There is a bar in this piece that has always sounded odd to me, but it has only just dawned on me that it might be due to a misprint.

The bar in question is on page 7, at the end of the second system. This is the fourth bar of the accelerando on the swell. As printed, we have a second inversion chord of E flat major with an added major seventh. The D natural in the left hand sounds unusually dissonant and I am wondering whether it should be a D flat. D flat, or its enharmonic equivalent C sharp, is the common anchor point for the chords throughout the previous three bars and it would make sense for it to continue to be so; the music is heading for a chord of A flat, so what is the point of introducing a D natural? The D and B flat in this fourth bar coalesce onto a middle C at the start of the next system, so isn't a D flat much more likely? Thus a D flat would be entirely logical, whereas the printed D natural has no logic to it at all.

I don't think the manuscript of this piece exists any more (I think the MSS of the Six Pieces were retained by Novello), but even if it confirmed the D natural I think I might still put it down to an oversight on Howells's part - unless anyone knows differently.

Any thoughts?

Every bar that Howells ever wrote sound odd to me, unless he found someone else's tune to keep him on the straight and narrow. (Tallis)

As printed, we have a second inversion chord of E flat major with an added major seventh. The D natural in the left hand sounds unusually dissonant and I am wondering whether it should be a D flat. D flat, or its enharmonic equivalent C sharp, is the common anchor point for the chords throughout the previous three bars and it would make sense for it to continue to be so; the music is heading for a chord of A flat, so what is the point of introducing a D natural? The D and B flat in this fourth bar coalesce onto a middle C at the start of the next system, so isn't a D flat much more likely? Thus a D flat would be entirely logical, whereas the printed D natural has no logic to it at all.

Schonberg had the courage of his convictions, and when he wrote the rubbish for organ that he did, at least he abandoned diatonic harmony.

Reger had his chorales and fugues, and stretched diatonic harmony to the ultimate degree.

What did Howells do?

He modulated; that's what.

Now on the basis that anything by Howells is an eternal circle of fifths and dominant sevenths, almost any note is related to any other, either at specific points in time or in the near future/recent past. As time probably doesn't exist as we think it does, I believe that it is entirely appropriate to just whaffle away in the style of Howells, playing anything that springs to mind. Indeed, my own acclaimed improvisation on a theme of Howells took diminution to new heights.

It was described as "Harmonically outstanding" by one critic, who went on to suggest that the work had a certain "disturbing brevity."

I hadn't the heart to inform the critic, that when presented with the rambling theme of a Howell's Rhapsody, I instantly vomitted and then fainted; collpasing in a heap across all four keyboards; mercifully set up with mysterious Celestes, a Clarionet and a Clarabella.

What the critic described as a "fragmented development" was actually the application of a wet sponge on the keys, the stops, the pedals and finally, my penguin suit.

My advice would be to accept the D natural for what it is....whatever it is....whatever it may be and whatever it may become.

It's probably the only bloody note that your listeners will ever remember afterwards.

MM

PS: ".....the music is heading for a chord of A flat" The Titanic was heading for America!

I am wondering whether that is supposed to be funny - or just bigotted twaddle!!

I'm not over fond of Howells either but the above doesn't deserve to grace this board!!

Oh, I think he's just trying to wind me up. MM prefers the corpulent, crapulent musical excesses of a corpulent, crapulent man whose music mostly just sounds like one long belch - usually a loud one; a man who, unable to handle anything as exacting as modulation, just contented himself with sliming through all the chromatics he could possibly think of, while his music metaphorically slides off the bar stool into a semi-comatose heap on the floor, whereupon it picks itself up and goes through the whole procedure again and again, until eventually it manages to stay triumphantly on the stool and collapse on the bar itself. And, in a futile attempt to convince the hearer that there is some point in all this hot air, he bludgeons his musical diarrhoea home by doubling every note in every possible octave with both hands and every available toe.

Yah! Boo! Sucks!

A kind reader has taken the trouble to contact me privately to point out that he cannot identify the bar in question from my description as he is using the collected edition of the Six Pieces. It is true that I was working from a separate copy of the piece. I had assumed that the collected edition would have been printed from the same plates and thus the seventh page of the piece would be the same in both versions, but I do not have the collected edition, so cannot tell.

Therefore, to remove all doubt, the bar in question is bar 89. I hope this clarifies.

It's suspicious that there is no precautionary natural on the D in the left hand. As they have been provided very generously elsewhere, it would appear that the absence of an accidental on this D is unintentional - though whether on Howells's part, the editor's or the typesetter's is another issue.

By the way, I am working from the collected edition, and the bar in question occurs exactly where you describe.

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Wagner?


MM

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I am not alone........

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

— Mark Twain

"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."

— George Bernard Shaw

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

— Igor Stravinsky

"Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."

— Gioacchino Antonio Rossini

"Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost."

— Harold C. Schonberg

"Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer."

— John Ruskin

"A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out."

— Ernest Newman

"If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong."

— Simon Rattle

"I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying 'I don't want to make a cemetery of your compositions.' "

— Hugo Wolf

"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws."

— Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

"I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."

— Richard Strauss

"Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man."

— Thomas Beecham

"I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland."

— Woody Allen


MM

For those with the one-volume Six Pieces it's page 36, second system, last bar. I had pencilled in a D flat in the LH chord on a previous occasion; its absence is, of course, a misprint.

I can recommend the Lexicon of Musical Invective, written by Nicolas Slonimsky. This is a compilation of critical reviews.

Charles Ives got tired of his music engraver "correcting" his music, "Those wrong notes; all of them are right". He also advised one of the more timid members of the audience to "stand up and use his ears like a man."

Good observation. Thanks, Nick.

Don't spread this around please, but I do actually like this piece.

I wonder if this isn't the almost definitive performance from...........America!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCxt8LJ472g

That's the proper sound for Howells.


MM

While on the subject of Howells misprints, another telling one occurs in the last of the Psalm Preludes (Set 2, No. 3). In the twenty-second bar of the Maestoso, meno mosso, the pedal minim E should be F sharp, thus agreeing with the manuals. I have this from two separate sources, and believe one of them received this correction from Howells himself.

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense since it then agrees with bar 14.

I've mentioned this before, but another one which surely must be a misprint (though I've never been able to obtain confirmation) is in the Psalm Prelude 2/ii, where the last quaver in the left hand of bar 26 must surely be an A sharp (thus anticipating the succeeding note and agreeing with the A sharp in the right hand). The printed A natural has no logic.

I agree; the same progression occurs in another key eighteen bars later.