Two Studies

The composer’s own description of his Two Studies – “one grave, one gay” -–is short and to the point. His first orchestral work, written to take advantage of a Royal College of Muisc Patron’s Fund scheme for young composers, it was of no great importance to him in retrospect. When he came to write about it in his autobiography As I Remember neary fifty years later, he found less significance in the music itself than in the opportunity it gave him to meet Gustav Holst, who had undertaken to look over the score before Bliss himself ventured to conduct the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in the first performance at an open rehearsal in the RCM in 1921.

Although it was good enough to achieve at least two further performances, Bliss withdrew the score for revision (or perhaps to add an introductory movement) and then so comprehensively forgot about it that when a bomb destroyed his publisher’s warehouse in the Second World War he assumed his Two Studies had gone with it. The score was rediscovered among the composer’s own papers, where it had been all the time, only after his death in 1975.

The accomplishment of Bliss’s first orchestral work need not be too surprising. His career having been interrupted by the First World War (in which he served with much distinction) he was no mere student in 1920: even before the first performance of the Two Studies his reputation as a composer was so well developed that he had been commissioned by Elgar to write the Colour Symphony for the Gloucester Festival of 1922. Moreover, having taken over the conducting of the Portsmouth Philharmonic Society from Arian Boult, he was getting to know the orchestra from the inside.

One of the most interesting aspects of the first of the Two Studies is the transitions between the three main sections. The first section – which is based on the melody quietly rising and falling on clarinets and cor anglais over dark harmonies in the lower strings – merges into the next section by way of a poetic violin solo blended with undulating clarinet harmonies and light flecks of colour from elsewhere in the orchestra. At the end of the second section, which begins with the introduction of a modally flavoured theme in 12/8 on unison clarinets and strings, the metre is restored on a crescendo to the original 3/4 and the tonality to the original A flat major. This is the moment for a climactic recall of the first theme grandioso on trumpets and horns. The last section recalls the first and confirms its tranquil atmosphere.

When Bliss took the score of the Two Studies to Holst at Brook Green the older composer looked at the first two pages of the second Study and asked, “But when is it going to begin?” It is true that there are a few preliminaries before the entry of the main theme but they are effective in setting the cheerfully busy scene and in creating a rhythmic momentum strong enough to persist throughout. The slow and more lyrical central episode, like its brief recall near the end, emphasises rather than weakens the intensity of the surrounding activity.