Endless Fascination
The life and work of Thomas Pitfield, composer, artist, craftsman, poet
ed. Rosemary Firman and John Turner
Hardback, 568 pages
Published 2024
ISBN 978-0-951479544
Forsyth Brothers
Endless Fascination is a celebration of the life and labour of the versatile British composer, artist, craftsman and poet, Thomas Pitfield. This sumptuous volume goes well beyond mere biography and analysis. It is a book not to read through – although one can do it – but to dip into, absorb slowly and learn. A cast of dozens contribute to this extensive, unique study of an overlooked British composer. The book has five sections: Thomas Pitfield’s Autobiographical Writings; Work; Recollections, Appreciations; Worklists; and details of the accompanying CD.
Thomas Pitfield (1903-1999) was born in Bolton, Lancashire. Self-taught as a composer, he studied piano, cello and harmony at the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM). His works are known for their often light-hearted, folk-influenced sound world. The orchestrations are masterly. His catalogue includes concertos for piano, violin, recorder and percussion, chamber music, cantatas, and opera. He held academic positions at the RMCM and the Royal Northern College of Music, where he taught notable pupils, including John Ogdon, Ronald Stevenson, and John McCabe. Pitfield was also a prolific poet and artist: he wrote sundry poems and produced numerous illustrations and graphics. His four autobiographies provide insights into his life and creative process. He continued to compose and create art until his nineties, and left behind a rich legacy.
Thomas Pitfield has not been the subject of detailed musicological study. Neither is he a household name, even amongst habitues of Manchester’s concert halls and recital rooms. Until now, those interested have had to explore a limited selection of disparate sources, often tricky to consult. The current Grove’s Dictionary entry runs to just over three hundred words. Most important are four autobiographical studies. There are a couple of important articles in the Composer journal and Musical Opinion. Apart from that, the student relies on articles, reviews and obituaries in various newspapers and magazines. In the prestigious Manchester Sounds (Volume 4, 2003-2004) John Turner published The Music of Thomas Pitfield: A Working Catalogue. This was a comprehensive list, along with details of some twenty publications that he had written, contributed to, or provided the illustrations for.
The first section of the book contains three of the four entertaining autobiographical texts.
No Song, No Supper is the first volume of Thomas Pitfield’s autobiography, published in 1986. In this memoir, he recounts his early life and career. It details his experiences as an apprentice engineer, his self-taught musical journey, and his eventual studies at the RMCM. The narrative, filled with personal anecdotes, reflects his modesty and dedication to his craft. It could be argued that this memoir exposes a deal of self-pity, reflected on seventy years after the events. He was brought up in a household devoid of cultural interests. Old age did give him a view on his youth more stoical than he must have felt at the time. Although it is the first of four volumes of autobiography, it covers much of his life until after the Second World War. The text progresses as a series of vignettes, often unrelated to time, because few dates are given. I do not have a copy of this book in front of me, but it had various illustrations and photographs not included here.
The second volume of Thomas Pitfield’s autobiography, A Song After Supper, was issued in 1990, when he was 77 years old. The book investigates his experiences as a musician, educator, examiner and visual artist. It gives insights into his creative processes and the influences that shaped his art. There is more information here about his musical activities, and his recollections about a galaxy of fellow musicians and artists.
According to the editors, Incidents from a Sixty Year Holiday Diary, the final volume of autobiography, was published in 1998 by Kall Kwik, Altringham. I was unable to find any record of this book in the usual library catalogues. This is not a conventional travel diary as such. It is about “a journey for most of their lives of two partners – man and wife, though with selected incidents from numerous holiday journeys”. These range from their first day of marriage to the time of publication. They are not arranged chronologically, but as Pitfield seems to recall them. Places visited include Grange-Over-Sands, Hastings, Bath and Cheshire. There are a few notes on travel to France and Italy. This section included Pitfield’s poem “The Dee at Night” which he set as part of his song cycle By the Dee for voice, string quartet and piano.
The third volume of autobiography, A Cotton Town Boyhood, has not been included in this volume.
The heart of Endless Fascination are academic assessments of Pitfield’s accomplishment in the various artistic endeavours that interested him. The longest essay is The Spontaneous Expression of a Direct and Simple Man: The Music of Thomas Pitfield by Jeremy Dibble, a British musicologist and professor at Durham University. He specializes in British and Irish music from the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on such composers as Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry.
Dibble investigates three chief topics: Life as a Composer, The BBC broadcasting, and a brief encounter with film, and Aspects of Pitfield’s Music. He makes considerable use of the autobiographical studies, supplemented with citations of letters to and from Pitfield, journal articles, reviews and programme notes. This study is illustrated by select musical examples. Dibble emphasises various stylistic influences, including Pitfield’s love of folksong collected from Cheshire and Staffordshire, and folk dances, which featured in many pieces. Dibble investigates Pitfield’s contribution to Solo art song. His poetic aesthetic was influenced by the Georgian Poets, promulgated by Harold Monro and his London-based Poetry Bookshop. The last section of the essay is devoted to Large-scale form and variation. It explores the Piano Concertos, the Concerto Lirico for violin and the Theme and Variations for String Orchestra. Dibble regards this as one of Pitfield’s finest compositions.
Stephen Whittle, a museum and gallery professional, discovers Thomas Baron Pitfield: Artist and Craftsman. He explains that although Pitfield had an “irrepressible determination to study music”, he had earlier “pleaded unsuccessfully” with his parents to allow him to take drawing lessons. In fact, cultural pursuits were discouraged in the young man’s household. As a teenager he discovered John Ruskin’s writings. He began to fill his early sketchbooks with landscapes and “fragments of pastoral poetry”. It was a rebellion against his parents. The section then looks at Pitfield’s contribution to carpentry and craft. He had been trained in woodworking by his father, who was a joiner and builder by trade. In 1930, he won a scholarship to the Bolton School of Art, where he studied the history of furniture making. The text includes photographs of items that he made. But then his interest developed towards textile designs, which he created with his wife, Alice.
The section continues with a discussion of Pitfield’s published volume of poetry, and is illustrated with reproductions of his linocuts. This interest in books extended to graphic design for a wide range of products, including booklets, greetings cards for the Vegetarian Society, and posters for the Peace Pledge Union. He also designed sheet music covers, and examples are given of John Brydson’s Noah’s Ark and Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony. The concluding sub-section examines Pitfield’s achievement in watercolour medium. This was taken up slightly later in life as a “pleasant foil and relaxation”. Wonderful examples are given of scenes in an around Cheshire and Manchester. Typically pastoral in mood, there is a melancholy watercolour of Farnworth (actually Prestolee) Locks near Bolton.
Rosemary Firman, professional librarian, formerly at the RNCM and then Hereford Cathedral, has contributed an important chapter on Pitfield’s literary work. Crafting Books, Weaving Word: Thomas Pitfield’s Books and Poetry explores different facets of his authorship. His approach to book production was Morrisonian: “Such a book contained it maker’s own words, written out, decorated, illustrated and bound by them.” Furthermore, the “ideal book was made from honest materials, using traditional skills, and was made with sincerity and joy.” In Firman’s opinion, this very nearly matched the “best” of Pitfield’s books, whether published or hand-crafted. The “Serious Poetry” is then examined. Readers who warm to A.E. Housman and the Georgian Poets will appreciate Pitfield’s verse. Examples are quoted in the text. It is certainly not innovative poetry, nor is it confessional. For a North Countryman, it has none of the grittiness of Ted Hughes. “Book Arts” are then discussed in detail, with numerous examples of Pitfield’s calligraphy and bookbinding.
Stuart Scott’s brief discussion of Thomas Pitfield and the Arts and Crafts Movement is essential reading. The artist “identified closely with this movement’s disenchantment with the impersonal, mechanisation direction of society and the seeking of a simpler, more fulfilling way of living.” This seems to have influenced the wide range of his artistic endeavour, which included “paintings, illustrations, prints, posters, cards, calendars, leaflets, music covers […] and much more.” Scott declares that the book The Poetry of Trees “brought together all his interests, crafts, and skills. Here he declares himself the all-rounder, or complete artist.” Even Pitfield’s house in Bowden, Cheshire, conformed to William Morris’s Arts and Crafts dictum: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Frederik Van Dam and Ghidy de Koning contributed the treatise ‘Archive of the Future: Wood in Thomas Pitfield’s The Poetry of Trees (1942)’. They originally published it in 2023 in the book Materials of Culture. I found the paper a little bit new-agey. It is illustrated with photographs of the front cover and endpapers of this book.
In the sixth chapter of the second section, John Turner discusses Thomas Pitfield, Pacifist Composer. Whilst studying at Tettenhall College, Wolverhampton, he signed up to the Peace Pledge Union. This was at a time of rising dictatorships in Germany, Italy and Spain. During the Second World War, he registered as a conscientious objector but avoided prison by agreeing to continue teaching. Turner also explores Pitfield’s relationship with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. The latter was not a happy one. That said, he did design the cover for the full score of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and his Simple Symphony. Pitfield, a vegetarian, wrote the Parkdale Song for the Vegetarian Society.
Manchester-based photographer Michael Pollard has assembled a first-rate photographic gallery of Thomas Pitfield’s creations. This includes drawings and pencil sketches, design of embroidery, several pages from his extensive notebooks, and a broad selection of sheet music covers. I enjoyed the early watercolours of two Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway steam locomotives. Perhaps the most evocative images are his landscape watercolours; my favourite is a sketch of Morecambe Bay from 1992. Even the briefest of glances at these pages reveals a remarkable diversity of talent in a wide range of media.
The third section of this volume is hard to summarise. It consists of more than thirty Recollections and Appreciations from a wide variety of individuals. It opens with a charming memoir by Tom Pitfield’s niece, Norma Pitfield. She describes regular visits to her uncle and aunt’s house, their effect on her reading and her “artistic prowess”. The memoir closes with the age-old regret – “that I didn’t take more notice of all the things that my uncle said, played, made”.
There is a key essay by Max Paddison, Emeritus Professor of Music and Aesthetics at Durham University. Paddison studied at the RMCM with Pitfield in 1964-1968. He had not kept a diary, so he is writing (he says) with the benefit of hindsight. Paddison considers the ambience of the college at that time, Pitfield as a teacher and composer, including certain stylistic traits. And then there was the impact of the “New Music” on himself and his educator.
There follows John McCabe’s introduction to Pitfield’s Selected Songs, Manchester Forsyth, 1989. He remarks that the perception that Pitfield’s style was “an agreeable kind of 18th century pastiche” was “inaccurate and unjust”. It is in the English pastoral school that he “stands much more clearly”.
Other familiar names might be pianist Peter Donohoe and onductor Andrew Penny, who recorded Pitfield’s piano concertos for the Naxos label. Well-known personalities include Ronald Stevenson, Arthur Butterworth, David Ellis and Anthony Gilbert. These four gentlemen, sadly all now gone, were amongst a baker’s dozen who contributed their thoughts to the programme published for a celebratory concert at the Royal Northern College of Music, held on 20 November 2000.
I noted above the earlier version of the worklist prepared by John Turner. It has been updated for this volume.
One very telling chapter in the fourth section is Stuart Scott’s compilation of the BBC Broadcasts of Music by Thomas Pitfield: A Chronological List. It is clear that performances have declined over the years. The first broadcast was in 1936, in a series featuring Contemporary Composers of the North. There was a steady stream of concerts and recitals throughout the following four decades, and the fifties and sixties were particularly fruitful. Sadly, in the 1990s and the present century, these transmissions have fallen by the wayside: in 1995-2024 there have only been four broadcasts. This reflects the fate of divers North Country composers such as John McCabe, David Ellis, Anthony Gilbert and Alan Rawsthorne.
Equally unsatisfactory is the meagre sum of records and CDs dedicated to Pitfield, noted in the Discography created by John Turner. Out of hundreds of pieces of music, only a couple of dozen have been recorded. (The Sonata No.1 in A for violin and piano appears on Lyrita SRCD359, not SRCD45 as listed in the text.)
The fifth section consists of programme notes for Flying Kites: A Trafford Miscellany, the CD which accompanies the book, released in 2005 on Campion Records (Campion Cameo 2044; review ~ review). It featured numbers by Tom Pitfield and his “friends and acquaintances”, among them Martin Ellerby, Robin Walker and John Ireland. The performers include Richard Baker (reciter), John Turner (recorder), Damien Harrison (percussion) and Keith Swallow (piano).
The most helpful index gives references to names cited in the text and to Pitfield’s achievement in all categories.
A plethora of illustrations is the most striking thing about this remarkable book. Yes, there are various photographs of Pitfield, his wife and friends, but the bulk of the graphics are designs and paintings by the man himself. I noted some, especially those in Michael Pollard’s Photographic Gallery chapter. But from first opening the book the reader is captivated by Pitfield’s artwork, even extending to the endpapers and the book cover. Dr Rosemary Firman has done a sterling job in assembling the graphics for this project. She added the illustrations to the text. Examples can be seen here. The text editor is John Turner, the doyen of North Country classical music, and chairman of the Pitfield Trust. Simon Patterson designed and realised the book. It is a fitting tribute to a remarkable polymath.
The production is outstanding. It is a large, heavy tome, not to be taken on a train trip, flight or cruise; in fact, I studied most of it propped up on my desk. The paper is of the highest quality, complimenting the text and illustrations. The typeface is easy to read.
The book will be of immense value to several distinct types of reader. Most significantly, historians of British twentieth-century music will find abundant information, well beyond usual composer biographies and studies. In the autobiographical sections, there is significant material that will interest the social historian of the period, with an especial emphasis on the North Country of England. Art lovers will be impressed by the sheer volume of illustrations included.
I doubt that there are many forthcoming books about Pitfield “on the stocks”, and I imagine that “stocks” of this wonderful book will not last forever. So, invest now!
John France
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