Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction: Paradox of an Establishment Composer
- PART I Howells the Stylist
- PART II Howells the Vocal Composer
- PART III Howells the Instrumental Composer
- 7 ‘From “Merry-Eye” to Paradise’: The Early Orchestral Music of Herbert Howells
- 8 Lost, Remembered, Mislaid, Rewritten: A Documentary Study of In Gloucestershire
- 9 Style and Structure in the Oboe Sonata and Clarinet Sonata
- PART IV Howells the Modern
- PART V Howells in Mourning
- Appendix: Catalogue of the Works of Herbert Howells
- Bibliography
- Index of Works
- General Index
8 - Lost, Remembered, Mislaid, Rewritten: A Documentary Study of In Gloucestershire
from PART III - Howells the Instrumental Composer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction: Paradox of an Establishment Composer
- PART I Howells the Stylist
- PART II Howells the Vocal Composer
- PART III Howells the Instrumental Composer
- 7 ‘From “Merry-Eye” to Paradise’: The Early Orchestral Music of Herbert Howells
- 8 Lost, Remembered, Mislaid, Rewritten: A Documentary Study of In Gloucestershire
- 9 Style and Structure in the Oboe Sonata and Clarinet Sonata
- PART IV Howells the Modern
- PART V Howells in Mourning
- Appendix: Catalogue of the Works of Herbert Howells
- Bibliography
- Index of Works
- General Index
Summary
Howells composed three essays for string quartet, all of them begun and two of them signed off early in his career. The first was the student piece Lady Audrey's Suite of 1915 (HH 50), then came Fantasy String Quartet of 1917 (HH 71), and lastly In Gloucestershire, posthumously published as String Quartet no. 3 in 1992 (HH 62). Together with the Piano Quartet (HH 66), Rhapsodic Quintet for clarinet and strings (HH 107), four sonatas for violin and piano, the postwar sonatas for oboe and clarinet, and a number of smaller pieces for various combinations, they make up Howells's entire output of chamber music, a small but very significant body of important and accomplished works mostly written before the Second World War and predating the later reflowering of his career as a composer of church music. But while the composition and publication history of Lady Audrey's Suite and the Fantasy String Quartet presents little in the way of difficulty to the commentator from a historical and documentary point of view, In Gloucestershire is an entirely different matter. This substantial, thirty-minute, four-movement sonata structure is in many ways an enigma. Originally one of Howells's earliest major works, In Gloucestershire, on the way to its final definitive version, underwent a process of revision and recomposition that occupied its composer on and off for twenty or more years and generated at least three discrete versions, two of which survive complete. It is a work that has twice been lost and subsequently rewritten.
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- Information
- The Music of Herbert Howells , pp. 139 - 152Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013