Beside Me.
Dark is the night with-out, I fear The storm, beyond the bar!
Tito Mattei
Hubert Parry.
Professor C. Hubert Parry, whose last work, "Job," has been so enthusiastically received and criticised by the musical world, composes according to the nature of the composition on which he is engaged.
"There are a hundred and fifty different kinds of work to be done in composing," he says, "and they vary in accordance with its being a big work like a symphony or an oratorio, or an opera, or a little thing like a song or a pianoforte piece. Then, what one wants may come into one's head when walking or driving, or in bed—anywhere, indeed, but in front of the paper it has to be written on. Then there is the general scheme to be considered, which usually comes first, and has to be thought out in big, cloudy way, out of which the details emerge into distinctness by degrees, and often want doing over and over again."
Like many another composer, Mr. Parry prefers the morning for the mechanical part of the art, viz., the work of scoring and writing down and getting into order those ideas which have already been conceived.
"As far as new ideas and schemes are concerned," he adds, "I am glad enough to take them at any time of the day they are so obliging as to come."
It is wonderful how chary the English composers are of answering the question as to whether or no they consider their countrymen a musical race. It seems a subject on which they fear to express an opinion, and either treat the matter with silence or, like Sir Joseph Barnby, content themselves by saying "We're on the mend." Not so Mr. Parry, however.