A Somme Scenario - Martin Ellerby

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A Somme Scenario is the twelfth in a series of works under the collective title of ‘Epitaph’. Although it states the name of one of the fallen soldiers in the Great War the intention is to make that particular individual a representative of a much larger collective whole, including the then enemy. George Butterworth was an English composer of great promise born in 1885 and educated at Eton and Oxford. He formed close relationships with Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams through his passionate interest in folk music. He met his end by a sniper’s bullet on the Western Front in 1916 and has no known grave. However, his name is amongst those recorded on the Thiepval Memorial which commemorates ‘officers and men of the British armies who fell on the Somme battlefields July 1915, February 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death’. As for his music he left behind a small, but precious, output of songs and the orchestral rhapsody ‘A Shropshire Lad’, perhaps his most enduring work. In 1985 the premiere of my own Requiem was supported by a George Butterworth Memorial Fund Award and I later visited and located his name on the aforementioned Thiepval Memorial in France. The Epitaph presented here uses two sources close to Butterworth, namely a musical quotation from one of his own songs and the use of poetry taken from the work of A. E. Housman. The musical quotation is from the song ‘Loveliest of trees’, the opening song of his ‘Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad’ Housman cycle. The texts are from the equally small output of poetry by Housman and have been adapted at times to suit musical considerations. Both sources are in fact symbolic and form, from a small intimate piece, a much more searching, larger allegory.

SATB Choir, Reciter, Trumpet, 2 Side Drums, Bells

C.  11:51