Notes on 'Walking into Clarity' by the composer, René Samson

Born 1890 in Gloucester, UK, in a lower middle-class family, Ivor Gurney's musical talents became manifest in early youth, as did his manic depressions that would haunt him all his life. In 1911 he received a scholarship to London Royal College of Music, where Sir Charles Stanford and Vaughan Williams were among his composition teachers. During the Great War (1914-18) he fought in the trenches in Flanders. He was wounded twice, the second time by mustard gas. After the War he made valiant efforts to stay one step ahead of his psychotic condition. In spite of his mental condition, he was remarkably productive both as a composer and as a poet. After a number of failed suicide attempts, he was involuntarily hospitalized in 1922 in Dartford (Kent) where he died in 1937 after a long and bitter battle.

In planning a musical composition about this life that has tragic as well as heroic aspects, one of the major choices to be made up front is: which aspect of this life to focus on: the Mental Illness, the Creative Genius, the War Hero, or something else. In my opinion, choosing any of these aspects as the central element does not do justice to Gurney. Focusing exclusively on his mental condition reduces him to a freak. As a War Hero, his situation is interesting but rather atypical. In contrast to most other British War Poets (Owen, Sassoon, Rosenfeld, etc.) he regarded the war not simply as a terrible tragedy but almost as an intermission from his mental problems.

I decided to focus on something else. Gurney was an almost obsessive walker. From his letters one gets the impression that he used the walking for a number of (related) purposes: as a form of self-therapy and as a means to stimulate his creative "apparatus". Apparently he discovered that by indulging in a manic state of physical activity - digging, walking, cycling - he could ban or reduce his depressions. At the same time, walking through the landscape of Gloucestershire, which he knew so well and which he loved so much, would get his creative mind racing, and the songs and poems would start pouring out so fast, he could hardly keep track of them.

Similar stories have been recorded about other mental patients. For example: Oliver Sacks writes about a surgeon with Tourette Syndrome, who in his "normal" condition would be so motorically challenged as to be a danger for everybody within arms' length, but who - during a surgical operation - would act with consummate finesse and accuracy. Sacks has coined the expression kinetic flow to describe this condition of intense focus.

Gurney’s forced hospitalization in 1922 made an abrupt end to his roaming in the countryside. This was a severe blow to him. Many of his post-’22 poems are witness of the grievous loss he experienced on account of being banned from his beloved countryside. In all of Gurney’s poems (also in those written before ’22), walking and Nature were always the twin sisters of Longing, Melancholia and Loss. In this respect – and in many more respects – he was truly a Romantic poet. Michael Hurd tells us about Helen Thomas' visits to Gurney in the mental asylum and of her smart and empathic idea to bring along maps of Gloucestershire and how together they would retrace the old walking trails on the maps which were now a lost paradise for Gurney.

Why does my piece carry the subtitle "fantasy"? Listening to Gurney's music, I cannot deny feeling a certain ambivalence. Although I hear an absolutely authentic and original musical personality, I still experience his music as "too English" (for my taste), too pastoral, too many unclouded-ever-so-happy-shall I be mother?-summer-days, too much in line with the common musical preferences of the English concert audiences of his times. There were very few English composers in the interbellum (and earlier) who escaped the prim cultural dictates of their time. Frank Bridge, who was a rather successful composer before 1914, fell into disgrace when his post-war musical idiom became darker and more influenced by Continental Modernism. My – admittedly rather grandiloquent – little fantasy, when I started working on this piece, was that I would give Gurney a second chance; the chance which he bravely acted on as a diarist, as a psychiatric patient, and – sometimes – in his poetry, but from which he recoiled as a composer: the chance to give us a look into the darker regions of his soul. Much to my own surprise, this is not exactly what happened during the writing of Walking Into Clarity. Again and again, Gurney’s poems drew me into the world of the great masters of 19th-century song-writing: Schubert, Schumann, Hugo Wolf; the world of their intense Nature-inspired lyricism. In the end I felt that I – happily – had lost control over my own project: I was not leading Ivor Gurney into the land of Modernism, but rather he was gently taking me by the hand, leading me into the world of the Great Romantic Masters – a Paradise Lost for many contemporary composers, myself included –, enabling me to quote from their work without losing myself.

Amsterdam, January 2012