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‘A crazy clutter of the mediaeval, medical mind’: Ken Russell, Peter Maxwell Davies and Modernist Medievalism in The Devils
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2022
Abstract
Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils is a shocking historical drama which, eclipsed by its own battle against censorship, has only recently had a critical revival. A landmark musical collaboration central to that film remains unexplored: Peter Maxwell Davies wrote the score, which is heard in tandem with ‘period’ performances from David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. Though ostensibly historical, the film’s disruptive atemporal style is elevated through an art of stylized anachronism. This collaboration mirrors Davies’s opera Taverner (premièred in 1972), not only because that too featured Munrow and his consort but also because Russell was supposed to direct its première. This article posits Davies’s film score as a compelling work combining historicist compositional interests and a challenging aesthetic of excess within the popular context of mass cinematic spectacle. Informed by the close study of Davies’s own manuscripts, it argues for new ways of understanding the role of a persistent past in the music of a resolutely modernist present.
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
I would like to thank Charlotte Bentley and Neil T. Smith for their comments on drafts of this article, as well as James Cook, Alex Robinson and Adam Whittaker (and the Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen (REMOSS) study group) for discussions that were formative in its development. I am extremely grateful for the helpful comments provided by the two reviewers for JRMA, as well as to the Peter Maxwell Davies Estate for permission to reproduce musical examples; to the Royal Academy of Music Library for access to relevant archives; and to Chris Scobie at the British Library for helping to identify relevant material.
References
1 London, Royal Academy of Music, DM/5/3/2. See <https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/de49f789-9c6c-4dde-ab92-2d97f2e79857>.
2 Raymond Durgnat, ‘The Great British Phantasmagoria’, Film Comment, 13/3 (1977), 48–53 (p. 48); available at <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43451340?refreqid=excelsior%3A94629f1afdf76823d6eef36c18ed3e3e>. Much of the recent literature on Russell assumes this point and moves forward from there.
3 See, however, Richard Crouse, Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of the Devils (Toronto: ECW Press, 2012), and the documentary Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils (2004), fronted by Mark Kermode, both of which, it might be said, take the score and collaboration into some (mostly documentary) consideration. As we shall see, it is in the musicological literature about Davies’s The Devils that the score is most notably absent.
4 Revealingly, there is no available or complete authoritative score for the soundtrack of The Devils. My research, therefore, has been aided by Davies’s fragmentary handwritten notes, sketches and manuscripts held at the British Library, London. The Suite from The Devils, incidentally, which includes some of the music from the film score, has been performed a couple of times, including once in a themed BBC Proms performance (Prom 40, 29 August 1974) featuring both the Fires of London and Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London. Meirion Bowen (writing for The Guardian, 30 August 1974) gave the concert a lukewarm review at the time, but noted that many people came ‘eager to hear the two groups combined for the incidental music […] for Ken Russell’s film “The Devils”’. Parts of it were also performed in 2014 by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Cleobury and released in the same year on CD by Naxos (<https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.572408>).
5 Utz, Richard, ‘Coming to Terms with Medievalism: Towards a Conceptual History’, European Journal of English Studies, 15 (2011), 101–13 (p. 109).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 For all the controversy this film received, and its storied history of censorship (some of which will be covered in the present article), the film prospered in British and European cinemas.
7 All these terms (authenticity, humour, etc.) are invoked as chapter titles in the useful primer for medievalism studies Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014).
8 A comparative study is beyond the scope of this article, but it might be a worthwhile and complementary investigation. Indeed, a television film version by the original cast of the Hamburg State Opera première of Penderecki’s opera was made in 1969. I have been unable to ascertain whether Russell or Davies might have seen this version, or whether there may be a line of influence.
9 There is an ongoing discussion about the distinction between the terms ‘medievalism’ and ‘neo-medievalism’; see Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games, ed. Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012). Medievalism may variously refer to the imaginative and creative recreation of the Middle Ages, whereas neo-medievalism denotes a speculative form of the medieval as it appears in fantasy or science fiction. Occasionally, however, neo-medievalism is used to describe any medieval imaginary, positioned against a scientific medievalism, that might elsewhere separate medievalism from work that is ‘medievalist’. But in order to underscore the artificiality and contingency of the recreation of the distant past in any (and all) media, I characterize medievalism and neo-medievalism as essentially interchangeable.
10 Utz, ‘Coming to Terms with Medievalism’, 106. Perhaps the most iconic and parodied form of popular medievalism, after all, is the costumed ‘Renaissance fayre’.
11 I borrow this phrase from Wetmore, Kevin J. Jr ‘“Sportful Combat” Gets Medieval: The Representation of Historical Violence at Renaissance Fairs’, The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, ed. Greg Colón Semenza, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 115–26 (p. 116).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Lukes, Daniel, ‘Comparative Neomedievalisms: A Little Bit Medieval’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 5 (2014), 1–9 (pp. 8–9).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Jonathan Hsy, ‘Co-disciplinarity’, Medievalism, ed. Emery and Utz, 43–52 (p. 43).
14 This was a very early work for Jarman (who was then only 19 years old). Jarman would go on to create a formidable body of work locating the modern in the medieval. See Mills, Robert, Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018).Google Scholar
15 Hsy, ‘Co-disciplinarity’, 50.
16 See, for example, Meyer, Stephen C. and Yri, Kirsten, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, ed. Meyer, and Yri, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–13 (p. 1).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Emma Dillon, ‘Vocal Philologies: Written on Skin and the Troubadours’, Opera Quarterly, 33 (2017), 207–48. Written on Skin has had a strongly salutary effect in this respect, inspiring a number of scholars to probe the intersection of an avant-garde present with the medieval past; see, for example, Maria Ryan, ‘Angels in the Archive: Animating the Past in Written on Skin’, Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen, ed. James Cook, Alexander Kolassa and Adam Whittaker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 174–87, and Anne Stone, ‘The Postmodern Troubadour’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, ed. Meyer and Yri, 397–419.
18 Dillon, ‘Vocal Philologies’, 214.
19 Ibid., 215.
20 Cross, Jonathan, Harrison Birtwistle: Man, Mind, Music (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), 11.Google Scholar
21 Although I concern myself here with the post-war generation of composers, the same could be said of preceding generations of composers too, for example with regard to the folk medievalisms employed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, and more generally in the so-called English Musical Renaissance, as well as the Tudor (and other) medievalisms of the likes of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. On Britten and Tippett specifically, see, for example, Wiebe, Heather, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Stone, ‘The Postmodern Troubadour’, 416.
23 This list is based on archival material dating from 1971 at the British Library, London (MS Mus. 1409, fol. 71).
24 I refer to the cult horror tradition which has historically relied on word of mouth and a certain amount of cult capital associated with bootleg video trading. The term ‘video nasty’ itself comes from the British controversy and public moral panic in 1981 surrounding the availability of a number of horror-film video cassettes: for more on this, see Petley, Julian, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 23–32.Google Scholar The Devils has also been cited as an example of the ‘nunsploitation’ subgenre of often lurid, usually low-budget exploitation films.
25 See Craig Lapper, ‘The Censors, the Studio and “Cutting the Orgy in Two”’ in the booklet that accompanies the 2012 BFI DVD release of the film (<https://www2.bfi.org.uk/blu-rays-dvds/devils>), pp. 7–13. Russell is quoted as saying after the penultimate(!) bout of cuts: ‘I believe that despite the fact I have butchered the film at your bidding far and away beyond anything I dreamed of […] what remains still just about retains my intentions – albeit in a watered-down version’ (p. 12).
26 See Petley, Julian, ‘Witch Hunt: The Word, The Press and The Devils ’, Journal of British Television and Film, 12 (2015), 515–38.Google Scholar
27 Successive releases have restored some of the edited content (the BFI DVD restores the originally released X-certificate version; see above, n. 25), but the full ‘director’s cut’ remains unavailable, other than having been viewed in select cinema showings. There has been a lively and ongoing campaign, led by the film critic Mark Kermode, to have this version (including the ‘Rape of Christ’ scene) released commercially.
28 A quick internet search will show that ‘good taste’ (and Russell’s problematic relationship with it) was consistently invoked in obituaries in (among other publications) the Financial Times and The Guardian when he died in 2011.
29 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 57.
30 Jeffrey Sconce, ‘“Trashing the Academy”: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Style’, Screen, 36 (1995), 371–93 (p. 372).
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 387 (emphasis added).
33 Hawkins, Joan, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3.Google Scholar
34 Ibid. No doubt the widened availability of the internet and the growing size of platforms such as YouTube have contributed to and accelerated (or even, perhaps, dissolved) this category. Certainly, YouTube facilitates the kinds of cultural juxtapositions implied here on a scale that could only have been imagined in an era of VHS. That increasingly uncensored versions of The Devils have begun to circulate in the last 20 years is, arguably, no coincidence. See, for example, Jodi Brooks, ‘The State of the Discipline: Film Studies as Bad Object’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24 (2010), 791–7.
35 Weldon, Michael, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (London: Plexus, 1983);Google Scholar Muir, John Kenneth, Horror Films of the 1970s, 2 vols. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), i, 109.Google Scholar
36 One might suggest that much of the current scholarly interest in Russell is concerned with ‘rehabilitating’ him, accounting for his idiosyncratic career by way of – as in the example of one recent essay collection – comparison with artistic mannerism and national style, such as in Ken Russell: Re-viewing England’s Last Mannerist, ed. Kevin M. Flanagan (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009). This is fine, although the approach taken in this article recognizes that a rehabilitative route is not necessarily the most desirable or productive way of reading his work (at least in this case).
37 Russell is, of course, aware of and very impressed with Davies’s music here; we have no idea whether the reverse is true and are allowed to presume that this is not the case. Seabrook, Mike, Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1994), 128.Google Scholar
38 Ibid. (emphasis added).
39 To be fair to Seabrook, his account is entirely consistent with Davies’s own publicly stated position. Indeed, his published mentions of the film and collaboration tend to refer to it only in biographical contexts relating to his move to Orkney. This can be observed in four short references in the recently published Peter Maxwell Davies: Selected Writings, ed. Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 127, 137, 220, 266.
40 Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 259.
41 A quick flick through its index reveals no mention of this film. The same can be said for other collections, such as Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies, ed. Richard McGregor (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2000). I do not intend this as a criticism, however; neither do I think it all that surprising an omission.
42 This fact seems to be the principal reason why Davies and scholars of his music mention the score at all.
43 Christopher Fox, ‘Magic Moments’, Musical Times, 151/1910 (2010), 87–91 (p. 87).
44 Rupprecht, Philip, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45 Fox, ‘Magic Moments’, 87.
46 See <https://www.discogs.com/release/1972838-Peter-Maxwell-DaviesFires-Of-London-Vesalii-Icones> and <https://www.discogs.com/release/4905273-Peter-Maxwell-Davies-Fires-Of-London-Eight-Songs-For-A-Mad-King>. The record sleeve for Eight Songs for a Mad King has photographic artwork taken on the set of The Devils. The eponymous King can be seen among Jarman’s white brick walls on the cover, and on the inside Davies is seen lying on some steps that feature prominently during the film’s execution scenes (he is surrounded by members of the Fires of London and singer Julius Eastman, all of whom are superimposed).
47 In 1970, Russell’s D. H. Lawrence adaptation Women in Love had been nominated for four Academy Awards. Recognized as he was already for having made a glut of innovative (mostly composer-biography) documentaries for BBC’s Monitor series in the 1960s, it seems that expectations were high: his work on the forthcoming The Devils was documented in a serious way in the BBC Omnibus documentary Russell’s Progress. (The same documentary has lengthy scenes of Davies and the Fires of London recording the soundtrack in the studio.)
48 This description, often attributed to Fellini himself, comes up nearly everywhere in journalistic and scholarly coverage of Russell. Its persistence is interesting, however, and reflects a desire by his advocates (then and now) to substantiate the film maker amid a great canon of European masters, and to explain his aesthetics of excess as being representative of a kind of Fellini-esque fantasism.
49 Edward Greenfield, ‘Popping up the Avant Garde’, The Guardian, 15 November 1971. Greenfield somewhat banally articulates how such a crossover might work, and it is perhaps unsurprising that its success was limited: ‘What for me distinguishes […] these works from so much avant-garderie is that their focus is clear. Though detailed analysis is not always easy, each work has a clear geographical shape with fast and slow interchanged more readily than is common.’
50 Proving the legitimizing function of modernist medievalism in British music at the time, Seabrook makes a point of mentioning in the next paragraph how Davies was able to work a ‘fifteenth-century French folk song’ quotation into one of his foxtrot arrangements. Seabrook, Max, 129.
51 Director of The Devils, special feature on The Devils BFI DVD set (see above, n. 25).
52 Christopher Ford, ‘An End to the Devils and Fox Trots …’, The Guardian, 18 January 1972.
53 This is confirmed in the Seabrook biography, where Davies corroborates that Russell had been ‘put off the work […] by hearing a reduction of the piece for single voice and piano’ (Seabrook, Max, 134). I suspect that for all his apparent ‘radical’ qualities as a director, Russell’s musical tastes were quite conservative: indeed, his great love was classical music from the Romantic period, and he was responsible for several groundbreaking BBC docudramas on composer subjects in the 1960s, as well as the films Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975). Musicological interest in the man has mostly focused on those works, and his approach to biography is famously impressionistic, surreal and theatrical. See, for example, John C. Tibbetts, ‘“Just an Innocent Bystander”: Composer Films of Ken Russell’, Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography, ed. Tibbetts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 155–216, and Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, ‘Tracking Tchaikovsky: The Melokinesis of Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers’, Musical Times, 155/1928 (2014), 51–69.
54 See Alexander Kolassa, ‘Presentness and the Past in Contemporary British Opera’, Recomposing the Past, ed. Cook, Kolassa and Whittaker, 155–73 (p. 164).
55 This is how it is labelled in a design included at the back of the original Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, programme.
56 Jarman was to design at least the costumes for this production of Taverner too. The British Library is currently cataloguing a sketchbook (MS Mus. 1854) belonging to Jarman containing his work-in-progress designs.
57 Peter Heyworth, ‘“Taverner”: An Obsession’, New York Times, 30 July 1972, <https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/30/archives/-taverner-an-obsession-that-became-an-opera-taverner-an-obsession.html https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/30/archives/-taverner-an-obsession-that-became-an-opera-taverner-an-obsession.html> (accessed 6 April 2021).
58 Davies compiled much of the libretto from written historical records: he details this precisely in Peter Maxwell Davies, ‘“Taverner”: Synopsis and Documentation’, Tempo, 101 (1972), 4–11. That edition of Tempo was entirely dedicated to articles about Taverner.
59 Joseph Kerman, ‘Popish Ditties’, Tempo, 102 (1972), 20–4 (p. 23).
60 For more on this music-theatrical context, see Michael Hall, Music Theatre in Britain, 1960–1975 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2015), and Robert Adlington, ‘Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143 (2018), 433–71.
61 See Beard, David, ‘ Taverner: An Interpretation’, Studies, Peter Maxwell Davies, ed. Kenneth Gloag, and Jones, Nicholas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 79–105 Google Scholar, and Connery, Majel, ‘Peter Maxwell Davies’ Worst Nightmare: Staging the Unsacred in the Operas Taverner and Resurrection ’, Opera Quarterly, 25 (2009), 247–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
62 Connery, ‘Peter Maxwell Davies’ Worst Nightmare’, 248–9.
63 Ibid., 251.
64 Mary Whitehouse, quoted in Petley, ‘Witch Hunt’, 534 (emphasis added).
65 Kerman, ‘Popish Ditties’, 20.
66 Lanza, Joseph, Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and his Films (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2007), 106.Google Scholar
67 Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London recorded some of the Terpsichore collection as part of the album Praetorius: Dances from Terpsichore/Motets in 1973. The ‘raspy’ performance is typical of their style of interpretation and the general popular perception of ‘early music’ at the time.
68 ‘La Bourée’ was a more recognizable example of ‘early music’ then, and a few years earlier in 1967 it had some international success seemingly through its quotation in the hit recording of ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ by the American band Fifth Estate.
69 This passage features in the first movement of the Suite from The Devils, which was first performed at the BBC Proms in the 1974 season in a concert, mentioned in n. 4 above, that combined Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London with the Fires of London. The suite itself includes a lot of music that did not survive the cut in the film; likewise, some of the more fleshed-out compositions (as I see them) in the soundtrack itself are not in the suite, including scenes explored below, such as the isorhythmic plague scene and the final execution scene. The recording studio performance of the execution scene (with Davies conducting) is included, almost in full, in the documentary Director of The Devils (see above, n. 25).
70 See, for example, his St Michael (1958). Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 144–5.
71 James Deaville, ‘Evil Medieval: Chant and the New Dark Spirituality of Vietnam-Era Film in America’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, ed. Meyer and Yri, 709–28 (p. 709).
72 The image recalls what John Haines has identified as the prominence of horn and trumpet in medieval-themed movies, though the chivalric associations are somewhat subverted here through the near manic repetitions and inauspicious funerary occasion. John Haines, Music in Films on the Middle Ages: Authenticity vs. Fantasy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 45.
73 See, for example, John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Adam Whittaker, ‘Musical Divisions of the Sacred and Secular in The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Recomposing the Past, ed. Cook, Kolassa and Whittaker, 89–106.
74 The stark juxtaposition of jarring medieval musical anachronisms with silence (and by extension, ambient noise) is itself a notable feature of challenging medieval cinema over the years. See Alexander Kolassa, ‘The Past Is a Different Planet: Sounding Medievalism in Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God’, Studies in Medievalism XXVII: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), 227–50, and Alexis Luko, ‘Faith, Fear, Silence, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Medieval Vision of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, ed. Meyer and Yri, 636–57.
75 Rob Young, Electric Eden (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 201.Google Scholar
76 Davies’s involvement is reduced in Young, Electric Eden, to a single parenthetical reference to ‘the featured composer’ (p. 202).
77 John Callow, Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 126.
78 Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of Film Music, rev. and enlarged by Richard Arnell and Peter Day (Exeter: Focal Press, 1975), 247. This reference is interesting in that the seven pages dedicated to The Devils include four reproductions of pages from Davies’s film score (including one wrongly attributed to the ‘burning sequence at the end of the film’).
79 Ibid.
80 The scene is not unlike that in a favourite film of medievalism studies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with calls of ‘Bring out your dead!’ Indeed, Monty Python were interested in Russell as director and he was referenced a couple of times in Monty Python’s Flying Circus (one episode receiving the title ‘Ken Russell’s “Gardening Club”’). This particular moment in The Devils has been cited as an influence on their own plague scene. See Marcia Landy, Cinema and Counter History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 83.
81 Louise D’Arcens, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 12.
82 A hanging stuffed crocodile or alligator is a common motif in depictions of a medieval alchemist or apothecary from the early modern period to the present day.
83 In Davies’s handwritten score, this is meticulously worked out: the tempo is set at 120 crotchets per minute (60 minims per minute in the slow section), with calculations that demonstrate how two different rhythmic talea (shown in Examples 3 and 4, setting an underlying cantus firmus derived from the ‘Dies irae’) fill up the four sections of the scene.
84 This chord is Davies’s ‘death chord’, a recurrent motif in many of his works from around this time and carrying particular significance in the opera Taverner, where it is closely connected to the theme of death through the Jester character. That makes for another interesting connection between that opera and The Devils.
85 See Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, and Davies’s own ‘St Michael: Sonata for Seventeen Wind Instruments’, ‘Prolation’ and ‘Realizing the “Aural Vision” of Prolation’, in Peter Maxwell Davies: Selected Writings, ed. Jones, 37–8, 39–42 and 43–5.
86 Quoted from London, British Library, MS Mus. 1409, fol. 74r.
87 It is a pivotal moment: in the chaos of this scene, Grandier first meets, and bonds with, Madeleine de Brou, with whom he starts a love affair and whom he eventually marries in secret. Sister Jeanne’s jealousy over this is the catalyst for the violence that encompasses much of the rest of the film.
88 Variously sized fragments of the ‘Dies irae’ chant appear widely in cinematic popular culture, forming an instantly recognizable musical signifier (usually of doom) for even the most mainstream audiences. Memorably, it takes centre stage in Wendy Carlos’s synthesized score for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining; but it also appears widely in Disney franchises (The Lion King, Pirates of the Carribean), action films (Big Trouble in Little China) and elsewhere, to say nothing of its use in early and silent cinema (and opera). This became the subject of a widely viewed Vox explainer video released in 2019, ‘Why This Creepy Melody Is in So Many Movies’ (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3-bVRYRnSM>, accessed 6 April 2021).
89 Robin Gregory, ‘Dies irae’, Music and Letters, 34 (1953), 133–9 (p. 138; emphasis added). I am grateful to Daniel Trocmé-Latter, who first drew my attention to this quotation (personal communication; see also ‘A Disney Requiem? Iterations of the “Dies irae” in the score to The Lion King (1994)’, Music and the Moving Image (forthcoming).
90 Quoted from London, British Library, MS Mus. 1409, fol. 74r.
91 It might be worth considering discussions of ‘excess’ in the context of the Gothic here: that being, after all, an early species of popular medievalism. Indeed, according to Fred Botting, gloomy Gothic ‘atmospheres’ have ‘repeatedly signalled the disturbing return of pasts upon presents and evoked emotions of terror and laughter’; Gothic excess concerns transgression, religious irrationalism (impinging as it were on the present to horrific effect) and the corrupting force of power, all of which inform The Devils. Botting, Gothic (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–3. Russell himself broached the subject more overtly in the film Gothic (1986).
92 See Thomas Prasch, ‘Behind the Last Veil: Forms of Transgression in Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance’, Ken Russell, ed. Flanagan, 195–210 (p. 198).
93 See Kevin Flanagan, ‘Introduction’, Ken Russell, ed. Flanagan, xi–xxv.
94 As discussed in Peter Brooks, ‘Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera’, Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118–34 (p. 121).
95 See, for example, Jed Rasula, ‘The Pathic Receptacles of Modernism’, Ré-inventer le réel (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 1999), 143–63 (<https://books.openedition.org/pufr/4132>, accessed 6 April 2021).
96 Kristin Thompson, ‘The Concept of Cinematic Excess’, Theoretical Perspectives in Cinema, ed. David Allen and Teresa de Lauretis, special issue, Ciné-Tracts: A Journal of Film, Communications, Culture, and Politics, 1/2 (summer 1977), 54–63 (p. 63).
97 This is particularly notable in the documentary Director of The Devils (see above, n. 25), in which Russell speaks in confident tones about basing the film on historical sources. That said, in the same documentary he discusses wanting to give the film a contemporary feeling, and to give medieval Loudun the feeling of being a ‘modern town’ with ‘modern people’.
98 Discussed in Crouse, Raising Hell, chapter 7.
99 Despite what Crouse says, I think this is likely. There were some similar tactics in Britain; they just failed to work in the USA.
100 The text on the poster also utilizes a medievalized decorative drop capital at the start of the text.
101 Nick Wilson, The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7.
102 Young, Electric Eden, 205.
103 Helen Dell, ‘“[A] single, true, certain authenticity”: The Authenticity Wars in English Twentieth-Century Folk and Medieval Music Revivals’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 10 (2019), 439–51 (p. 447).
104 Richard Taruskin, ‘The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past’, Authenticity and Early Music, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 137–207 (p. 205).
105 I have avoided filling this article with accounts of the medieval (or, indeed, the Renaissance), of early music and of the history of modernism (musical or otherwise). That ‘forward-looking’ modern composers have consistently drawn on the influences of the distant past is clear. All the same, see Alexander Kolassa, ‘Intertextuality and (Modernist) Medievalism in British Post-War Music’, Intertextuality in Music: Dialogical Composition, ed. Paulo Ferreira de Castro, William Everett and Violetta Kostka (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 114–28.
106 A case in point might be the promisingly entitled ‘Echoes of the Past in the Present’, Peter Maxwell Davies: Selected Writings, ed. Jones, 53–5, a transcript of a conversation between Roger Smalley and Davies mostly discussing the presence of early music in some of Davies’s pieces. The two composers talk mainly of formal and technical matters. Likewise, in a Radio 3 interview with Tom Service on Music Matters (2014), both Davies and Birtwistle (there in celebration of their eightieth years) seem a bit put out when pressed on the nature of the influence of medieval music on their work, it being merely something they used in order to rebel (against the conservative music-education establishment of the time) in their student days.
107 Alison Hennegan, ‘Safer “Out” Than In’, Gay News, 168 (May–June 1979), 19–20, quoted in Peter Maxwell Davies: Selected Writings, ed. Jones, 136–43 (p. 138).
108 Ibid., 139.