Ahead of Goldfield Ensemble’s concert on 12 October, Kate Romano takes a look at the appeal of British Light Music; beautifully crafted orchestral miniatures synonymous with the rise of BBC Radio from the 1920s onwards.
This month marks the centenary of Ernest Tomlinson (image), the Lancaster-born Light Music master and Ivor Novello winner who died in 2015. As I write, his music is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in two special programmes; and there’s a complementary thread of email exchanges with his daughter, Hilary Ashton, in my inbox. I’ve been talking to her about arranging Tomlinson’s best-loved orchestral piece, the Little Serenade, for clarinet and strings. We both agree how nice it has been to hear the music of Tomlinson (or ‘ET’ as he is affectionately known) on the radio.
Radio was always the home of Light Music. It was the substance of the BBC Light Programme, featuring in Housewives' Choice, Music While You Work, Friday Night is Music Night, Desert Island Discs and children’s programmes; and it introduced newsreels and series including The Archers. Under director general Sir John Reith, the BBC’s music programming was a top-down attempt to cultivate the man-in-the-street and enable listeners to appreciate ‘good’ music. Fine ensembles and staff orchestras were brought together to perform music by composers including Eric Coates, Ernest Tomlinson, Ronald Binge, Edward German, Haydn Wood and Peter Hope, which accompanied the British public through work, rest and play. BBC Radio was a national institution, growing rapidly from 600,000 licensed sets in 1923 to 3.4 million by the end of the decade and music took up the bulk of the programming.
Classical composers have always written lighter music, but the rise of BBC Radio combined with the popularity of the Seaside Orchestras in the 1920s and 30s turned British Light Music into a genre of its own. ‘My inspiration comes in the form of melody,’ said Ernest Tomlinson. ‘I write singable tunes with normal harmonies’. Simple to listen to and singable it may be, but this music is not easy to play well and the ‘lightness’ belies a complexity and exquisite craftsmanship. The hallmarks of Light Music were languid lines, beguiling and sophisticated harmonies, elegant scoring and adventurous orchestration, all of which created music filled with character and atmosphere. It had an uplifting and soothing effect on people, with warm, sunny harmonies and radiant shimmering strings. Light Music composers were particularly skilled at developing their ideas, keeping audiences listening with the addition of graceful countermelodies woven through familiar themes. The finest Light Music composers developed unique styles of orchestration. Former seaside organist Ronald Binge was renowned for his seductive, cascading strings; a method of imitating the echo of a large cathedral, which he discovered when writing for Mantovani’s orchestra (Sailing By is an excellent example, with a beautiful mellifluous use of the wind section). Eric Coates' orchestration was greatly admired by Ravel. His Sleepy Lagoon, one of the most instantly recognisable Light Music pieces, glows like a tropical island (though the ‘lagoon’ that inspired Coates is the sea view from his cottage in Selsey looking towards Bognor Regis - and the glow was most likely from the gasworks).
Ernest Tomlinson came from a musical family and gained early experience by arranging music for his father’s choir. From the start, he displayed a natural aptitude for detail, a deep understanding of the musical forces he was writing for and the ability to create vivid colours. In 1947 he took a hack job as a music copyist for a London publisher where he learned his trade. By 1950, he was working as a freelance composer and arranger, and he received a commission from the BBC to write music for a play about Cinderella. ‘I was so pleased I started there and then’ he said. ‘I put the phone down and thought… the Prince must have a Serenade. I wrote it within an hour’. The resulting three-minute Little Serenade (originally written with words to be sung) which opens Goldfield Ensemble’s concert at the Granary, became his most popular piece.
Light Music seemed to be rooted in the nation's ears and heart. But it wasn’t the only music played on the radio. Archive editions of The Radio Times from the first half of the century list music by European masters; Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Weber, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Ravel and Debussy. There are symphonies and concerti by living British composers. Stanford, Parry, German, Somervell, Vaughan Williams, Coleridge Taylor and others from the newly established music schools were heavily promoted, due to their perceived similarity to the German masters. Occasionally, the listings include startling reminders of contemporary avant-garde music from Europe where bracing, disruptive musical languages were being created; Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Janáček, Boulez. In the same year that Ernest Tomlinson wrote Little Serenade, Stockhausen was writing his seminal early electronic piece Gesang der Jünglinge at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne.
Light Music became an easy target for criticism. By the mid-1950s it was met with increasing hostility from some of the ‘serious’ composers and by the 60s, it was competing with another type of tuneful and singable music on the airwaves; pop music. In 1967 The Light Programme was disbanded and split into BBC Radios 1 and 2. Light Music was homeless. Pushed into the background, its composers started to write music for advertising, for libraries, cartoons and theme tunes. Ernest Tomlinson describes an unsettling feeling of ‘never knowing what the music would be used for’. His daughter Hilary told me that in his letters he would often say that ‘Little Serenade is the signature tune again’ for something he had heard on the radio.
As Light Music fell out of fashion, Ernest Tomlinson began a one-man mission to save as much of the music as possible. As organisations started to dispose of unwanted scores, due to changes in policy, or just through indifference, he began to collect as many of his own and his colleague’s scores as possible, storing it in the barn next to his family home in Lancashire. ‘He filled up wardrobes, trunks, lofts…. anything he could find’ said Hilary. Thousands of orchestral works, once owned by music publishers, conductors, disbanded orchestras, concert halls, theatres, broadcasters and others were brought together by Tomlinson. With the support of the Light Music Society (founded in 1957 with Eric Coates as president) a library was created. It includes over 30,000 bags of orchestral sets, items rescued from the BBC rubbish skip by Ernest, 442 sets of music from the erstwhile BBC Scottish Variety Orchestra library (rescued by the orchestra’s pianist) and over 8000 popular songs.
Today the archive has a home in the basement of Bolton’s Victoria Hall. Fittingly, it was built in 1897 based on the design of a Victorian music hall. I visited on a cold wet Tuesday in January earlier this year and spent a happy afternoon exploring the archives. There’s a bewildering amount of music, stacked floor to ceiling, and with limited time (and a ladder), the only way to approach it is through the composers you already know something about, taking each yellowing score down from the shelf, one at a time, and leafing through it. I was pleased to find (and borrow) more music by Adam Carse, a prolific composer with a deft touch, which you can also hear in the concert on 12 October. I spent time in the Frederic Curzon, Armstrong Gibbs, Robert Farnon and Percy Fletcher sections. I left with a feeling that there must be many hidden gems in these silent shelves; and a comfort that we have an almost inexhaustible supply of this very special kind of music with a timeless ability to make people smile.