Sir Arnold Bax Society

Introduction

Sir Arnold Bax is best known for his musical output, containing at its core seven numbered symphonies and a large amount of tone poems. He also wrote concertos and concerto-like works such as the monumental 45-minute Symphonic Variations. There is a lot of chamber music, from Nonets down to Quartets and solo works. As an avid (and by all accounts superb) pianist, the piano was regularly written-for.

Everyone forms their own unique path into Bax's music by listening or performing. Generally, one of the symphonies or the tone poem Tintagel are what introduces Bax's music to the public, though amongst the board of trustees we have not yet agreed which symphony is best. 

Bax also wrote music for film, with Oliver Twist (1948) being his most famous. 

There are some works for choir or for voice and piano, but Bax's dense, chromatic harmony does not always translate well to voices as it does for instruments.

First listening

We would encourage any new Baxian to browse the Listening page of this website and to pick works at random. Bax is very easy to listen to in the background thanks to his extraordinary ability to control the ebb-and-flow of emotion and drama through a work, and his tunefulness is pleasant to listen to both carefully and disinterestedly. Once one starts paying attention, Bax's music becomes fascinating. The tonecolours conjured from the instruments involved is broad and inventive, and Bax is rightly considered one of the finest orchestrators of the last two hundred years. He has a unique gift for melody that rewards intense listening and a keen sense of rhythm and metre.

Performers from Bax's lifetime

No discussion of Bax is complete without the mention of Harriet Cohen. They were romantically and platonically linked for several decades until Bax's death in 1953. She was a fine pianist, one of the leading performers of her generation, and she premiered most of Bax's works for piano. Bax was publicly shy, performing only when absolutely necessary, so Cohen's championing of his works was vital to the success he had during his life.

Many of Bax's orchestral works were conducted by Sir Henry Wood or Sir Adrian Boult with the finest orchestras in Britain. During Bax's revival in the 1980s many recordings were made by BBC Orchestras and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley, Myer Fredman, Raymond Leppard, David Lloyd-Jones, and other conductors.

Bax was one of the more prolific writers for viola music and along with contemporary composers like York Bowen and Benjamin Dale wrote several works for Lionel Tertis, the famous viola player. You can read more about Tertis in the Articles section of the website.

Concertos were written for Jascha Heifetz (violin) and Gaspar Cassado (cello).

Bax's contemporaries

Within Britain, Bax was writing at a similar time to Vaughan Williams (d.1958), Holst (d.1934), Elgar (d.1934), Walton (d.1983) and many others. He can be considered part of the ‘Pastoral English School’, whose main driving factors were ‘interest in the country’, ‘interested in British music, especially folk’, and ‘interest in Elizabethan music’. Many members of this unofficial school also took inspiration from elsewhere - Holst from India, Bax from Ireland.

Outside Britain, the Frankfurt School of Composers (including Balfour Gardiner and Grainger) were direct contemporaries. Other contemporaries include Ravel and Stravinsky (who both greatly inspired Bax's music), and Sibelius (who was in fact the first president of the first Bax Society). Sibelius met Bax and Harriet Cohen many times, even gifting them the first few chords of Sibelius' since-destroyed and never-published Eighth Symphony.

Bax's decline and renewal

After Bax's death in 1953, there was a reckoning within the British musical establishment. Modernism had swept Europe during the first half of the twentieth-century, but it hadn't conquered England, and so there was a concerted push to get serialist pieces on British programmes. The current thought seventy years on was that this was an abject failure that decimated the classical music scene and all but determined the place of new music in the public's eye. Bax's music was in the firing line, and performances of his works dried up. It wasn't until the predecessor to this charity raised funds for recording sessions that Bax returned slowly to the public eye and we are blessed with high-quality recordings of most of Bax's output. With the championing of Bax by major conductors like John Wilson, Sir Mark Elder, Martyn Brabbins, Martin Yates, and others in recent years, Bax is slowly returning to concert programmes, and we hope our work in producing new editions only encourages more performances. An example of this is my 2024 edition of Spring Fire, which was recorded by John Wilson and the BBC Philharmonic for broadcast on Radio 3 but also presented live to a studio audience in Manchester.

Articles, Interviews, Reviews

These sections of the website contain a huge quantity of detailed writing on the subject of Bax's music. Members receive a half-yearly newsletter containing all new articles, interviews, and reviews, and these are then published on this website a year later. 

Bax outside the UK

Bax's music has been played across the world. His Seventh Symphony was premiered in New York by Sir Adrian Boult. Sir Mark Elder has performed Spring Fire in Chicago several times. There have been performances of Bax's orchestral music in other anglophone countries like Australia (most recently with the Australian Discovery Orchestra). There used to be a Bax Society in Japan, but sadly there is no information available online about it - we would love to find out more. We also hear regularly from musicians in Finland and Italy about interest in Bax's music, no doubt for his friendship and kinship with Sibelius and Bax's remarkable gift of melody.

His chamber music is perenially popular, especially with flautists, oboists, violists, and harpists. We hear regularly of performances of the Elegaic Trio and the Oboe Quintet from across Europe (many in Germany), and even in further-flung places like Bangkok and Rio de Janeiro!

This charity believes that Bax's music is equal to the best of any country and any composer, and would be welcomed by audiences worldwide. Bax is not just for British audiences, but for all.

[G.Owen]