Wednesday 7 June 2023, 5.30pm, South House Theatre, Arts University Bournemouth
Natalie Burton, Arts University Bournemouth
The Composer as Editor: John Ireland’s Mother and Child as a Biographical Song Cycle
The work of all composers can be understood to be inspired by their personal experiences to some degree. But in the case of John Ireland, memories and experiences of people, places and events are integral to his compositions. In many cases, such contexts are made explicit through words: whether inscriptions, dedications or literary quotations. But personal experience also speaks through the music itself, with symbolic motives and musical gesture articulating personal experiences, people and places in specific moments or as reminiscences through a web of musically-intertextual quotation and allusion.
Ireland had a life-long love and fascination for literature, so the combination of words and music in song represented an essential mode of personal expression. The composer’s editorial custom of retitling songs from their poetic originals is a significant aspect of his work and provides a unique methodological framework within which to contemplate and analyse his songs and cycles Given the deeply complex and personal nature of Ireland’s compositions and their inextricable dependencies across genre and extra-musical media, his song titles provide a semiotic trajectory directing the listener towards a greater awareness of what is often a unique but always highly personal response to the texts.
In Ireland’s song cycle, Mother and Child (1918), the composer retitles all eight of the poems by Christina Rossetti to reflect elements of his own experience to create a biographical cycle structure.
