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Articles
A selection of articles about Erik Chisholm
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| | | “A thoroughly national composer: tone poet of the Highlands”, Basil Hogarth, 1930
“The hardest working man in Singapore”, Alan Gordon, 1946
“Busy Dr Chisholm polishes off his 11th opera”, Music Critic, 1962
“Conductor loved controversy”, Fiona Chisholm, 2004
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The Scottish Highlands |
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| Listen to Music Clip Sea Tangle |
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| Cappriccio infantileseo | by Kaikhosru Sorabji,1930
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Erik Chisholm & Kaikhosru Sorabji taken in the 1950s at Corfe Castle |
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Of the articles written about Erik Chisholm, few can be more original than "Cappriccio Infantileseo" by Sorabji, a life long friend.
I love my love with an E because he is
Enticing, Equable, Endearing, Edifying,
I hate him with an E because he is execrable,
Elephantine, egregious, epistemological,
Epileptic, ellipsordal,
I love him with an R because he is Artful (joke!!!)
Rubicund, rich and rare
I hate hin with an R because he is rednosed,
Rachilic, rude and rebellious
I love him with an I because he is impudent,
Idyllic, innocent, incomparable and ingenuous
I hate him with an I because he is insane
Intolerable, indecorous, indelicate and incorrigible
I love him with a K because he is Katty
Komplaisant, Kareful and Konsoling
I hate him with a K because he has Kollywobbles
Kold feet, Korns and Kramp
He feeds on Earth-worms and lives in
‘Ell and his name is . . . . . . . . . .
(?Douglas?)
The extravagant adjectives are remarkably apt. There are exceptions “elephantine”, “epileptic”. which don't quite fit.
Nobody in our society eats earthworms -and as a committed vegetarian Chisholm certainly wouldn’t- perhaps the reference is to the children’s ditty:
“Nobody loves me Everybody hates me. I’ll go into the garden and eat some worms”
Chisholm may have felt that way now and then; he trod a rather tough path through life.
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| Dr Erik Chisholm: an appreciation | by Agnes Walker, The Edinburgh Tatler, 1965
This article on my good friend the late Erik Chisholm is the direct result of a lecture given by John Purser at Aberdeen University with the title 'Should Scotland Have a MacBartók?' I contend that we do have a MacBartók in Scotland in the music of Chisholm.
Erik Chisholm was born in 1904 in Cathcart, Glasgow. He was a delicate child and for that reason left school at the age of thirteen. He had always shown musical talent as a boy, composing songs and keyboard pieces, some of which were published. At an early age he became a pupil of Philip Halstead at the Athenaeum, now the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he carried away many prizes. While still a student at Glasgow, he came under the notice of Herbert Walton of Glasgow Cathedral from whom he took organ lessons; by the time he was twelve giving organ recitals and acting as deputy for Walton. A few years later he went to London where he was brought to the attention of Rachmaninov, Dr Eaglefield and Lev Pouishnoff whose pupil he became, acquiring some pianistic virtuosity.
But his interest in the larger aspects of music took him to Canada in 1924 where he was organist and choirmaster at Westminster Presbyterian church, Nova Scotia, as well as Director of Music at Picton Academy. Two years later he returned to Glasgow and as he felt he required academic sanction he obtained letters from Professor E J Dent and Donald Tovey which admitted him to Edinburgh University - a rare privilege for a student possessing none of the usual certificates and diplomas. He became a Mus B in 1930 and a Mus D three years later.
He lectured well and researched diligently into such subjects as Celtic music. His first Piano Concerto, called the 'Piobaireachd' was performed with the then Scottish Orchestra and at the Amsterdam Festival in 1933, Chisholm playing the solo part. He was then drawn into the orbit of Margaret Morris and the Celtic Ballet, for whom he wrote four ballets...
Chisholm's enthusiasm for other composers led him to found the Active Society of Music in 1929 for the Propagation of Contemporary Music. It was indeed active for ten years, inviting (among some two hundred others) personalities like Hindemith, Szymanowski, Bartók, Medtner, Busch, Casella and Sorabji to Glasgow.
It was Bartók whom Chisholm worshipped and who became his greatest influence. Chisholm befriended Bartók when he left Hungary, and gave him hospitality in Carment Drive in Shawlands. The strange sounds emanating from there made little impression on Glasgow and later in Edinburgh when Chisholm presented the string quartets of Bartók for the first time in St Cuthbert's church, the audience walked out; but it consolidated the opinion of these two composers that the Magyar and Celtic music have similarities which cannot be equated in Western harmonic systems. An article which was not published in Con Brio but was in preparation - author now unknown - claimed a possible two-way influence between the two men, pointing out that not only had Chisholm given Bartók hospitality and a platform but that Bartók was intensely interested in Scottish music and on his last visit to Glasgow just before the war, he took away a bagpipe chanter and a collection of pipe music. Chisholm would certainly have had much to offer him on this subject which was so important to his own work.
Chisholm wrote once that the three highlights of his life were in hearing at age seven Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata played by Lamond on a piano roll; becoming acquainted with the music of India and lastly being offered the chair of music at Cape Town University in 1947. In 1940 he was a conductor of the Carl Rosa company. In 1943 he went to the Far East as musical director for ENSA, conducting for a time the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. He found in Hindustani music a similarity with Celtic music and Yehudi Menuhin has demonstrated at an Edinburgh Festival the same similarity to the music of Bartók. Chisholm's Indian Concerto is a work that I have rather made my own, having played it in Sweden; in London with Sir Adrian Boult; many times for the BBC and in Moscow and Poland. I always remember that visit to Moscow in 1958, Erik and I working on two awful pianos in the Moscow Conservatoire when suddenly he took off and after it seemed hours of waiting I rushed after him up and down endless corridors, no-one speaking English. I found him at last. He hadn't noted the room we were in and was frantically looking for me. The orchestra took a long time to master the work but all went well and was well received in the press. London opinion was mixed but The Bulletin claimed 'There is little doubt that the quality of the work and the colourful way in which it was played will soon gain for the work a popular appeal.'
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Chisholm conducting his Hindustani Piano Concerto Moscow 1957: 50 years later in 2007 it will be heard on BBC Radio Scotland |
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We gave two performances with the Moscow State Orcehstra. Chisholm made arrangements then on the recommendation of Shostakovich for the publication of his Celtic Song Book in Moscow with accompaniments by Chisholm. He was preparing a second volume at the time of his death in Cape Town in 1965. He made a tremendous contribution to South Africa as Dean of the University Music Department and head of the South Africa School of Music. He reorganised the departments, engaging first-class professors for degree courses. He founded the University Opera Company in 1951 under the direction of Gregario Fiasconaro, which gave a great impetus to opera in South Africa. A tour of Britain under Chisholm in 1956 - 7 included the British premiere of Bluebeard's Castle by Bartók. Years before in Glasgow with the Grand Opera Society he gave the first complete performance of The Trojans of Berlioz - a special train brought a trail of people from London.
I remember those fleeting visits to London and Scotland. How he dashed the Janáček Sonata Presentiment and Death on to my piano desk - 'That will suit you. Play it.' His enthusiasm for Janáček led to the commission by the Pergamon Press for a book on Janáček: the manuscript arrived on the desk of Kenneth Wright only days before Erik died, 'each chapter', he said, 'neatly cross-tied with blue ribbon and some barely legible hieroglyphics from the Master's own hand on the familiar University blue notepaper.' Chisholm was a household name in South Africa, highly regarded as a lecturer, frequently on TV and radio.
Memories come back to me. He arrived one Sunday morning at my home in Whitecraigs dressed in pyjamas and an overcoat; threw a parcel of music at my father who had opened the door and said 'give those to Agnes. I've just finished them,' and dashed back to a waiting taxi. They were the piano preludes From the True Edge of the Great World - it being a Gaelic superstition that the Hebrides were the edge of the world. I have played the preludes since, both in Scotland and abroad. Years later when on a tour with Erik and Lovey Scott, F G Scott's daughter who was to become his second wife, we were all happily seated in the train when a clergyman entered our compartment. Erik seeked ill at ease and muttered remarks not audible to anyone; but at the next station he bundled us all out saying 'Come on all you, I can't stand these damned ministers.' He wrote no religious music.
In his last years in South Africa the climax and synthesis of his creative genius was in his operas - he wrote twelve in all. Dark Sonnet, a lugubrious modern dialogue between husband and nagging wife (ending in the husband's suicide) based on Eugene O'Neill's play had a great success in New York in a tour of opera from South Africa. The Earl of Harewood had plans to present The Pardoner's Tale from Chaucer, The Inland Woman and Dark Sonnet at an Edinburgh Festival, but relinquished his post before it came about. Those three short operas make a group, not unlike Bartók's trilogy, which he always preferred to be performed in one evening. In a year's sabbatical in London not long before his death Chisholm completed a full-scale opera based on Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Symon Goldberg played his Indian Violin Concerto at an Edinburgh Festival several years ago. Lili Kraus (to whom it is dedicated) played the piano one in South Africa.
It seems to me that there are even less chances for Scottish composers to be heard. When a Scottish National Orchestra goes abroad with Benjamin Britten representing composers from England, the situation is black indeed and is one that Chisholm would have deplored. Had Erik been given the position at Glasgow University which we denied him, one wonders what might have been. He left us before Scotland had time to catch up with him. In his last years in South Africa his schedule of work was incredibly heavy and contributed to his untimely death at the age of sixty-one. Perhaps his diet of fried mushrooms, whisky and love didn't help to prolong his always restless life. Perhaps his day is still to come - when Scotland will realise his importance as a composer and a pioneer in founding a Scottish national school of composing in which he could certainly be called Scotland's MacBartok. |
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| Conductor Loved Controversy | by Fiona Chisholm, Cape Argus, 2004
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Erik Chisholm and his daughter Fiona in Glasgow
My father, Erik Chisholm, whose birth in Glasgow 100 years ago was celebrated in 2004, over two weeks by UCT’s Opera School, loved controversy. |
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| | | Conductor Loved ControversyOne event you won’t find recorded in the CV of this composer, conductor, writer, administrator and teacher, who for 19 years was the impulsive professor at the head of UCT’s College of Music, was how he tried to take his ageing spaniel into a City Hall concert to hear the noted Johannesburg pianist Adolph Hallis play the Rachmaninov-Paganini rhapsody.
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Erik Chisholm with Towser
Now this happened to be one of Towser’s favourite piano pieces and, like many other regular concert-goers (for he went to all college concerts and opera rehearsals at the Little Theatre with his master), no sooner had he settled down at his feet, than he shut his eyes.But his entry had been spotted by a “granite-jawed, beady-eyed, lofty usher” who marched up to my dad and in a stage whisper that reached far beyond the stage, told him that NO DOGS WERE ALLOWED in the City Hall and he must be removed forthwith. |
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By this time the audience was showing a lively interest in the scene. Rather than hold up the concert, Chisholm’s wife Diana (“mad as hell” he later claimed) rose from her seat, took Towser by the lead and led him out.
Subsequently my dad wrote a letter of complaint to the Town Clerk, the late Jan Luyt, on December 19, 1960, requesting that this irritating usher “who pushes around, holds back and commands with masterly authority and offensive efficiency” be replaced by someone more friendly. Luckily Luyt had a sense of humour. Replying on December 29, 1960, he wrote that it was impossible to make exceptions to the no-dog rule “however well-trained and musical Towser may be” and that the usher to whom Chisholm had referred “in rather uncomplimentary terms” was only doing his duty. But his letter ended warmly. “I hope by now that your temper, as well as Towser’s dignity, has been restored and that your good lady is no longer as mad as hell. If this is so, perhaps we may regard the matter as closed as I would not like anything to mar the good relationship which exists between us.”
A rumpus which created a good deal of amusement in Cape Town was when the UCT authorities ordered several large “alien” pines in the College grounds to be cut down. Chisholm erupted. He loved these trees and on his daily walk to work would leave under one tree an imperial mint for the local ants and a slice of toast for Ronnie the Rat. He retaliated by announcing that he would not conduct the college orchestra for the annual graduation ceremony. A silent graduation procession? How ghastly. The pressure to yield was enormous. Eventually he did, but on his own terms. He opened the programme with Trees and every item that followed was about forests and tree-planting ceremonies.
Probably his most famous controversy was over “The Bloemfontein Boneheads”. This was my father’s rude term for the executive members of the 1960 Union Festival Committee who turned down a unanimous suggestion from its advisory committee of musicians to stage the premiere of John Joubert’s opera Silas Marner. Instead they chose a tried and tested opera. My father roared into battle with his usual white-hot enthusiasm. He called the committee a bunch of “operatic boneheads” and because they were in Bloemfontein, well, they soon became known as the “Bloemfontein Boneheads”. In an article on the Sunday Times on July 5, 1959, he had another crack at the “BBs” (as they then were called) blaming them for being unable to distinguish between creative work and recreative work. “Thus they are selecting operas merely to give big fancy parts to over-publicised South African singers such as Mimi Coertse.” He further suggested that the opera by Joubert (who lived in England) had been turned down because he was not “100% Afrikaner” and the opera was not about those “crushing Voortrekker bores”. He got away with the slight on Onse [Afrikaans for “Our”] Mimi but was forced to apologise for his remarks about the “worthy Voortrekkers.” “I mean of course,” he hurriedly explained, “that so diffuse a movement as the Voortrekkers is not a suitable subject for concentrated operatic treatment”. Eventually Silas Marner was given its world premiere in Cape Town by the UCT Opera School, with Albie Louw in the title role and my father conducting.
In his youth in Glasgow he was a virtuoso pianist and celebrated concert organist and an unsparing and witty music critic. He could have been a full-time writer but at the age of seven had a life-changing experience, which directed his course towards music. He heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata played on a pianola. His major works include two piano concertos, a violin concerto, a concerto for orchestra, two symphonies, six ballet suites, orchestral suites, much for solo piano, much vocal music and 10 operas. But both the man and his music have been largely forgotten for the past 40 years since his premature death in 1965 aged 61.
Hopefully this year of his centenary, which is being marked with events in London, Glasgow and Cape Town, may bring about the change and “Scotland’s forgotten composer” remains forgotten no more.
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