Erik Chisholm

Men and Music: The Lectures

In 1964 Chisholm gave a series of lectures on Men and Music, illustrated with music and slides, at the University of Cape Town Summer School. In his own words Men and Music wasn’t

going to be a serious business. It will consist mainly of light hearted reminiscences about some important figures in 20th Century music, from which it will be possible to gain insight into their characters and personalities.

Many distinguished composers came to Glasgow in the 1930’s to give concerts of their works for the Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music (a bit of a mouthful, known colloquially as The Active Society) which Erik founded in the late 1920's.

The 20 composers he talks about are William Walton, Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger, Eugene Goosens, Bela Bartok, Donald Tovey, Florent Schmitt, John Ireland, Yvonne Arnaud, Frederick Lamond, Adolph Busch, Alfredo Casella, Arnold Bax, Paul Hindemith, Dmitri Shostakovich (Chisholm cheated here - Shostakovich didn’t actually appear but they were friends and the Active Society "played quite a lot of his music"), Kaikoshru Sorabji, Bernard van Dieren and Nikolai Medtner.

It is clear Chisholm planned to publish the lectures but he ran out of time, out of life - as he died just over a year after presenting them.

They are fun to read; several serious musicians have found them hard to put down once started, and have read them into the small hours of the night.

These lectures have been compiled and edited by Tony Hudson as a downloadable pdf document on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.

What follows is a modern presentation of those lectures given by Dr. Chisholm, I have taken a few, very minor, liberties with the text but essentially they are just as he presented them over 50 years ago. Some of his opinions now-a-days may be considered to be slightly politically incorrect, but I have left them in as he intended.