The Archive of Stanley Messenger
Stanley Messenger's Rounds
Marcus Tristan Heathcock
Stanley’s Rounds form part of the musical fabric of my life in a way that it is quite hard to describe in any definite way, but the fact that he is also my grandfather makes the attempt to try and do so into an interesting exercise for me.
When I was a child, along with my parents and my sister, it was a family tradition to sing together quite a lot, things such as carols in four parts at Christmastime and, of course, lots of rounds. Amongst these were some of Stanley’s rounds, most notably the ones for January, May, June and December. Not that they are easy to sing, mind you, but the very unusual quality of the melodies and the fact that they are very succinct meditations on the nature of each particular month, make them very rewarding to have a go at nonetheless!
Stanley has never pretended to be a professional composer – he has reserved his particular genius for other activities – but as one myself I thought it might be interesting to give a perspective on how Stanley’s musical creativity has influenced my own.
Although a round is, on the surface, a simple construction – a single melodic line sung by each voice in turn but starting at intervals of a few notes or bars after each other, so as to set up a polyphony – a good round, like anything else, is very hard to write. And what I find fascinating personally is that such a wealth of musical material can thus be generated from a single melody. I recently heard a radio programme about a tribe of people in a remote area of the Central African Republic who have a very interesting mode of singing. All people in the village sing roughly the same melody, during any particular song, but at their own speed and with their own particular decorative features. A crowd of individuals singing with one voice, if you like. And the wonderful polyphonies that this generates is both startling and very beautiful.
And, in some ways, a round is a bit like a stylised version of the way of singing that is in evidence in the Central African Republic – a series of slowly rotating harmonies that spring into life from just a single melodic line. And Stanley has been particularly inventive with this form. Some rounds, particularly the May round, are pieces of pure polyphony in the tradition of the madrigal composers in particular, but in a wholly personal style that is both contemporary and timeless at the same time. Others seem more like a melody with accompaniment, skilfully achieved by building accompaniment-type figures into the melody. The July round is an example of such a piece.
As for myself, I can say that I have never written any proper rounds, but the idea of a single melody generating all the musical material for a piece out of itself is fairly central to my musical composition process. Although the reason for this is mostly a musical one, as it should rightly be for all composers, I think, there is also an underlying conceptual reason as well. In the European past, people expressed themselves in a freer and more unstructured way, as in the Central African Republic of today, but with the life-affirming presence of the secure community around them. And this, although by intellectual standards haphazard, process created structures that were both complex and fascinating. And then came the era of purely scientific thinking, a chapter in the biography of humanity which, ironically, both displaced the human element as the central point of interest in the picture and, at the same time, launched the era of ‘lonely individuality’, if I can call it that. Creativity also became highly structured and defined during this period, the highlight and epitome of this being the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach.
But now we are entering a new era, where we are starting to re-discover the free and unfettered modes of creativity that we knew about in the past, but through the filter of what we have learnt from the scientific age through which we have passed. Therefore as a creative person I can go into the composition process with the idea of taking a melody and generating all the musical material from it, a fixing point that originates from within an intellectual mode of thinking, and humanize it by playing around it and adorning it in a very liberated and unfettered way. The decorations, for example, may be specific to one particular voice or instrument, and this brings about the effect of a kind of collection of individual voices that are trying to sing as one but without compromising their identity as separate entities. Or, to put it another way, a crowd of individuals singing with their own voices but creating, out of that, a sense of community. A subtle, but nonetheless important, difference from the situation in the Central African villages or in the Europe of the pre-scientific era that I was talking about earlier.
And it was the exposure to singing Stanley’s rounds at a tender age that probably started me on this musical path of investigation, and I hope that other people will get as much interest and enjoyment out of them as I have done.
Marcus Tristan Heathcock
www.sunnymarcus.com
The Archive of Stanley Messenger
Stanley Messenger's Rounds
Marcus Tristan Heathcock
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