Early Years

One of Scotland's most outstanding composers, Erik Chisholm was born at 2 Balmoral Villas, Cathcart, into a family in comfortable circumstances, owning a car and running their own home cinema. When they moved to 28 Corrour Road, Newlands, they added an extra story to hold a full-size billiard table. Chisholm's father, who was a master painter, ran the family firm; his mother had been a singer. ‘My mother is a McLeod, thus giving me descent from two Highland clans,’ he wrote proudly.

Erik was the middle of three brothers. He had buck teeth, poor eyesight, suffered from migraines and was not strong. His mother once declared that ‘you could blow peas through Erik's ribs.’ But he overcame these disadvantages and behaved like many another little boy, playing ‘kick the can, ringing doorbells or tying opposite door knobs together. and pushing younger and weaker lads into beds of stinging nettles.’

At Queen's Park Secondary School, ‘our mistress was a Miss Polly White who during a rehearsal by Class 1a. of which I was a rebellious pupil, of "A hundred pipers and a' and a" said to me, “Erik do please stop singing. You are dragging the whole class out of tune".’

Whatever Miss White's opinion of his singing, Erik left school at 13 to study at the Glasgow Athenaeum School of Music (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and was taught organ by Herbert Walton, and piano by Philip Halstead. he also gave a performance at a British Music Society concert of one of his own works - a piano sonatina. He then travelled to Hull to study composition with a Dr. Eaglefield, performing the Liszt Piano Concerto in public aged only 17. Still in his teens, he went to London and Cornwall, studying piano with Leff Pouishnoff, living with the Pouishnoff family and composing when he was not practising.

In 1926, Chisholm took up posts as organist and choirmaster at Westminster Presbyterian Church, and music master at Pictou Academy in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. But old Glasgow, and an appointment at the United Free Church of St Matthews, soon called him home. He put on a concert for the Spanish Society, and he also began to study with Professor Donald Tovey towards his M Mus (1931) and D Mus (1934).

Celtic Connections

On holiday in Millport as a boy, Chisholm had been given a copy of Patrick MacDonald's 1784 A Collection of Highland Vocal Airs. It was a seminal gift and he based many pieces of music on tunes from the collection, including all the Scottish Airs for Children, and the melodies for The Celtic Song Book. His much-annotated copy is kept in the University of Cape Town Archives.

His interest in Scottish music also included Piobaireachd, the classical theme and variations of the bagpipes. Chisholm based the opening movement of his 1st Piano Concerto on a Piobaireachd called MacCrimmon's Sweetheart. The Mitchell Library holds the full manuscript score of this remarkable work, as well as a rare copy of the libretto for his opera The Isle of Youth.

In 1939, Erik's father bought him and Diana a house at 3 Carment Drive to accommodate their growing family, for they now had three daughters. This was the year of the founding of the Celtic Ballet Company, with Margaret Morris at its head. Chisholm was musical director and the first production was of his full-length ballet, The Forsaken Mermaid, performed on two pianos in 1940 with choreography by Margaret Morris and décor by Andrew Taylor Elder.

The piano score was published by the Dunedin Society, in preference to the songs of F.G. Scott, who described Chisholm as ‘a snake in the grass.’ But it was Chisholm who organised that F.G.'s entire archive be photostatted for the Mitchell Library. Not the work of a snake.

The Second World War brought Erik and Diana into hard times, Erik, himself rejected for call-up on medical grounds, had supported the artist William Crosbie's application as a conscientious objector. He was black-balled thereafter, apparently losing virtually all his teaching work, and he and his family retired to a farmhouse in Traquair.

Crosbie designed the sets and the costumes for Chisholm's ballet The Earth Shapers, based on Celtic mythology, and produced in 1941.

Glasgow Musical Life

In November 1932, Erik married Diana Brodie. They lived at 118 University Avenue, where Morag was born on the kitchen table. He was 28 and she was 21, and they probably met in St Matthew's Church where she sang in the choir and he was organist. Her father had been a whisky exporter and the company had its own blend; but he had died, so Diana was given away by Erik's friend and fellow-composer, Francis George Scott.

They often played and sang together and were well matched, socially and educationally. In 1930, Erik set up The Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music, of which Diana was Secretary. It put on an extraordinary series of concerts, at which composers of international stature performed their own works. Amongst them were Hindemith and Bartók, who was introduced to, and intrigued by, bagpipe music.

Others who came included Casella, Walton and Sorabji who performed his own monumental Opus Clavicembalisticum to a stunned audience, and who became an intimate friend of Chisholm's.

In 1932 Chisholm became conductor of the Glasgow Grand Opera Society. Most memorable amongst the productions was the first ever complete performance of Berlioz' The Trojans, with the ballet scenes and, on the Saturday, both halves performed on the same day. Mozart's Idomeneo was also given its first British performance under Chisholm's baton.

But Chisholm was also scoring successes as a composer. In 1933 his Double Trio was performed in London and his Dance Suite in Amsterdam. That same year he was appointed organist and choirmaster at the Balcony Church, where he founded the Barony Musical Association, which also put on operas, including rarities such as Mozart's Titus.

War Work

Early on in the War, the BBC commissioned The Adventures of Babar from Chisholm, for Narrator and orchestra. Chisholm wrote the script, which was a humorous, rhyming résumé of the first of the Babar books. He described the work as "introducing several French folk songs - if you like a cross between Peter and the Wolf and Hary Janos!’ It was first performed by the BBC London (Symphony) Orchestra under Adrian Boult.

After a marvellous orchestral imitation od air-raid sirens, enemy aircraft and a bomb dropping, the work continues with a musical pun on the name, using the tune of Ba-Ba Black Sheep.

But despite the commission, money was tight for the Chisholms, and Erik helped to make ends meet by doing work in the family painting firm. He was no doubt relieved when he was employed as a conductor with the Carl Rosa opera company and the Anglo-Polish Ballet, touring Britain and eventually Italy with the latter, for ENSA.

In 1945 ENSA sent him to India to form an orchestra in Bombay. It was a crucial turning point, for there he came into contact with Indian classical music, which had a profound effect upon him. He instinctively felt the connection between Eastern and Celtic music and his Night Song of the Bards is inspired by both, using the tuning for the Rág Sohani (which is performed between midnight and dawn) , to evoke Druidic calm as well as Hebridean Storm, as in the Allegro tempestuoso of the Second Bard.

The Bombay venture proved a failure as regards an orchestra, but Chisholm moved on to Singapore and there performed miracles of organisation and performance, giving lectures with gramophone records to the troops, and gathering an orchestra from many nationalities, finding music (with the help of Lord Mountbatten) and employing copyists to make sets of parts, and even organising the making of music cabinets.

The result was the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, which put on major works, including concertos, and performed to a remarkably high standard. Some of the musicians he met there came to Cape Town to work with him.

South Africa

Word must have reached Cape town of his abilities, for he was head-hunted for the joint posts of Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Music and Principal of the College of Music - for which he had unsuccessfully applied in 1939, and which had remained unfilled. His arrival created a stir. he sacked some of the staff and set about reinvigorating the entire department, in particular in reviving opera production.

It was an extraordinary opportunity. At last he was in command of an orchestra and had opportunities to conduct the Municipal Orchestra. His style was developing. The influence of the Far East lies behind his Hindustani Piano Concerto and the slow movement of his Violin Concerto was based on Rág Sohani and inspired by a Brahmin Hymn.

The Violin Concerto was premièred in Cape Town in 1952 by Szymon Goldberg and later that year at the Edinburgh International Festival with Max Rostal as soloist. Chisholm also brought many distinguished musicians to South Africa, including Eugene Goosens and Albert Coates. (In South Africa already).

But Chisholm never forgot his native Scotland and in his orchestral work Pictures from Dante he recycled music from his earlier ballet Piobaireachd matching it to images from Gustav Dore's illustrations to Dante's Inferno.

Chisholm revelled in the Cape Town facilities - notably the University's Little Theatre which had been especially adapted for opera productions - for which he was able to compose operas in the knowledge that they would be performed.

Particularly successful were the one-act operas, Dark Sonnet and The Pardoners Tale - the latter a setting of Chaucer's middle English story of three rogues who are outwitted by an Old Man who turns out to be Death. The music for Dark Sonnet, although not in strict 12-note style, is influenced by the Second Viennese School. It was composed in 14 scenes to match the sonnet form, while preserving Eugene O'Neill's Before Breakfast script. The Pardoner's Tale, by comparision, makes use of early mediaeval styles of music.

Music International

By now a leading figure in Cape town, Chisholm not only toured with his opera productions over much of South Africa, but took them to Europe, putting on the first performance of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle in the British Isles, and seeing Dark Sonnet televised by the BBC - a rare privilege for any modern opera.

In 1953 Erik and Diana had toured music departments in America. Erik was reassured to realise that his standards in Cape Town were high, and boasted that at University of Cape Town they performed opera with an orchestra, whereas at Columbia they were only using pianos. Returning home on the Queen Mary, Chisholm composed the opera Black Roses. It was put on with Dark Sonnet in New York as part of his trilogy Murder in Three Keys. He had always had a taste for the Grand Giugnol stimulated by his early interest in German expressionist cinema. He ran a film club in Cape Town, echoing childhood days when his brother cranked the handle on the home movie projector.

In 1957 Chisholm was again on tour - captured in performance and playing with a cat in Glasgow by the pencil of a female admirer, of which he had not a few.

The same year, he and Diana were féted in Russia, and in Moscow Erik conducted his Hindustani Piano Concerto, throwing the score down in a rage when Agnes Walker ill-advisedly played the solo part from memory.

But Shostakovitch was impressed enough to support the publication of a volume of Chisholm's Celtic Song Book, complete with translations, though they asked him to tone down the dissonance in one or two of the settings.

Sadly, Diana and Erik were going their separate ways. Erik found new love with the daughter of his fellow-composer, F. G. Scott. Lillias Scott sang and later published two books of her poems. Erik set some of these in the first glow of romance, composing Hert's Sang with the instruction that it was to be performed ‘with joy.’ Both poems and music are in Scots.

But Chisholm's hectic life was taking its toll. To be a Dean and Principal, professor and teacher, composer, conductor and pianist, and author of a major study of Janacek, was more than even his phenomenal energies could sustain. Following a heart attack in the spring of 1965 he was advised to take a break. He took a short one and paid the price, dying of heart failure. It is really only in 2005, his centenary year, that his true worth began to be re-established, not only as a prime mover in the 20th-Century-music-making, but as an outstanding composer in his own inimitable right.