AS TOLD TO
Peter Warlock
The interest in Peter Warlock started when I was at college in Cheltenham in 1962. There was a composer living in nearby Painswick, called [Charles] Wilfred Orr, who knew Warlock. Even before then, one of the music tutors had said: ‘Why not go to the library and have a look at some Warlock songs?’ And when I came to London in 1967, I found there was already a Warlock society, so I joined them. I have been their secretary since 1973. Warlock was very much a Chelsea composer – more a Chelsea composer than anywhere else. He lived with DH Lawrence in Cornwall for a bit and then went to Ireland to escape the First World War, but he always homed back to Chelsea. He had nine addresses in Chelsea – I’ve got a list of them somewhere – and the last of them was 12a Tite Street, now No 30, where he died.
He didn’t write in big forms – he was essentially a songwriter. But his most captivating work, I think, is called Capriol. It’s a suite of six dances written for strings or piano duet. Pieds-en-l’air is a totally original piece and it has the most beautiful harmonies. It’s not like Stockhausen and 12-note music that nobody can understand, but the harmonies aren’t traditional – it has a poignant dissonance that means something. If you heard a couple of bars of Warlock, you could identify it as being from that composer, in the same way that people can from Mozart. That’s why he has that following and we have the society. There are 300 members in 14 different countries around the world.
Malcolm Rudland was talking to Lucy Brown
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