Description
In 1878 Edward Elgar (then just 21), his brother Frank and friends Frank Exton and Hubert and Willie Leicester, used to meet on Sunday afternoons to rehearse in a shed behind his father’s music shop in Worcester. With two flutes, an oboe, a clarinet and a bassoon (played by a self-taught Elgar), this was not an orthodox wind quintet grouping, so Elgar arranged and wrote new work for the group.
Elgar gave the works the collective title ‘Shed Music’ and, whilst the majority are short but delightful miniatures, he wrote a number of fairly substantial works too, including a series of seven increasingly complex and ambitious pieces that Elgar called his ‘Harmony Music’ series.
In May 1879, just two days after completing Harmony Music No. 5, Elgar embarked on Harmony Music No. 6 – starting with the second movement, an Andante Arioso. Jerrold Northrop Moore, author of Edward Elgar: A Creative Life, said of it: “It brought the best of his melody-making into a sort of slow march with dark dignity. Here was an utterance which could combine nostalgia for the past with real aspiration for the future”. He later repurposed this movement as a work for organ entitled Cantique. Elgar then added a first movement – an Allegro molto – ‘a sophisticated sonata structure of some scale’. He then started, but never finished, a Minuet so Harmony Music No. 6 remained a two movement work.
Elgar’s Shed Music was lost for nearly 100 years before most of the music was rediscovered and broadcast on the BBC in 1976. To my knowledge, however, Harmony No. 6 has never been formally published. Special thanks for the source material for this arrangement go to John Morrison.
Elgar’s music has been re-arranged here for the standard wind quintet grouping of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon.
