Delius' Concerti and the Value of Polyphony

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[Musik-Konzepte 141/2 (2008), 179-198, in German]

Delius’s Concerti and the Value of Polyphony

I Introduction

This essay represents the results of an attempt to short-circuit a frequently posed critical

argument against Delius’s music, namely that it is loosely constructed, by suggesting that

such an argument is misplaced and unnecessarily polarised in the way it is framed. This

essay will thus confront the value (or otherwise) of “rhapsody” in Delius’s music.1 Two

conclusions will be pursued. First, the very looseness that is often associated with rhapsody

can equally be interpreted as a virtue; indeed, it is suggested that this quality lies at the

core of Delius’s musical style, both technically and aesthetically. Secondly, such looseness

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can be interpreted without recourse to the common analytically driven apology that,

despite appearances, the music is ‘in actual fact’ quite organically integrated and unified

On the matter of this second claim, it is characteristic to find the literature on Delius

on the defensive when it comes to the nature of his musical language and aesthetic. Here

are some representative examples: “the more one inspects a Delius score and examines its

elements, the more closely it seems to be bound together – providing the elements are

preserved intact”;2 “The more straightforward and simple a composition appears on the

page the more likelihood there is of patient thought and effort and skill behind it all”;3 “the

work [the Violin Concerto] is not a formless, waffling piece of pastoral ‘cowpat’ music but a

highly organised structure”;4 “Their structural articulation is sometimes a little stiff, but in

the finest work of the group, the Violin Concerto (1916), the beauty of individual sections

offsets formal weaknesses”.5 This is, of course, a standard rhetorical manoeuvre in many

analytically-minded discourses. In this essay, however, it will be suggested, not that these

apologia are incorrect or wrong-headed, but rather that they represent unnecessary critical

responses to the music, and that they reveal more about the writer than the music.

This essay offers an alternative, by making use of the philosophical aesthetics of the

Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, specifically his concept of polyphony as developed most

famously in his work on Dostoevsky. It will be suggested that with polyphony Delius’s

concerti can be apprehended, experienced, and interpreted in ways that go some way

towards coming to terms with the otherwise idiosyncratic orchestral textures and formal

processes. In this sense, it is indeed literally true, though without the connotations of

elitism, that “Delius’s music requires a fine adjustment of the senses: it is music for the

connoisseur”.6 His works are, in a positive sense (and the analogy is pertinent, given the

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invocation below of Bakhtin’s work on Dostoevsky), ‘loose and baggy monsters’, as Henry

James famously described the Russian novel.

The use of a Bakhtinian concept of polyphony will bring this essay close to

Nietzsche, an enormous influence on Delius. This is by virtue of the way in which a

polyphonic interpretation of the concerti can itself be interpreted as underpinning claims

that Delius provides the listener with examples of “nature music”.7 Put crudely, polyphony

as heard in the textures of these concerti is, after Bakhtin, the sound of nature going about

its business, as suggested by the link made between the frequently descending lines

(especially in the bass) in Delius and the organic life cycles of nature.8 (Further

hermeneutic extrapolations could be provided in another context, but will not be pursued

in this essay, since the influence of Nietzsche on Delius is discussed elsewhere in this

volume.)

This essay is not concerned with historical issues, such as the genesis and reception

history of Delius’s four concerti – Piano (1908), Violin and Cello (1915), Violin (1916), Cello

(1921) – and does not consider their place in Delius’s oeuvre and musical development.

Similarly, mention is not made of the other almost forgotten concertante works Delius

wrote, of which there are a few. Rather, the intention is to explore an issue concerning the

critical interpretation of the four major concerti and to offer a tool for the practice thereof.

II Rethinking value judgements

There are at least two reasons for attempting this alternative Bakhtinian interpretive

intervention on the Delius concerti. First, it is interesting to shine an alternative light on the

value judgements commonly made of the works and of their place within the canon.

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Secondly, it is useful to offer an alternative means by which such judgements can be

generated, debated, rationalised, and justified. Some brief comments will map out the

contours of the standard views of the works.

It is generally held to be the case that the Violin Concerto is the best of the four

concerti. “Of all the concertos this is by far the most successful”;9 “It is among Delius’s finest

works”;10 “Of these [Violin Sonata, Double Concerto, Violin Concerto, String Quartet] the

only completely successful effort is that of Violin and Orchestra”.11 Michael Kennedy offers

an alternative assessment, though lacks the space in his survey article to back up the

assertion: “Whereas many regard the Violin Concerto as Delius’s finest work in the

medium, I believe that his last concerto, for cello, claims that position”.12 The Cello

Concerto is looked upon slightly less favourably than the Violin Concerto, and a certain

awkwardness in the writing is usually offered as the explanation. Thus Thomas Beecham:

“Save for the several slow movements in the String Quartet, the Violoncello Concerto and

the Double Concerto, in which his true self often rises to the surface, his peculiar melodic

and harmonic singularities do not there seem to move with ease and certainty”.13

The Double Concerto and Piano Concerto have come in for various criticisms over

the years. The relatively early Piano Concerto, which took Delius several years to arrive at

the final version, is universally considered a lesser achievement than the other three

concerti: for example, “Although some passages are characteristic of Delius, the Piano

Concerto is not one of his strongest compositions”.14 More strongly worded is this: “the

writing is of a stereotyped, derivative, latter-day Lisztian order”.15 Yet, it is interesting how

such qualities can be taken either positively or negatively according to the assumptions of

broader critical ideologies: thus, Michael Kennedy notes with a certain astonishment that

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“such an ardent Delian as Cecil Gray regarded it [the Piano Concerto] and other early works

as ‘much more accomplished’ than the later ones – an extraordinary judgement, I am bound

to say”.16

The Double Concerto usually faces censure on account of its apparently heavy

handling of the relationship between the two solo instruments. Thus, “Of the three other

works [Double Concerto, Violin Sonata, String Quartet] the Double Concerto with Orchestra

is much the least successful, the composer betraying an obvious inability to handle the

violoncello part when it is not playing melodic passages”;17 or “The Double Concerto shows

Delius less at home [than in the Cello Sonata] with the larger instrument, whose

accompanying passage-work tends to dawdle along”.18 Kennedy, again, is more

circumspect: “The solo instruments are poetically intertwined or contrasted throughout

and the principal reason for the work’s neglect must be that it is melodically

undistinguished compared with many of Delius’s compositions”.19 It should certainly be

noted that there are more canonic and better-loved examples of the genre (Brahms), but

the question of whether there are problems with the cello writing is up for debate; it is

interesting that the version played most frequently today is one using a solo part that was

edited by Herbert Withers in 1932 in which some of the passagework was considerably

modified – one might say standardised in order to present a more acceptable feel to the

texture.

The intention, then, in offering the beginnings of a Bakhtinian interpretation of the

Delius concerti is not to revise, let alone reject, these critical responses, coming as they do

from highly respected musicians. Indeed, the present author’s own opinion is that the

Violin Concerto is indeed the most successful of the four. Rather, the intention is to suggest

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that there might be alternative ways of forming and debating judgements about music,

which are less implicated in the history of the music itself and its attendant critical

ideologies, and to suggest how it might happen.

III Signposts in Delius criticism

One of the interesting things about trying to interpolate polyphony into the music of Delius,

or perhaps to extrapolate polyphony from it, is that, although the critical literature on the

composer is still relatively small, there are tantalisingly suggestive signposts in some of the

more perceptive writing – and not just from writers that approve of Delius’s musical

language – that point towards just such a critical alternative. Several writers have

described the concerti, and indeed Delius’s musical style more generally, in ways that are

for the purposes of this essay polyphonic in a Bakhtinian sense avant la lettre.

Some representative examples from the literature are provided below, grouped

under three broad headings: melody, counterpoint, and formal development. The precise

nature of the significance of these statements will become clearer below (section V), after

the general outlines of Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony have been unpacked (section IV). At

that point it will be possible to view these statements in an alternative, and perhaps more

fully positive, light to that in which they are presented immediately below, and to the

largely defensive contexts within which they arose. Thus the statements below are

presented on their own without commentary.

MELODY. “He wrote comparatively few melodies of the kind that can be instantly

reproduced and ‘whistled by errand-boys’”.20 “there is not a single theme in the work [In a

Summer Garden]; yet the effect of a continuous outpouring of melody is achieved by the

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subtle manner in which rhythm and melodic fragments are merged together”.21 “One can

say that Delius’s mature music is not written as a melody with harmony and orchestration

but as a combination of sounds, made possible by whatever group of instruments he has at

his disposal, so arranged as to portray to the best of his ability the sound-picture which he

has in mind”.22

COUNTERPOINT. “Nor did Delius employ counterpoint […] It is in harmony and

orchestration, the skilful pointing of the right instruments to bring the only possible sound

at any particular moment, that Delius instantly succeeds and makes his own music unique

and unmistakable”.23 “[…] the horn part which carves its own way, seemingly irrespective

of the baritone voice”.24 “they [Delius’s melodies] appear, if taken away from the rest of the

score, to have no connection with it”.25 “The soloist has to realise that his part does not

predominate but should weave its way through the exquisite harmonies of the orchestra,

almost like a beautiful river passing through a lovely landscape, ever flowing on, sometimes

clear and sometimes in shadow, but ever conscious of the rhythm of the work which seems

in the end to vibrate into eternity”.26

FORMAL DEVELOPMENT. “The best of Delius is undoubtedly to be found in those

works where he disregarded classical traditions and created his own forms”.27 “Delius

eschews normal development”.28 “But he [the poet Christopher Fry, in a suggestive

comparison with the composer] finds it difficult to invent a good plot upon which to rest

his characters and cause them to interact”.29 “It is almost as if Delius knew the secret of an

advanced kind of melody which he was unwilling to share with us; for as he approaches

and touches on the most profoundly beautiful melodic idea he will break off, giving us a

snatch, a whiff and no more. […] There is a single chord here [in the song Cynara] which is

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one of the most voluptuous that Delius ever wrote and the possibilities it offers for

development add to the disappointment that it only comes and goes, for ever”.30

“Repetition – but what magical repetition – is preferred to development”.31 “This is not

symphonic development, because Brigg Fair’s development of theme is in depth rather

than in width, making more [from variation] than one would have thought possible from

the one simple melody”.32 “There are criticisms that it [the Violin Concerto] rambles on and

that if the ‘best’ parts were put together and a shorter work formed it would become more

viable”.33 “themes cross-relate and cross-refer and the whole piece [the Violin Concerto]

grows from the two-bar motto with which it opens”.34 “One can’t define form in so many

words, but if I was asked, I should say that it was nothing more than imparting spiritual

unity to one’s thought. It is contained in the thought itself, not applied as something that

already exists”.35 “His music is not earth bound; it hovers”.36

IV Bakhtinian polyphony

With these statements and value judgements of musical criticism at the back of one’s mind,

it is time to turn directly to Bakhtin, and to explore his theory of polyphony.

Although Bakhtin did not write about music explicitly and made passing comments

about it on only a few occasions, musicologists have been exploring the musical potential of

Bakhtinian ideas about polyphony for several years, and it is fair to say that his ideas have

infiltrated musicology quite broadly, if perhaps unevenly. Here, the concept of polyphony

will be taken out of its fuller Bakhtinian contexts (after a brief allusion to their scope), in an

attempt to re-inscribe it into a new context befitting the Delius concerti. Such re-inscription

is possible, and parallels conceivable between the musical parts in Delius’s concerti on the

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one hand and literary polyphony on the other hand, despite differences in medium and

materials, for the reason that, although polyphony, dialogue, and voice began life as musical

metaphors,37 Bakhtin grounded them within a general philosophical aesthetics, rather than

the medium of literature or genre of the Dostoevskian novel.38

To describe the artistic representation and embodiment of what he called the

‘unfinalisability’ of life (basically, its loose open-endedness), Bakhtin used the term

polyphony, and, as a subset of polyphony, ‘dialogic relationships’. Polyphony took hold of

Bakhtin’s imagination during the mid-1920s, a period during which he was in close contact

with a number of musicians, including the philosopher and virtuoso pianist Maria Yudina

(who, much later, corresponded with Stravinsky), the musicologist turned literary theorist

Valentin Voloshinov, and Shostakovich’s closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, who was

professor at Leningrad Conservatory and artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic.39

Indeed, Bakhtin is clear about the musical, metaphorical origins of polyphony:

“Transposing Glinka’s statement that ‘everything in life is counterpoint’ from the language

of musical theory to the language of poetics, one could say that for Dostoevsky everything in

life was dialogue, that is, dialogic opposition. And indeed, from the viewpoint of

philosophical aesthetics, contrapuntal relationships in music are only a musical variety of

the more broadly understood concept of dialogic relationships.”40 In earlier writings

Bakhtin had used the terminology of post-Kantian writing on ethics, aesthetics, and

theology. Combining the musical metaphor with its roots in these long-standing traditions,

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is a work of philosophical anthropology as much as a study

in literary poetics: “Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is

not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a

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person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the

first time that which he is – and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be

means to communicate dialogically.”41

According to Bakhtin, polyphony has greater significance than simply the means for

describing the (musical) juxtaposition of, and dialogue between, contrasting voices (their

dialogic relationships). Polyphony claims to represent artistically one of the most

fundamental facts of human existence: that in real life every person inescapably

approaches a word from her own unique perspective and with evaluative intent. Her

‘utterance’ always embodies its own unique and unrepeatable attitude towards its

(otherwise abstract linguistic) content, what Bakhtin calls its ‘tone of voice’ or ‘intonation’.

Not only when a word is uttered but also when someone else’s word is treated as an

utterance, an author is necessarily posited with a unique personality and voice.

Participants in the polyphonic event enter into what Bakhtin terms a ‘dialogic relationship’.

This concerns the “irrevocable multi-voicedness and vari-voicedness”42 of an

utterance, and the fact that two characters, or an author and character, approach the same

word differently. Indeed, the fact that there are different perspectives – dialogic

relationships – between utterances is axiomatic to polyphony: “A plurality of independent

and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact

the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.”43 According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky

juxtaposes different voices alongside one another “in the unity of the event”,44 representing

and embodying the tone of voice adhering to each alongside other voices within the same

material word.

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What Dostoevsky creates in his novels, then, is an aesthetically organised image of

life. The old Newtonian world with its single all-seeing, all-knowing perspective has been

replaced by an Einsteinian universe of multiple perspectives. What matters is who is

speaking, and from where: “The element of address is essential to every discourse in

Dostoevsky, narrative discourse as well as the discourse of the hero. In Dostoevsky’s world

generally there is nothing merely thing-like, no mere matter, no object – there are only

subjects. Therefore there is no word-judgement, no word about an object, no secondhand

referential word – there is only the word as address, the word dialogically contacting

another word, a word about a word addressed to a word.”45

Within a single polyphonic utterance the dialogic relationships between two (or more)

voices are experienced as the juxtaposition of the intonation given by a character to word

alongside the author’s intonation. Even the author’s ‘own’ speech contains turns of phrase

typical of his characters, and his tone of voice is hybrid. Indeed, for Bakhtin, the difference

between author and character is purely heuristic: everybody is an author, and thus

creative. Every utterance is co-created by an author and a character (or speaker and

listener), and the character’s response influences as many elements of the utterance as the

author’s, from thematic content to tone of voice: “The idea lives not in one person’s isolated

individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins

to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give

birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas,

with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only

under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in

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someone else’s voice, that is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At

that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives.”46

Polyphony is constituted by the dialogic relationships between voices: “Everywhere

there is an intersection, consonance, or interruption of rejoinders in the open dialogue by

rejoinders in the heroes’ internal dialogues. Everywhere a specific sum total of ideas,

thoughts, and words is passed through several unmerged voices, sounding differently in each.

The object of authorial intentions is certainly not this sum total of ideas in itself, as

something neutral and identical to itself. No, the object of intentions is precisely the passing

of a theme through many and various voices, its rigorous and, so to speak, irrevocable multi-

voicedness and vari-voicedness. The very distribution of voices and their interaction is what

matters.”47

In fact, “The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain

independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony. If

one is to talk about individual will, then it is precisely in polyphony that a combination of

several individual wills takes place, that the boundaries of the individual will can be in

principle exceeded. One could put it this way: the artistic will of polyphony is a will to

combine many wills, a will to the event.”48 Dialogic relationships, then, respect the

individual tone of each voice. “Thus the freedom of a character is an aspect of the author’s

design,” writes Bakhtin. “A character’s discourse is created by the author, but created in

such a way that it can develop to the full its inner logic and independence as someone else’s

discourse, the word of the character himself. As a result it does not fall out of the author’s

design, but only out of a monologic authorial field of vision.”49

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So, for Bakhtin there are three primary conditions of polyphony. First, there are a

number of independent voices or subjectivities present in an event. Secondly, these are not

silenced by other participating agents (both inside and outside the music), and must be free

to engage their expressive ‘loophole’ or ‘surplus’ away from enclosure and finalisation.

Thirdly, it is not enough that analytical interpretation account for the multi-voicedness by

contending that the voices simply coexist as a sum-of-the-parts; it is also necessary that

they are not assimilated by other voices. This means that a polyphonic interpretation of

dialogic relationships does not undertake merely to codify the work. Rather, it both

describes the voices qua voices and accounts for the musical experiences they encourage. It

aims to “hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them.”50

Before returning to Delius’s music, it should be acknowledged that the musical

engagement with and cognition of polyphony consists not just of (quantitative) movements

from voice to voice. There is also a parallel (qualitative) movement alongside, which can be

filed under a category familiar from the work of Walter Benjamin, namely ‘distraction’. It

could be suggested that distraction provides a ground for polyphony, but the full case

cannot be provided here. This essay is concerned only with suggesting that, whatever its

ground, polyphonic listening and interpretation provides a useful and alternative view of

Delius’s concerti.

V A Bakhtinian view of Delius criticism

Now that the outlines of a potentially Bakhtinian theory of musical polyphony have been

provided, a return to the three-fold collection of statements above (section III) is

appropriate, in order that their implications for a polyphonic interpretation of Delius’s

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music might be unpacked and explicated. Already it might be clear where the impact and

benefits of the potential impact of employing Bakhtinian polyphony as an interpretive tool

might be gained. Even at the generic level, the polyphonic nature of the concerto is clear,

and the following statement could easily have been penned by Bakhtin on account of its

intensely anthropomorphic conception of the genre: “concertos are viewed, witnessed as

well as heard. Concertos not only bring dissimilar musical forces into play, they also enact

scenes of human activity. Men and women and groups are brought into conjunction,

cooperation, confrontation. Hence the common tendency to personify the solo and the

orchestra in concertos – as conversationalists, as debaters, as antagonists, as Orpheus and the

Furies”.51

MELODY and COUNTERPOINT. In terms of melody and counterpoint, which it is

judicious to treat together, it is possible to interpret the quotations above in Bakhtinian

terms without excessive intervention. After all, the “skilful pointing of the right

instruments” indicates a concern for a particular kind of balance within the texture, a

search for the right “combination of sounds [that embody] “the sound-picture which he

[Delius] has in mind” – says Bakhtin, “The very distribution of voices and their interaction

is what matters”. This textural balance is one in which melodies are autonomous to a great

degree, each one of which “carves its own way, seemingly irrespective of” other voices

because they have already been internalised and their response thoroughly assimilated

into the tone of each melody. Indeed, the degree of autonomy is such that “taken away from

the rest of the score, [they appear] to have no connection with it”, since, modifying

Bakhtin’s words, “the freedom of a melody is an aspect of the design”. Since the solo part

“does not predominate but should weave its way through” the texture, the textural balance

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is thus one in which the texture as a whole “seems in the end to vibrate into eternity”, as its

dialogic relationships bounce off each other and interweave through the musical fabric.

Part of the reason why Delius’s melodies cannot often be “instantly reproduced and

‘whistled by errand-boys’” is that they are dialogic (rather than monologic), which is to say:

they are not there to be whistled or taken as singularly dominant within the texture and to

lead the musical development, but rather are out to react to other melodies in the music, to

other elements of the texture and parameters of the formal design (including, most

prominently, orchestral harmonisation and harmonic tension), and to allow other melodies

to speak for themselves as equal partners in the musical discourse. Thus the orchestral

counterpoint in Delius is not integrated in a standard manner such that there are primary

and secondary voices (melody and harmony). Just as Bakhtin writes that “there is nothing

merely thing-like, no mere matter, no object – there are only subjects”, so all musical parts

are primary voices, or at least have the potential to sound as primary voices, including all

inner parts (as can be heard in the irruptions of melodic arches in the orchestral string

parts and finely etched wind writing).

FORMAL DEVELOPMENT. It is clear from even a cursory glance at or listen to the

music that the developmental processes of Delius’s music are biased towards open-ended

forms and towards the articulation of moment-to-moment progressions. This is not to

assert that there is no evidence of larger or standard formal plans or proportion in the

music (indeed, Deryck Cooke’s article, to be discussed below, shows that there is often a

panoply of just such structuring in the music), but simply to suggest that the focus for

musical development lies elsewhere. Perhaps the clearest indication of the Bakhtinian

extent of Delius’s formal developments is given by the comparison with Christopher Fry

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quoted above, which noted that Delius “finds it difficult to invent a good plot upon which to

rest his characters and cause them to interact”. Issues of intentional fallacy aside, this

statement is true: Delius’s music is based upon the dialogic relationships and interactions

between its constituent voices, rather than the pre-planned pouring of content into a

formal mould, and the plots are themselves determined by the personal characteristics and

parametric specificities of the individual voices within the texture – often but not always

laid out across the opening few pages of music, as ideas to set in motion dialogue according

to the musical responses generated by further ideas and their musical interventions. This is

why, as has often been observed in criticism, Delius’s music frequently turns to repetition

and transformation as a means of generating development, and why “the passing of a theme

through many and various voices” (Bakhtin) is central to the Delius aesthetic.

This alternative kind of attitude towards formal development allows for

extraordinarily subtle nuances of melodic gesture. Sometimes ideas are developed and

concatenated into long arches, sometimes they appear and disappear in a moment,

“break[ing] off, giving us a snatch, a whiff and no more”. In the latter case, this is because

they are not born for development – development is born (or not) of their internal

disposition and the contingent reactions they have to other melodic materials. Dialogic

relationships thus spring up all over the musical texture, like the multiple perspectives on a

single object of Cubist art. Quite remarkably, the clearest statement about the polyphonic

and dialogic nature of Delius’s formal development happens to come from the composer

himself: form, Delius apparently said, “is contained in the thought itself, not applied as

something that already exists”, these words echoing what Bakhtin calls “a unity of a higher

order than in homophony”. When Bakhtin writes that “the artistic will of polyphony is a

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will to combine many wills, a will to the event”, this is nowhere more true than in concerti

like those of Delius, in which the roles of the actual performers live on stage are crucial in

giving life (or not) to the multiple dialogic relationships within the music (though precisely

how performers might engage in polyphonic performance of music like Delius’s cannot be

entered into in the present essay, there being numerous interesting issues for Performance

Studies to take up in another context.)

Before turning to some musical examples of polyphony, it is possible to focus

further these remarks by considering one of the few critical texts to consider one of the

concerti in any analytical depth. The article in question is by Deryck Cooke, and was

published in June and July of the centenary year, 1962.52 By the standards of Delius

criticism, this was and is a major article, and it offers a number of useful things, including a

stern refutation of certain other writers on the so-called flabbiness of Delius’s formal

construction, a detailed thematic analysis of the Violin Concerto based on the methods of

Rudolf Reti and Arnold Schoenberg (with a nod to Hans Keller’s wordless functional

analysis), and a meta-argument about the function and possibilities of music analysis. The

melodic analysis is a good one, and shows numerous connections between the materials on

various levels, some obvious, others less so yet clearly an integral and conscious part of the

construction of the work. Of key import to the coherence shown by Cooke’s analysis are

rhythmic contour and pitch shape, which Delius seems to have used both together and

separately, and sometimes in a different manner to harmony,53 to develop the materials in

a myriad variety of ways.

What is most interesting for the purposes of the present essay is that, underlying

Cooke’s essay, there is a persistent worry that the alternatives against which and with

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which he argues, represent a black-and-white dualism, a pair of choices from which there is

no escape: either Delius’s formal constructions are good according to the new method of

analysis Cooke proposes, or they are bad according to the older (and Cooke says

inappropriate) methods that had arisen in conjunction with earlier repertoires – either

characteristically Delian “rhapsody” is good or it is bad. It might well be that the former is

true, but of more importance here is the following point. The dualism he erects in order to

motivate the essay is unnecessary, and can be discarded, not in favour of a third way (some

kind of sublating synthesis of the two choices), but in favour of a method – the polyphonic

method – which avoids constrictive grounding in historically determined categories, and

allows for the co-existence of both looseness (the very quality that Cooke is determined to

refute for fear that it is a negative quality) and taut construction (the quality he aims to

show in abundance), without recourse to the mysticism of Cooke’s use of “imagination” in

his “Fact No. 4” of analytical method.54 What ‘taut loose construction’ might mean, beyond

generating some kind of paradox about “a uniquely plastic kind [of musical

development]”,55 remains to be suggested, and to this the present essay now turns.

VI Polyphony in the concerti

Having suggested that there is, despite its age and small size, material that can be valued in

the literature surrounding Delius and his concerti, it is time to ask what musical gestures

and events within the Delius concerti can be described as polyphonic in a Bakhtinian sense.

It has been noted above in passing that the genre of the concerto is likely to provide

good and easy case studies in polyphonic interpretation. After all, its main premise is

contrast; it may or may not be a coincidence that, during the same years that Bakhtin was

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thinking through polyphony, the Soviet scholar Boris Asaf’yev was writing about “the

concerto principle” in much the same way (and was also in close contact with Maria

Yudina).56 According to Joseph Kerman’s more recent terminology, there are three modes

of concerto duality between solo and orchestra: polarity, reciprocity, and diffusion.57 While

these are used by Kerman as music-analytical labels, he also offers them as historical

periodisations: polarity is characteristic of Baroque concerti, reciprocity of Classical and

some Romantic concerti, and diffusion comes to the fore in twentieth-century music. As

music-analytical labels, the second and third bear the most fruit in connection with Delius’s

concerti, diffusion in particular, as it covers such things characteristic of Delius as the

inversion or at least imbrications of figure and ground (solo and orchestra),58 and passages

in which “The agents have become diffused into a single radiant essence. Duality has been

lost in a drawn-out moment of glittering delicacy”59 – curiously, though they are about

Prokofiev, Kerman’s words could easily be about Delius specifically. It is worth bearing in

mind Kerman’s reminder that “The concerto entails duality, but duality does not always

mean contrast, let alone conflict destined for reconciliation”,60 for this possibility is what

polyphony holds out for its characters and heroes. Reciprocity, Kerman notes, “does not

always entail echoing or agreeing. It can also encompass contradiction, recoil, retort,

reflection, explication, and more”,61 all subtle nuances in describing the manifold ways in

which Delius’s solo instruments and orchestral textures relate to each other, and the ways

in which the heroes of polyphony, be they literary characters or musical agents and

gestures, take account of each other and play themselves off against each other in the

musical discourse.

20

The following representative examples are taken from the Violin Concerto. This

work is in four movements with a cadenza, but plays continuously for c. 24 minutes; first

and second subjects can be loosely identified, along with Scherzo- and Finale-like material,

and the whole span can be interpreted in Lisztian manner like the latter’s B minor sonata.

The Violin Concerto has been chosen for attention in the present essay because it has

received the best press of Delius’s four concerti, and because it embodies many of the

points that have been at issue above well.

The rhapsodic nature of Delius’s melodies is clear in almost every passage in the

work, from the opening sentence, which shoots off at a tangent almost as soon as it has got

started but is immediately interrupted itself by new, subsequently developmentally

significant material ([1]-1),62 through to the accompanied cadenza at [20] or the material

recapitulated at [27]+2. Much of the melodic material involves the use of a wide register

and tessitura, both within the individual gestures that make up phrases (as at [3]+3) and

across the breadth of the longer spans of melodic continuity. Much of the polyphonic

energy generated by the interchanges between melodic fragments spills over into the ends

of phrases, as at [2]+2, where a shortened phrase is cut off and the solo violin spirals down

into what becomes the next, slightly more restful phrase. There is a certain focus to much of

the melodic material in the characteristically Delian syncopation on the second beat of the

four-beat (predominantly 4/4 or 12/8) bar, a focus which allows for the change of focus

from one voice to another in the texture, and for the build-up of anacrustic momentum as

the polyphony changes direction or nuance. Good examples can be heard in the slow

movement (which begins at [12]), where the multiple voices of solo violin, horn, violin 1,

and flute / oboe / cor anglais interweave a fine-tuned multi-voiced texture of some subtlety

21

both rhythmically (they share a thematic core but play it out at different speeds at in

different registers) and harmonically (the harmonic support for the polyphony changes

with each repetition of strong-weak chord pairs, as at the two bars at [12]+2). In this

respect the role of the wind in the polyphony, which act as vicarious soloists, reflecting and

deflecting the solo violin’s gestures, cannot be exaggerated: “One cannot open a single

orchestral score of Delius without remarking a wealth of woodwind detail, exquisitely

pointed”.63

The repeat of material at [16]+4 showcases a typical dialogic re-voicing of material,

with the solo violin an octave higher than earlier, and the orchestral violin 1 doubled at the

octave as that particular voice receives polyphonic emphasis, albeit temporarily. The

“multi-voicedness and vari-voicedness” of the material is well illustrated by the transitional

gesture at [2]+4, recapitulated at [26]+3, which is no less than a re-intonation of the

ascending gesture four bars earlier made rhythmically to sound a completely new way.

Only on a few, slightly weak occasions does there seem to be an attempt made by a single

voice to dominate the polyphony: the streams of solid unison semiquavers at [8]+1 and

[10]+1 do tend to undermine the harmonic force of the climaxes they follow and to be

atypically foursquare for Delius.

In the harmonic language of this concerto, there are other methods of creating

tension than the standard major versus minor polarity, usually involving the manipulation

of agogic weight in the melodic lines and a panoply of sixth and seventh chords that

provide fine shading to the texture of polyphonic streams. Indeed, there are relatively few

straightforwardly minor chords in the work at all: examples can be heard at [1]-2, [3]+2,

[6]+2, [10]+2, [19]+9, [24]+4, [27]+2, [30]+2, [32] and so on.

22

There are different kinds of polyphony in the concerto. Whether one speaks in terms

of four types of agency – principal, external, narrative, performer-as-narrator – as Robert

Hatten does,64 or in terms of some other theoretical context such as Bakhtin does in writing

of “the element of address”, one can certainly hear voices with a broadly narrating function,

as at [6]+5 or the eight bar phrase at [9]. Perhaps the climaxes could be said to impose a

similar degree of narration upon the texture, and thus a less dialogical tone, at [3], [8], [10],

and [27], where the turning points of the discourse can be heard articulated by a central

tutti voice rather than the multitude of voices present in other passages; these are the few

instances of “assertive and peremptory brass writing” in the work.65 And one can hear the

dance- or folk-like Finale beginning at [32] (for some “the one weak spot of the work”66) as

imposing upon the polyphonic texture a single monological trajectory and thus tracing out

some kind of external agency upon the music – heard in the rather foursquare harmony

and phrasing, which, unusually, articulate together in parallel rather than separately.

Indeed, in terms of the large-scale pacing of the work, an external force can be heard in the

texture at the infrequent points where closure is articulated simultaneously in both

harmony and phrasing, opening up, as Lawrence Kramer might say, “hermeneutic

windows”.67 Most of the time, as Bakhtin notes, the voices “develop to the full their [own]

inner logic and independence as someone else’s discourse, the word of the character

himself”, and this is why for the majority of the work the points of articulation take place

separately in each of the major parameters (harmony, voice leading, phrasing, melodic

material); but occasionally there is the weight of a single voice (that of Delius himself)

imposing upon the texture; thus closure happens conventionally only in the following

places, and then not very substantially or for very long (except for the Coda): [16]-1 in F

23

major, [24]-2 in A major, [32]+3 in E major, [32]+5 in F sharp major, [32]+7 in G major,

[36]-1 in A major, [36]+4 in D major, [37]+1 in F major, [38]+3 in F sharp major, [39]+2 in

C minor, [39]+3 in C major, and on F major in the Coda.

The characteristically Delian 28-bar Coda of the concerto gives further pause for

thought. In a way it is the most obviously Bakhtinian event of the work, and shows very

well how the formal development of polyphony is governed by the standard dichotomy

between ‘form’ and ‘content’, as if the two were different and separate. Rather, the voices

“are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony”. They are articulated with a

general quietening and slackening of dynamic, pace, and descending thematic activity

(exactly in the manner of the Cello Concerto and Double Concerto), and there is a peaceful

dispersion of activity outwards rather than inwards. Any closure that emerges from the

texture is generated from intensity and tone rather than formal or harmonic progression,

save for the slow moving pair of plagal cadences at [42] and [43]+4. There is a sense that,

under the weight of its own inertia, the work stops rather than closes.

VII Conclusion

It is hoped that this essay can be read as providing a tentative prolegomena to any future

Bakhtinian explorations of Delius’s music, the concerti in particular. It has been structured

in such a manner as to show how some of the more perceptive writers on Delius’s music

have long since picked up on one of its central aesthetic qualities, namely its polyphony,

and to suggest that this is a virtue rather than a vice of his musical style. While it has been

noted elsewhere that there are precedents of a sort for Delius’s “freely evolving

processes”68 in Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Debussy’s Prélude à L’Après-Midi d’un Faune

24

(regardless of whether Delius knew such works himself), it has been the aim of this essay

to suggest that this kind of construction, polyphonic construction, abounds in Delius’s

music, the concerti specifically. More generally, it is also suggested that the pursuit and

development of a judgemental faculty for apprehending and appreciating music’s

polyphonic qualities is a worthwhile activity, and beneficial for enlarging the

understanding of the relationship between music’s technical and aesthetic levels.

1 Deryck Cooke, ‘Delius and Form: A Vindication’, [2 parts] The Musical Times 103/1432

(June 1962), 393-3; The Musical Times 103/1433 (July 1962), 460-5 at 461

2 Alan Jefferson, Delius (London: Dent, 1972), 93

3 Jefferson, Delius, 95

4 Michael Kennedy, ‘The Concerto in Britain’, in Robert Layton (ed.), A Companion to the

Concerto (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 326-49 at 334

5 Anthony Payne, ‘Delius’, section 2, New Grove Online


7 Percy Grainger, quoted in Christopher Palmer, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan (London:

Duckworth, 1976), 81



10 Kennedy, ‘The Concerto in Britain’, 334

11 Sir Thomas Beecham, Frederick Delius (London: Hutchinson, 1959), 173, cf. 217


13 Beecham, Frederick Delius, 217


25

15 Palmer, Delius, 58






21 Philip Heseltine [Peter Warlock], quoted in Jefferson, Delius, 102





26 Beatrice Harrison, quoted in Kennedy, ‘The Concerto in Britain’, 335









35 Frederick Delius, quoted in Cooke, ‘Delius and Form’, 460; also quoted in Palmer, Delius,

52


26

37 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 42

38 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 40. Stephen Benson, Literary Music: Writing

Music in Contemporary Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), chapter 2

39 Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1984), 39-49, 104-8

40 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 42






46 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 87-8

47 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 278-9



50 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences’, in his Speech Genres

and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), x-y at

169

51 Joseph Kerman, Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1999), 3 (italics original), cf. 50

52 Deryck Cooke, ‘Delius and Form: A Vindication’, [2 parts] The Musical Times 103/1432

(June 1962), 393-3; The Musical Times 103/1433 (July 1962), 460-5

27

53 Cooke, ‘Delius and Form’, 462



56 Boris Asaf’yev, A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard French (Ann Arbor: UMI Research

Press, 1982), 225-42

57 Kerman, Concerto Conversations, chapters 2, 3, & 5

58 Kerman, Concerto Conversations, 91




62 References to the Augener score are to figures and bars: [6]+5 refers to 6 bars after

figure 5, [4]-3 refers to 3 bars before figure 4, etc. The discussion should be read with a

score at hand.


64 Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven,

Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 225-6



67 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice: 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990), 1-20

68 Anthony Payne, ‘Delius’, section 2, New Grove Online

Delius' Concerti and the Value of Polyphony

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