CAREY BLYTON - THE BECKENHAM SALON -

Active in the Beckenham / Bromley area of Kent between 1950 and 1954, The Beckenham Salon was an informal association of writers, poets, composers and other creative artists which provided an outlet for their artistic activities. Carey Blyton was one of the five founder members, the other four being David Munro (poet), Michael Hopkins (poet), David Roberts (photographer) and John Vosser (pianist / composer). Sir Arthur Bliss was invited to attend sessions of the salon and subsequently became its President.

For the first two years it operated in private houses, along the lines of the 19th century salons. It 'went public' in 1952 and the last public concert took place in 1954, after which it ceased its activities.

Through this organisation Carey Blyton was able to hear (and often actively participate in) the first performances of most of his works from Op.1 to Op.15 (mainly songs and chamber music) - an invaluable experience for a young composer at the outset of his career.

The founder members of the Beckenham Salon (clockwise): David Munro (seated),
Carey Blyton, Michael Hopkins, David Roberts and John Vosser.

The following extract (reproduced with kind permission) is taken from 'Composer Interviews Number One: Carey Blyton' in which Peter Thompson, a one-time pupil and long-time friend of Careys, interviews him about his life and times:

Peter: Carey, what strikes me most about your music and what inspires it is the variety of interests and influences which affect it. To begin with we start with the Beckenham days when, as a young composer, one feels that you were in a sense flirting with ‘the low life’!
Carey: (laughs) Yes!
Peter: You were involved with ‘The Beckenham Salon’.
Carey: That’s right. You’d like to hear a little bit about The Beckenham Salon? Well, it was really a group of young chaps mainly, not many girls really involved with it. One was interested in photography, one was a poet, one was a writer, one was a pianist who wrote piano music and there was me. There were, in fact then, five founder members. We would meet often on a Sunday morning at my parents’ house and my father would always open the door with the same mantra, for he got used to Sunday morning as a record morning, and he’d say: “The Bible class is in the front room and you know the way”, and then he would show them in. And I was only thinking about it a little while ago; we all had our favourite things, which we played over and over and over again, that everyone had to listen to. I mean, one chap was into Ernest Bloch’s Avodath Hakodesh (his setting of the Jewish sacred-service), you know, that religious, Jewish work; someone else was into Verklarte Nacht by Schoenberg; another into Delius. David Munro, who was a little older than most of us and was rather like a ‘Father Confessor’ figure to all of us – being four years older – was into American and Russian music and I was very much into El Salon Mexico by Copland which I inflicted on them, you know, for months every Sunday morning! So they were interesting days, and then we decided, why don’t we have a Salon, like the nineteenth century Salons, in different people’s houses, and so we did that for a while and then we went public after that. But that’s another story.
Peter: And the all-night parties?
Carey: (laughs) Well, that aspect of the Beckenham Salon has become exaggerated over the years. During the five years of the Salon’s existence there were plenty of parties. If girls were not active participants in the Salon’s activities, there were plenty of them around for the parties and they were active enough at those . . . . But most parties broke up around 2 or 3 in the morning; there were actually very few that went on to dawn. But one did in fact give rise to some extraordinary poems, written by David Munro, the Salon’s ‘Father Confessor’: short, bitter and cynical. I set these poems to music – my very first song-cycle, Three A.M. – and gave the first performance not long after the party, accompanying the bass-baritone, John Frost. Possibly the only song-cycle based on an all-night adolescent party in the ‘serious’ repertoire. You can get a flavour of the poems from the opening two lines of the first song: ‘The dawn gapes in with an ashen face / At the jaded hour’. Reviewers of my CDs have rather seized upon these all-night parties, with their flavour of ‘louche living’; it amuses me to say nothing, but let people imagine what they will. But, seriously, I realise now that the music played at them left its mark: mostly popular American music - Gershwin, Cole Porter, the Duke Ellington and Paul Whiteman bands, blues, ragtime, jazz and so on. All somehow penetrated my drink befuddled brain – and a lot stuck.
Peter: You were born in 1932 . . . .
Carey: Right.
Peter: So this would have been in the late ’40s or early ’50s ?
Carey: Very, very late ’40s – really the early ’50s. ’49, ’50, ’51. ’52.
Peter: And Sir Arthur Bliss, I believe, came to support you.
Carey: Yes! We made a great mistake, we wrote to both, well he was then Mr Arthur Bliss, and to Edmund Rubbra asking if they would be interested. They both wrote back and said ‘Yes’! Which was a bit awkward! But Edmund Rubbra had given us a way out by saying that he lived in Oxford and that it would be difficult for him to come. So we were able to write back and say that we really wanted a more actively participating President and thank you all the same but we might perhaps ask someone else. But Bliss did in fact come to a number of the private Salons.
Peter: And continuing with the variety of interests and influences on your music . . .

(Composer Interviews Number One can be obtained from Fand Music, www.fandmusic.com)