ABSTRACT
The chapter traces Rubbra’s lifelong fascination with Eastern music, philosophy and religion. It explores dualities evident in Rubbra’s personal and musical response to the East, and how he resolved such tensions. For him, the East was both a sensually enticing ‘Other’ and an intellectual and spiritual ideal. Musically, these attractions were summed up in the tension that Rubbra recognised between the colourful ‘exteriors’ of timbre and mode versus the ‘interiors’ of line and an improvisatory yet controlled approach to structure. An early Japanese folksong arrangement, ‘Fukagawa’, shows Rubbra playing on a Western audience’s expectations of mode and harmony to convey an Eastern sense of ephemerality. The Cantata Pastorale’s evocation of Indian music through its opening scale pattern and timbre is offset by its long, unfurling solo recorder line, whilst the Pezzo Ostinato hides a tightly controlled structure based on Golden Section proportions beneath its surface spontaneity and variation. The relationship between soloist and orchestra in Rubbra’s Piano Concerto in G challenges Western societal norms of competition and individuality with an Eastern model of discourse and co-operation. Finally, in his song cycle The Jade Mountain, Rubbra conveys a Taoist equilibrium of line and colour, crystalline structure and organic growth.
