Setting Wilfred Owen to Music

by Stephen Tyler

In Summer 2013 the choir visited All Saints, Dunsden Green on the outskirts of Reading to perform our “All At Sea” program. In the course of this I met John Bodman who acquainted me with the connections that the church there has with the war poet Wilfred Owen. John is working to get the village twinned with the town of Ors in France where Owen in buried, and has an ambitious program of arts events for 2014 taking place in both countries to commemorate the war, and specifically remember Wilfred Owen. John asked if our choir would like to participate in those celebrations, which of course we were very happy to do, and also asked me if I might consider doing an original choral setting of some Owen texts to mark the anniversary.

Now, I have to somewhat shamefully admit to never having read a Wilfred Owen poem before that day, so I immediately set about fixing that and went and read every one I could find. I was quite taken aback at the extraordinarily powerful imagery, both literal and figurative, portraying life, and death, in the trenches of the Great War.

The first job was to short list some poems that might work as pieces of music. My starting point for any composition is always the selection of a great text that has something significant to say, and says it really well. Then, I try to create a musical setting that amplifies the power of the text, and avoids getting in the way of it.

The first poem I seriously considered setting was Dulce Et Decorum Est. This describes with fierce realism the reality of facing deployment of chemical weapons. It hit me very powerfully when I read it, partly because news had just broken about the use of chemical weapons in Syria and it all seemed quite shockingly relevant to the modern world. I planned out an approach to a choral arrangement but in the end decided against it. In my head, what I was hearing was simply not going to be any more powerful than the poem being read. In fact, the music was going to get in the way of the text. So the search continued…  

In truth a lot of Owen is like that – so powerful that setting it to music would do it an injustice. It’s also quite relentlessly graphic and dark. As good as it is, there is only so much you can take in one sitting! Eventually I settled on three poems that lay out various aspects of Owen’s view of the war, but also, I think, make very good subjects for pieces of choral music and work well together as a set. These were Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, and The Next War.

Anthem For Doomed Youth
In Anthem For Doomed Youth, Owen describes an environment in which death had become unnaturally normalized and common place. It provides a relatively gentle introduction to Owen’s general view of the war – as a crucible of ignominious death in which he was yearning for scraps of human dignity.

It reads:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattleCan patter out their hasty orisons.No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;And bugles calling for them from sad shires.What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyesShall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.

I was actually initially struck by the first line not reading “…. for these who die in battle“, which lesser mortals like me might have written if I was looking to set up a rhyme with “rattle” a couple of lines later. But no, he writes “…who die as cattle“.   This pulls no punches right from the outset. In two words he makes clear that they die in great numbers and with no dignity. He expands on that to explain that their death is barely marked, but leaves us to imagine the scenes each night in the “sad shires”, behind the drawn blinds of the final stanza. We are left with a sense of communities in an almost constant state of mourning, sending their young men in droves to a front where they faced a very high likelihood of meeting an extremely undignified death.

It’s also a very musical text – “the monstrous anger of the guns”, “the stuttering rifle’s rapid rattle”, and of course there was simply no way I could turn down the chance to set “the shrill demented choirs of wailing shells”!!   

In many ways it is the simplest of the three texts and that is reflected in the approach I took to the music, which is really a gentle warm up for what is to come. The music for this, like the text, is not particularly dramatic. It paints an interesting but relatively easy to contemplate scene, without getting into the more extreme emotional territory of the other two pieces.

Futility
The second piece, Futility, was suggested to me early on by one of our choir members, Geoff Harvey. Consequently I am fairly sure it was the first Owen poem I actually read. When I’d finished reading all the others though, it remained one of my firm favourites.

The text reads:

Move him into the sun -Gently its touch awoke him once,At home, whispering of fields unsown.Always it woke him, even in France,Until this morning and this snow.If anything might rouse him nowThe kind old sun will know.Think how it wakes the seeds, -Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?Was it for this the clay grew tall?- O what made fatuous sunbeams toilTo break earth's sleep at all?

It really is an achingly painful poem that places us right at the battle front, not in the heat of battle, but in the quiet aftermath, where we witness an optimistic hope giving way slowly to a resentful despair. Clearly there is an emotional journey here that can be amplified and intensified further with music. There are also some very musical individual words and phrases: “the kind old sun”, “the clays of a cold star”, “fatuous sunbeams” etc. that seemed to be begging to be played with.    

My starting point for this was the first line. I wanted a shimmery start to suggest stepping into the Sun’s light. I’ve always found intriguing the shimmer that occurs when women’s voices split to 3 or 4 parts, especially with non triad-based harmony and this seemed like a good time for it! Consequently the piece starts with a plain unison in the women’s voices that expands through a widening cluster chord to a shimmery four part E flat major 7th chord on “Sun”. From there on the text really suggested the music so naturally and obviously that it took barely two days to complete the setting.

The Next War
The final piece in the set, The Next War returns us to the concept of the normalization of death, as introduced by Anthem for Doomed Youth. In this, Death is personified and portrayed not as an enemy, but as a friend.   

It reads:

Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to Death,-Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,-Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,-Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.He's spat at us with bullets and he's coughedShrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,And greater wars: when each proud fighter bragsHe wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags. 

Owen is mocking the stupidity of the fact that they were not fighting against death. He lampoons the fact that death was accepted in their company. He harks back to verbal imagery in Dulce et Decorum Est by describing the chemical weapons they faced as the “green thick odour of his breath”. And he finally condemns the present by expressing a vision of a future in which men don’t league with death to fight against each other, but instead unite to fight against death. Which is about as optimistic a thought as I found in the Owen canon, and seemed like a good way to end the set!

This was by far the hardest of the three to actually get my head around in terms of planning an approach to a choral setting and it took me way longer to do that then other two combined. Owen employs here a very uncomfortable concept – that of being all friendly with death. It is hard and unsettling to read about people being quite comfortable in very close proximity to death. Owen I think wants you to be unsettled by that. He wants you to feel moral discomfort at the situation he is describing where the value placed on human life is minimal and death on a large scale has become normalized and accepted, in the pursuit of flags.   

So what aspect of this do you amplify with the music? Well, the takeaway message from this is a very deep and serious point about the morality of war. But the genius of the poem is the way Owen conveys that with language that is infused with levity.  It is the tension between the language and the point he is making that gives this poem punch. So in the end I decided it was important to focus on amplifying that tension in my setting.   

As with futility, the opening words were musically important. I made “Out there” into an eerie and uncertain place with an opening motif that has a deliberately ambiguous key and a discordant suspension and resolution. That motif returns several times, each time to snap us back to an uncomfortable place for “We’ve sniffed”, “Our eyes wept”, “Oh death” and the final “for flags”. Aside from those key tension points, for the rest of it, in an attempt to amplify the levity of Owen’s language, I kept the music largely to a major key, with simple triadic chordal harmony and a melody designed to keep it all rather uncomfortably light (and trite) given what he is actually saying. The piece reaches its dynamic apex with the phrase “He wars on death” culminating with a very loud F major chord, before returning to a quiet and protracted tension as the uncomfortable motif returns at the very end of the piece.

Summing Up
Working with the Owen texts has made WWI far more real and relevant to me than it ever was before. I’ve never had a great interest in military history, and I still don’t. But I am very interested in the nature of human experience, especially aspects of it that are completely foreign to me, and Owen’s poetry shines a bright light on how the context of a war fought in trenches and with chemical weapons, pushed to the limits of humanity. Owen is not writing military history. He is writing about the experience of the people in those trenches in a way that lets you directly into their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, and frustrations; and in that I find a sense of connection and contemporary relevance to the act of remembering the ‘Great’ War.

I have very much enjoyed my journey through Owen, as I have with previous compositional journeys through texts from other great poets, notably Rossetti and Poe.

– Stephen Tyler