nebulae and Places in Devon

There is a particular sound the English make when they write for massed voices and no words at all, or nearly none — a kind of choral weather system, fronts of sound moving through a hall rather than sentences being spoken. David Bedford understood this better than almost anyone of his generation, and this disc, dug up from what must have been the outer provinces of the LP catalogue sometime in the mid-1970s, makes the case with a persuasiveness that surprised even me, and I thought I knew Bedford fairly well.

Star Clusters, Nebulae and Places in Devon — the title alone tells you this is not a composer burdened by false modesty, or by much interest in what listeners might expect. Two choirs face off across the stereo image (on headphones the effect is startling, almost physically disorienting): one intoning the names of astronomical objects, Ring Nebula in Hydra and twenty-one companions, the other murmuring the place names of Devon, Starcross, Hope’s Nose, names that to English ears carry the smell of tidal mud and cream teas rather than deep space. Bedford sets them against each other not for irony, particularly, though there is some of that, but because he is interested, genuinely, almost boyishly interested, in what happens when vowel sounds collide across sixty feet of choir risers. Somewhere around the twenty-minute mark the singers break into a kind of chattering, cackling patter that I can only compare to a rookery disturbed by a low-flying gull. It ought to be ridiculous. It is not. It’s rather wonderful, actually. Then, a few minutes later, the same voices open into a full-throated radiance that owes something to Herbert Howells, that Hymnus Paradisi sonority, the high tenor lines floating free of harmonic gravity, and something, I’d argue, to Ligeti’s cluster-writing, though Bedford’s clusters glow where Ligeti’s often chill. The ending simply stops. No cadence, no valediction. The sound just withdraws, as though a door closed somewhere in another building.

Bedford came to this music by an odd route. He studied with Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy, though you would search Berkeley’s elegant, French-inflected scores in vain for any trace of what Bedford became. Far more decisive were the years in Milan with Luigi Nono, at a studio bristling with oscillators and tape loops and the sort of political urgency that never really rubbed off on Bedford’s temperament. He took the sounds and left the ideology at the door. What survived from that apprenticeship was an almost sensuous fixation on sonority itself, texture as subject rather than vehicle. He was never much of a systems composer. No serial rows, no numerological scaffolding creaking under the surface. Just ears, tuned very finely, and a willingness to let an exquisite noise be its own justification.

The Song of the White Horse, written in 1978 for a BBC Omnibus film, takes us somewhere else, out onto the Ridgeway path above Uffington, where that great chalk horse has been carved into the hillside since the Bronze Age, or so legend and geology dispute between them, and stands as folk memory of Alfred’s victory over Guthrum’s Danes. The five-part structure moves like a walk through changing light. “Prelude — Wayland’s Smithy” opens on a small ostinato cell turning over and over on the synthesizer, murky, half-lit. There’s a kinship here with John Ireland’s landscape pieces, Mai-Dun especially, that same wary tenderness toward ancient ground, the same refusal of picture-postcard prettiness. “The Blowing Stone” is the disc’s genuinely uncanny moment: a tape of the composer himself blowing into the actual holed sarsen stone at the hill’s foot, a sound like a foghorn dredged up from some Anglo-Saxon nightmare, later answered and civilized, if that’s the word, by the brass. It returns, transfigured, when the choir sings of Alfred’s warhorns being sounded across the downs. The Chesterton ballad, Chesterton, still unfashionable, still underrated, gets a flat, incantatory setting from the young soprano Diana Coulson and the Queen’s College children’s choir, voices deliberately drained of expressive inflection so that the words function almost as chant, as spell. This is not so different, structurally, from what Britten does with boys’ voices in the War Requiem, minus the irony.

Two demerits, and they matter. There’s no internal cue-point tracking anywhere within either piece, a real inconvenience for anyone wanting to relocate “The Blowing Stone” or study the choral entries in Star Clusters without scrubbing blindly through twenty minutes of tape hiss. And the synthesizer timbres in the White Horse chorale, thrilling in 1978 no doubt, now sound faintly of their period, a little like discovering the special effects in an old science-fiction film were achieved with painted glass and wire. This doesn’t sink the music. It dates it, gently, the way certain Vangelis scores are dated, without being diminished by the dating.

I don’t know of a rival release of either piece, which makes the question of comparison somewhat academic. This repertoire has never exactly been fought over by competing choirs and engineers. That scarcity is itself an argument for treasuring what exists. Flaws and all, this is a disc that rewards the patient, slightly adventurous listener.