queer spirituals


written by
Andrew Hodges.

No. 10
Kathleen Ferrier
digital music


Like the first song, to which it is a counterpart, this last song has quite a complex dramatic form. Here is an introduction and then the words interspersed with musical and textual comment.


10. Kathleen Ferrier (7:35)

This song is dedicated to the pianist and alto singer Kathleen Ferrier. She was almost exactly Alan Turing's contemporary, being born in 1912 and dying of breast cancer in 1953. For that reason alone I would be drawn to her. But there is a more direct link. In the 1950s my mother did secretarial work for her sister Winifred Ferrier, a writer and educationist, and some of my earliest memories are of playing with typewriters, books and tape recorders while my mother was working at Winifred's house. I think this contact represented the first time I ever saw people who were actively participating in culture.

Then it was through my mother that in the 1960s, when I was supposed to be learning to play the piano, Winifred Ferrier generously passed to me some piano music, of which three pieces bore Kathleen's signature from the 1920s. The only one I had a hope of playing was Bach's Prelude and Fugue in F minor from Book 2 of the Well-tempered Clavier.

For over thirty years I have been conscious of having in my keeping something precious from musical history, and now thanks to the computer I can do something positive about it.

The copy of Bach's F minor Prelude and Fugue, with Kathleen Ferrier's signature at the top.

Anyway, I have chosen this signed copy of the Bach Prelude and Fugue in F minor as the basis for my final Spiritual, though in fact only the first page of the Prelude features in the music.

The song begins with a piano rendition of the Prelude, but after a few bars the singer ( a mezzo-soprano: no attempt could be made to suggest Kathleen's alto voice) takes the part of the top line and the synthesiser adds a background:

Soprano:the music, the music...
can't stop the music in my head

This song is in fact almost a Song without words, with singers commenting on the music rather than the music supporting the singers; words fail. And the most important motifs are introduced by instruments. The first is Bach's chromatic F flat just before the conclusion of the first page of the Prelude:

which in Bach's music makes a chord of the augmented sixth and hints at the possibility of remoter keys before resolving into a cadence of A flat major.

In my song however the instruments pick up on the F flat and instead of giving the resolution, use it to sweep on into a romantic chord sequence over which the soprano tells the story, and the tenor joins in a very humble way:

This is music Kathleen Ferrier played.
A Prelude from the Forty-Eight

Tenor: She was magic
Soprano: She was magic
They loved her for her humour and her voice.

By this stage the texture has developed into the world of late romanticism, and the soprano explains:

In 1952 she sung Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde

This, probably her most famous recording, was music very different from the folk songs, Messiah, and St Matthew Passion which had brought her acclaim in the 1940s. The poems of Mahler's wonderful song-symphony are of course about the prospect of death; Gustav Mahler himself had not long to live when he wrote it, and neither did Kathleen Ferrier when she sang it.

My music quotes the opening of the work, with its notes C E G A defiantly asserting the simplicity of C major and anticipating the chord of the added sixth of Ewigkeit (eternity) with which Das Lied von der Erde ends. Then the flute plays fragments from one of the greatest moments: the line in the last song, Der Abschied (the farewell):

O Sieh! wie eine Silberbarke schwebt der Mond...

(Oh see! like a silver ship soars the moon... )

The crucial words O SIEH, not death-defying but death-accepting, are set by Mahler to the rising sixth from G to E, and this sixth forms the motif of this middle section. The soprano explains:

But she had cancer.

The brass concludes this section with four solemn chords on B-A-C-H, over which the soprano sings (on G-E) the motif:

Oh see!

A new section begins in which there are no words: a slow counterpoint combining Bach's theme from the F minor prelude, a lament based on the famous one of Purcell, and B-A-C-H. It drifts into flatter and more depressed keys, until in a bitonal effect, a G major chord on synthesiser and harp washes across. After a pause, the instruments shyly and slowly try out rising and falling sixths in various textures and harmonies, with the strings playing in counterpoint the theme from the Prelude for Max Penrose. This is brought to a halt by the Sanctus theme as in Heavenly Bodies, but this time asserting C major, and from now on the music acts as a SEA of C.

Soprano: see it and die

The next phrase is sung to the 'behold the sea itself' horn fanfare from The March of Time, but using the transition from A flat minor to C major:

Tenor: ecstasy

At this point it sounds as if the music has ended in C major. But with a crash there is an unexpected recall of the Creation sequence from the introduction to The Gardening Song. The music is exactly repeated as far as the harp rising up the first sixteen harmonics of the deep C. But then there is a difference. Instead of the evocation of the evolution of biological life, the brass comes in with a repeat of the harmonic sequence, very strongly, surrounded by an ecstatic sea of C major, until on the fifteenth harmonic, a big chord of A flat minor supports the harp sweeping up as it did at the climax of Gerry's Nightmare. This time the resolution in C major continues for a passage of loud dance music with full percussion, until recalling Horizon, the paralysed young man in a state of consciousness where music is the only reality.

In the view of Roger Penrose, the very nature and origin of the physical universe, and its emergence out of mathematical truth (in this song, symbolised by the natural harmonics), must be related to the possibility of our human consciousness. Our understanding of pure numbers, and perhaps therefore of musical relationships, goes to the root of such consciousness. To 'see' at all is to exist in a four-dimensional quantum-mechanical cosmos which we do not yet understand... a true mystery of the connection between mental and physical and mathematical worlds... an Ewigkeit beyond death...

Both: O See!

The wave breaks and the piano asserts a deep C as leading the way to Bach's classical F minor. There is. however, a prelude to the recapitulation: a hint at romantic development, and then in another throwback to The March of Time a reference to the Village People who used the same rising sequence of falling notes that Bach used in this prelude:

Tenor: just can't stop the music...
Soprano: the music, the music...

...and now the recapitulation begins properly, giving the whole of the first page of Bach's Prelude, but this time with more instruments joining in, including Alan Turing's solo violin. This is a 'dance of the living and the dead.'

Soprano: the music... the music...
can't stop the music in my head...

We know the F flat is approaching, and indeed all the instruments draw attention to it. But this time, by being combined with the rising sixth G - E, Bach's F flat is finally identified with Mahler's E. But it is resolved as Bach intended into A flat major, and finally the soprano sings, rising a sixth on the notes E flat to C:

Oh See!

so that the last note is C although set in a soft and sweet A flat; this is also the key in which my grandma's March began in the first song, and so as a last farewell the horn reminds us of her simple tune. I'm sure Kathleen Ferrier would appreciate the link with this democratic human base.

Behold the C itself!

© 2000 Andrew Hodges

In 2003, at the fiftieth anniversary of her death, the BBC presented a new documentary TV programme with new material from the new book Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier.


Songs: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10


Introduction to the Queer Spirituals email andrew@synth.co.uk