Fletcher, Percy E.

Fletcher, Percy – Labour And Love – Tone Poem for Brass Band

(b. Derby, 12 December 1879 – d. London, 10 December 1932)

Preface

Percy Eastman Fletcher was born in the English industrial town of Derby, a notable railway centre at the edge of the extensive coalfields of the North. He had lessons in piano, organ and violin and eventually left – as so many did – for London. In the capital, he was lucky enough eventually to find work as a theatrical Director of Music. He was not the only one – musicians of similar backgrounds, such as Arthur Wood and Alfred Reynolds, also ended up in the theatre. But Fletcher was perhaps the most successful, working at a succession of notable venues – the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, the Savoy Theatre, Daly‘s Theatre, the Drury Lane Theatre and, from 1915 until his death, His Majesty‘s Theatre. His biggest success was probably the 1913 musical Chu Chin Chow by Frederick Norton, orchestrated and directed by Fletcher. He also wrote a successful sequel, Cairo, which ran for more than 200 performances in 1921. A 1926 musical, The Good Old Days, had almost as great a success.

But Percy Fletcher was a far busier musician than this would suggest. For one thing, he wrote a host of domestic songs and ballads that one still hears in old 78 rpm recordings – Kitty, Secret of My Heart, The Bells of Youth – and he provided orchestrations for others (such as the once very popular Indian Love Lyrics by Amy Woodforde-Finden). He wrote choral works (of which The Passion of Christ, from 1922, was once popular with church choirs). He composed many suites for light orchestra, such as the 1918 Rustic Revels and the 1921 Woodland Pictures. His most successful was probably the 1914 Parisian Sketches, of which the movement entitled Bal Masqué has retained a very tenuous popularity, as has his overture Vanity Fair.

Fletcher’s most lasting contribution to music, though, came in 1913 when he was asked to write a work for the 1913 National Brass Band Championships held at the Crystal Palace.

Brass bands were popular among the collieries and factories of industrial Britain and by 1913 were well organized, with a series of national competitions. Both bands and local choirs provided what was often the only cultural pursuits for the working men (it was mainly men) of the industrial regions. The brass instruments used were cornets, saxhorns of several sizes, and trombones. The band movement developed a novel and idiosyncratic standardisation of music for the cornets and saxhorns, whereby they were all written for as transposing instruments in the treble clef – even the bass tubas! It meant, of course, that anyone who had learnt to play on one instrument could transfer to another type of instrument without having to re-learn the technique – something that was important in allowing for continuity of personnel. By such means players often became more literate in music than they were in their own language.

The bands themselves were usually funded and supported by the particular colliery or factory (which probably owned the instru-ments) though some were funded by local communities, and it is not surprising that by the end of the 19th century, performing in competition against other bands figured large in any band’s calendar. It became the cultural equivalent of football.

What often proved the band movement’s weakest feature was the music they played. Hymn-tunes, marches and novelty items (often with a soloist) were the staple fare of public performances, but as competitions grew, there was a growing feeling that selections from the classics and transcriptions of operatic pieces were no longer enough. It was against this background that the organizers of the National Brass Band Championships approached a recognized composer from a different tradition to commission an original work as a test-piece for the 1913 championships, to be held at the Crystal Palace in south London. The previous five years had used transcriptions of Wagner’s overtures to Rienzi (1908) and Der fliegende Holländer (1909) and to Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1912), together with a selection from Meyerbeer’s Les Hugenots (1911), and a selection called Gems of Schubert (1911).

Percy Fletcher agreed to write an original piece and thus became the first recognized composer to write ‘serious’ music for brass band. His 1913 piece, the tone poem Labour and Love was no ‘modern’ work, belonging to a style and emotional world that owes much more to Liszt and Tchaikovsky than to even Richard Strauss or Elgar. But it was an original brass band piece and it was a success because of that. The National Championships were suspended until 1920, but when they returned there were only original test-pieces until the 1950s, when an occasional, effective (and technically very demanding) transcription of an overture was used. More important still was the list of composers who contributed test-pieces. Percy Fletcher had followed his success with the Epic Symphony (1926) and this encouraged the brass band authorities to approach other composers. Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, Granville Bantock, John Ireland, Herbert Howells, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, Edmund Rubbra, and Gordon Jacob all wrote test pieces for brass band, and the custom has continued with composers such as Malcolm Arnold, Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Simpson and Hans Werner Henze contributing.

Labour and Love is a series of vignettes, generally contrasting the dramatic with the tender, in which the opening thematic material undergoes a Lisztian transformation until it provides an emphatic apotheosis led by the trombones. Along the way there are prominent solo passages or cadenzas for the cornet, tenor horn, baritone horn, tenor trombone and euphonium.

The winning band in 1913 was Irwell Springs Band from Rochdale, near Manchester. A local poet immortalized their win in verse, one of which is:

“Labour and Love” – so was this music named,

That brought together bands renowned and famed;

You’ve worked and won, and now you stand above,

You had the Labour first – now take the Love.

The Brass Band Score

The composition of brass bands became standardized quite early because of the need to ensure consistency in competitions. For competitions, the brass group normally consists of 25 players, not including percussion, divided in these proportions:

1 Soprano Cornet

3-4 Solo Cornets

1 Repiano Cornet (an unusual spelling of ripieno)

2-3 2nd Cornets

2-3 3rd Cornets

1 Flugelhorn

1 Solo Tenor Horn (usually called Solo Horn)

1 1st Tenor Horn (usually called 1st Horn)

1 2nd Tenor Horn (usually called 2nd Horn)

1 1st Baritone Horn (usually called 1st Baritone)

1 2nd Baritone Horn (usually called 2nd Baritone)

1 1st Trombone

1 2nd Trombone

1 Bass Trombone

1-2 Euphonium

2 E♭ Bass Tuba (usually called E♭ Bass)

2 B♭ Bass Tuba (usually called B♭ Bass)

Plus 1-2 percussion (these were not allowed to play in competitions until the 1970s).

Labour and Love has the usual features of a brass band score – all cornets and saxhorns are written as transposing instruments in the treble clef, for instance – but it differs from modern scoring in two ways. Firstly, Fletcher includes a part for 3th Tenor Horn (actually the 4th, since the true 1st Horn is called the ‘Solo Horn’). This is unknown in modern writing, which recognises only three tenor horn parts (Solo, 1st and 2nd). This score attempts to indicate where only the 2nd horn should play by omitting the 3rd at those places – thus preserving the best balance – but the original parts give no guidance on the matter.

Secondly, Fletcher writes for 1st and 2nd Trombones in tenor clef. Band scoring has settled on these two parts being written in treble clef, as transposing instruments (the transposition being the same as for the Euphonium). This leaves the Bass Trombone oddly alone as the only instrument written ‘at pitch’.

A table of all the transpositions is at the start of the score.

Phillip Brookes, 2012

Conductor’s score and parts are available from Musikproduktion Höflich (www.musikmph.de), Munich.