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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
There is no more apposite coalescence between Ronald Stevenson the musician and Hugh MacDiarmid the poet than in those lines (a lyric from the long philosophical poem-sequence To Circumjack Cencrastus), which Stevenson set around 1975 as The Song of the Nightingale. There are few singers in today's world, even though there is much left to sing about. But the singer – if he can be found – is of necessity a solitary: an individual (nay an individualist) whose pipings, heard perhaps in Eden, are now all too often swamped in the chaotic noise of what passes in so many areas, not least in music (where noise is at least a concomitant) as the hallmark of progress.
1 Stevenson called his friend ‘an apocalyptic ragman’, while MacDiarmid's biographer Alan Bold, discussing the poet's search for a world language, or linguistic internationalism, in In Memoriam James Joyce, considers him ‘in practice … confined largely to English coloured with exotic quotations’ ( MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, a Critical Biography, London: John Murray, 1988, p. 360).Google Scholar
2 It could be of course an opposite, as in the ironic setting of jolly words to a dirge, or vice versa.
3 Compare Brahms's comment to Henschel: ‘Like the seed-corn it germinates unconsciously, and in spite of ourselves … When I have found the first phrase of a song … I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work … If afterwards I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape’.
4 These two very different songs were composed on successive days – 10 and 11 February 1964 – in South Africa, part of a group of MacDiarmid settings set down, somewhat in the spirit of ‘home thoughts from abroad’, shortly after Stevenson had given the world première of the Passacaglia on DSCH at the University of Capetown, where he was currently a visiting lecturer.
5 Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays ed. Ross, Raymond J. and Hendry, Joy (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Stevenson has also set several of MacLean's poems: one of them, Calvary, originally composed for chorus in 1968, lodges at the centre of the otherwise MacDiarmid-texted song-cycle The Infernal City.
* Actually the preceding couplet (Ed.)
6 The ‘Kurt Weillian’ approach is well illustrated by Stevenson's ‘Blues Ecossaise’ The Barren Fig (1960–1965)Google Scholar setting lines from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.
7 ‘MacDiarmid the Poet’; introduction to The Hugh MacDiarmid Anthology ed. Grieve, Michael and Scott, Alexander (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. xviii.Google Scholar
8 His settings of James Joyce and William Soutar, though not as numerous as of MacDiarmid, have also accumulated into substantial series. In addition to the poets mentioned earlier, he has set among other Yeats, Masefield, Wordsworth, Tagore, Sacheverell Sitwell and Kathleen Raine; German and Italian poets in their own tongues, poems in Lancashire dialect – and many Scots such as his namesake Robert Louis Stevenson (perhaps the most poignant settings of all in his large-scale song-cycle chosen from A Child's Garden of Verses), James Hogg, Robert Garioch, Sydney Goodsir Smith; the Aberdonian Doric of Robert Gordon and, in Gaelic, Sorley MacLean and his own son-in-law Aonghas MacNeacail. It is a matter for regret that though a representative sample of Stevenson's piano music is now available in commercial recordings, not one of his songs has yet found its way onto disc.