Eric
Coates (1886-1957)
"London Calling"
Music for Wind Band
Pomp and Circumstance march mirrors
Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, then surely an Eric Coates
march does the same for the 1930s and 1940s. With their snappy, crisp repeated
rhythms, bustling energy and feel-good factor, Coates's marches were used not
only for relaying Britain's successes in World War II, but as signature tunes
to long-running radio programmes and later, with the advent of television,
signature tunes for the BBC and the new commercial television stations.
Coates's music indeed found its way into the musical conscience of the whole
nation through that potent new medium, broadcasting. Already in his late
thirties when radio broadcasting started, Coates was Britain's finest and most
successful light-music composer, his music being played by every possible
combination of players throughout the land and his songs sung by opera and
music-hall singers alike. Born in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, in 1886, he had a
prestigious classical music training at the Royal Academy of Music, studying
composition with Frederick Corder and viola with Lionel Tertis. He was Tertis's
most outstanding student, following him into professional engagements with the
Hambourg String Quartet, the Beecham Symphony Orchestra and the Queen's Hall
Orchestra, where he was principal viola from 1913 to 1919. In that position he
would have played in many first British performances of music by Strauss,
Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. But his real interest was in
composing light music and he left the orchestra in 1919 to dedicate himself to
writing in all over 160 songs, thirteen orchestral suites, three phantasies,
seventeen marches and 24 other short orchestral compositions. Coates gained
lucrative contracts with Chappell Publishing and Columbia Records, the latter
being quick to record the latest published Coates score. In 1933 he had a
spectacular success with his seventh orchestral suite London Everyday, when the Director of
Variety programmes for the BBC chose the march Knightsbridge
from the suite as the signature tune to the new nightly programme, In Town Tonight. Within a fortnight the
BBC had received 20,000 requests for the title of the signature tune and within
a year 100,000 copies had been sold. Coates had touched something in the
British public and overnight he became a celebrity.
Chappell
was quick to ask Coates for another march and the Pathé News team was present
to film its Columbia recording sessions for their newsreel. London Bridge, as the march was called, had
high expectations of being the seller Knightsbridge was, and even a rival HMV recording was made simultaneously.
However, it was not the success everyone hoped for and another three years
passed until Coates wrote his next march. RNVR
was originally on the title-page, but crossed out to make way for Seven Seas. Dedicated to the Scottish
shipbuilder John D. Robertson, it was one of the few marches written in
compound time. Twenty years later it became the signature tune to the new
British commercial television station TV South Wales and West.
With the
start of World War II in 1939, Coates received many letters asking him to write
a great patriotic song. Instead, he responded with the march Calling All Workers. Inspired by his wife,
who requested a march that would pace the rhythm of sewing machines, Coates
composed his most rhythmically driven march. He dedicated it to "all
workers" and the inscription on the score reads, "To go to one's work
with a glad heart and to do that work with earnestness and good will". It
became one of the war's most potent musical symbols and was used as the
signature tune for the BBC daily programme Music
While You Work.
Coates
followed this piece with four other very successful war marches. Over to You, dedicated to "all who
make and fly our aircraft", was first performed in 1941 before thousands
of workers at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. London
Calling was commissioned by the BBC in 1942 as the call sign for
their overseas children's programmes. The
Eighth Army march was dedicated to General Montgomery and the Eighth
Army on their important war victory at the Battle of Alamein in October 1942.
It was thereafter used by the BBC at the start of their Middle East
transmissions and became the theme song for Nine
Men, a film about the infantry in Libya. Salute the Soldier was written at the request of Sir Harold
Mackintosh, Chairman of the War Saving Committee for the "Salute The
Soldier" campaign. Coates conducted the first performance on the 25th
March 1944 in Trafalgar Square with the Band of the Scots Guards.
In a
sense, Coates had become the unofficial musical Laureate and there were many
people who felt he should have been asked to write for a Royal occasion. But in
official musical circles, the fact that Coates was a very successful
light-music composer and not a serious one stood against him. After the war,
Coates wrote marches for the openings of the new commercial television stations
and in 1950 the Holborn Borough Council commissioned a march to celebrate the
fiftieth year of their charter. Two years later he started one of his least
played and best marches, Rhodesia. Written
for Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra's visit to the Central African
Rhodes Centenary Exhibition in Bulawayo, Coates's original title was The Green Lands; however, the colonial
office associated green lands with the jungle and requested Coates to change
the title to Rhodesia. A few
years later, Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence meant that for
political reasons the march was hardly ever played again. Different from any
other Coates march, it is more noble, even Elgarian in character, perhaps the
kind of march Coates might have written for a royal occasion. All Coates's
marches were written to a strict formula of an introduction full of excitement
and anticipation. A bustling energetic main tune, a trio section of a similar
character, sometimes more reflective. A repeat of the main tune and then the
trio in a grander climactic guise. He wrote all but one of his marches for a
full orchestra, Chappell using staff arrangers to prepare versions for solo
piano and for military band. The one march Coates did not write for an
orchestra was for the military band of the Nottingham Police. Men of Trent, as it was known, was
dedicated to Athelstan Popkess, the Chief Constable of Police in 1953.
If Knightsbridge had been a major financial
success back in the 1930s it would have been nothing compared to the success of
Coates's next march which is probably the most remembered today. Having always
turned down film scores and Hollywood contracts on account of the film
directors being in so much control of the composers' music, pressure was
exerted by Louis Levy, Musical Director of Associated British Pictures, for a
Coates score for the film The Dam Busters, as
it was of national importance. Coates obliged with a march, leaving Leighton
Lucas to fashion a film score around it. In a few weeks the Dam Busters march sold a quarter of a
million records, stayed in the hit parade of 1956 for a year and received the
Ivor Novello Award for the most outstanding piece of light orchestral music.
Coates's
next march was also his last ever composition. High
Flight, written in 1956 for the Warwick production film of that
name, tried to capitalise on the Dam Busters
just as Landon Bridge had
done on Knightsbridge twenty years
earlier.
During
the 1930s and 1940s Coates had become involved in a journalistic debate with
the BBC over the deepening division between light and serious music, especially
how light music and his in particular was being almost totally excluded from the
Promenade concerts under Sir Henry Wood. In Coates's younger days both types of
music had shared the same platform, but now the division between middlebrow and
highbrow was widening, caused to a large extent by BBC policies. Symphonic
music, for instance, was considered on a much higher plane than light music. The Three Elizabeths, Coates's final
orchestral suite, is an unconscious effort to bridge that gap, being the most
symphonic piece he ever wrote. The first movement, Halcyon Days, originally conceived as a separate concert
overture, is almost Straussian in its design, evoking the age of Elizabeth I
and the quest for adventure and exploration. The second movement, Spring Time in Angus, dedicated to Queen
Elizabeth now the Queen Mother, is a miniature tone poem in conception. The
last movement, Youth of Britain, inspired
by the eighteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, is a
march. Written during the final years of World War II in the Vale of Evesham,
the BBC rewarded Coates with a first performance on Christmas Eve 1944 by the
BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Michael
Ponder