14 October 2009
The Neglect of English Classical Music
David Hamilton (August 2009)
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/44183/sec_id/44183
As T.S.Eliot noted, traditions have to be renewed. The English Music Festival presents English Classical music from Medieval to Contemporary and is renewing a tradition.
Yehudi Menhuin wrote to the Times in 1995, “English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.”
Why is it neglected? Like other aspects of English culture it is the victim of a negative ideology that devalues it with pejorative labels like “elitist” or “narrow” but the labels do not fit reality. English music is not imitative, but innovative. It has developed significantly from the early twentieth century but is still rooted in the English tradition - it is tuneful, melodic, tonal and recognisably English. English Classical Music is hidden by a cloud of prejudice and ignorance and is stigmatised as “elitist” or “quaint” when in fact it has the tonal qualities that people enjoyed before modernism set out to destroy them.
In 2005, the Proms had a number of all-English programmes and all but one sold-out, whereas other non-English music programmes did not. The Gloucester 3 Choirs Festival in 2001 did a special Festival of only English music and sold out swiftly. The BBC Music Magazine has a Top 20 Best sellers list and there is some really interesting English music discs there, often by obscure composers.
Despite a noble heritage, much of this glorious music is overlooked. “English Music” festivals tend to either fail at the outset for lack of funds or become internationalised and absorbed into the Social Engineering Culture. The Cheltenham Festival was founded as “The Cheltenham Festival of British Music”, but went “international” and now stages the same as everywhere else.
Without renewal our culture would die and the Festival renews by commissioning works. An oratorio “Prayerbook”, written and performed specially for the first Festival by David Owen Norris was acclaimed by the audience. The Clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 was a beautiful performance. (1906).
Frederick Cliffe’s First Symphony of 1889, was only revived after 83 years' neglect. The Daily Telegraph of 22 April 1889, published a review: “It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon "Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.”'
Over a century later The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of “Dynamic Tryptich.” Conductor Sakari Oramo explained, Foulds composed "some of the most original music ever conceived". Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo, believes: "There's no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: "I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it. ”Foulds's daughter " took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she's been left by her mother." Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book “Music Today” Foulds's, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits.”
In the Baroque period we produced composers of immense skill like Purcell, Byrd, Arne, Tallis and Blow. The period between Arne and Parry has been dismissed as a “musical Ice-Age” though we had Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, who were on a par with their foreign contemporaries, but not progressive enough for international attention. In 1769, Englishman Philip Hayes, who built Oxford’s beautiful Holywell Music Room, composed the world’s first piano concerto! Some great composers died young: Edward Bache, composer of exquisite chamber works, died at 25, and Thomas Linley, died aged 22 in a boating accident in 1777, yet produced wonderful anthems, odes and oratorio, about one of which was written “Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proof of original genius than can be traced in this charming ode”.
Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century there was a renaissance of music in England. Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself; Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner. Richard Strauss described Elgar as “the first Progressivist in English Music”, and Hans Richter told his orchestra of Elgar’s First, “Gentleman, now let us rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer”! Others found inspiration abroad and incorporated the sounds into something uniquely “English”; Delius turned to the continent and Negro spirituals to develop a unique sound with lush, rich harmonies. Vaughan Williams returned to English roots in folk and Tudor to revive an English music, rebelling against the ubiquitous Teutonic schools. English solo song grew from parlour song and folk roots into a beautiful, high-art form; at the other end of the scale, England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, “the Cockney Wagner”, composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music – to rival Wagner’s Ring, and epic orchestral works. Writing about Holbrooke’s The Raven, Irish composer Hamilton Harty said “there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays!” There are other composers of this period to listen to include Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells. These, and many more, are known by a small corpus of recorded works.
Yehudi Menhuin, also stated: “I am drawn to English music because I love the way it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometime dramatically. The music … is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man’s experience of today as related to a particular place…”
In 1927, Holst wrote incidental music to a mystery play "The Coming of Christ" which has never been recorded. As I mentioned, Cliffe’s first symphony, an acclaimed masterpiece, has not had a professional public performance for over 90 years. His second symphony has not been published; none of the symphonies by Walford Davies, Coleridge Taylor and Somervell are available, nor is Bowen’s first symphony which was so popular that The Times devoted a whole column to analysing it; Delius’ opera, "A Village Romeo and Juliet", considered by many the first great modern English opera, has not been performed at either the Royal Opera House or English National Opera for over half a century.
Contemporary artists have similar repertoires and only a small number of works are considered “acceptable.” Concert managers are not prepared to take risks, so they programme what they know, usually popular classics for government funding. A programme of Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Verdi is familiar and safe but to present say, Moeran, Gibbs and Farrar a risk. English music is not fashionable. It is not politically correct and managers hesitate to promote anything English, as if inimical to other cultures. In an era of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” English culture is shunned. It is not the done thing to seem nationalistic by celebrating our traditions: the ending of Elgar’s Caractacus is stigmatised because it points forward to a great British Empire! We are supposed to be ashamed of our culture and ignore it or apologise. Composers of the early twentieth century are dismissed as the “English pastoral composers," lesser musicians whose works are put below the Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian schools. But the pastoral tradition has always inspired composers and poets.
It is often based in a particular location or built from folk song-like melodies - Williams’ three "Norfolk Rhapsodies" (1905-07), and "In the Fen Country" (1904); Holst’s "A Somerset Rhapsody" (1906-7); Butterworth’s "Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad" (1912), his "Two English Idylls" (1911) and "The Banks of Green Willow" (1913); and Finzi’s "A Severn Rhapsody" (1923). The sleeve notes to a recording of "A Severn Rhapsody" read: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’. A pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. These works bespeak a retreat from the care, complexity, or harshness of society. English classical music has its roots in the country; is rooted in our landscape but not necessarily a picturesque one. Gustav Holst was walking in the desolate Dorsetshire country between Wool and Bere Regis in 1926 when visited by inspiration and he started "Egdon Heath", also prompted by the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native". The music is stark and austere. As for elitism anyone can go to these concerts without passing a test. They just have to like the music. Furthermore, composers like Holst wrote music for brass bands. “The Moorside Suite” was used in the brass band competition at the Crystal Palace in 1928 which was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band.
Most works in the English pastoral tradition are not large-scale works but representative of the pastoral genre, though degree of intersection with other forms and genres like the ‘rhapsody’ is characteristic. Some English composers are known collectively as a pastoral ‘school,’ the creative background to both composition and reception, and that their music is so closely bound to landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style shares aspects of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folk song. It is for this reason that Elgar, Parry and Stanford had individual voices yet developed their style from the German musical idiom but are often excluded from the pastoral canon though their importance to the English Musical Renaissance is recognised.
Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite varied influences and often different styles, played an important part in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style.
Three aspects of English pastoralism: setting, language and sensibility. ‘Setting’, the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece; ‘language’, the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition; ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides the pastoral ‘outlook’, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folk song and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature” Amberley Wild Brooks” and Vaughan Williams’s “Fifth Symphony” though disparate are of the English pastoral tradition.
Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been steeped in German classics, especially Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók. Contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folk song, Ireland developed a complex harmonic language like French and Russian. He was very influenced by poetry and his settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was susceptible to the spirit of place. “Chelsea Reach” is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of the great sweep of the Thames as it flows past the Houses of Parliament. He loved the Channel Islands but his main love was Sussex, a landscape of undulating downs and then isolated villages, including Amberley whose ‘Wild Brooks,’ coursing through the fields, inspired the most brilliant of his piano pieces.
Many contemporary composers are writing tonal, innovative, exciting and melodic music which spreads from the English tradition which is difficult to hear in concert, yet is too good to be ignored. There are record labels releasing this music like Naxos, Dutton, Lyritia, Hyperion, Chandos and they sell well. The BBC music magazine has a classified chart and they usually get in. But concerts are not put on because they are not part of the productions fashionable with the ruling elites even though they are enjoyed. The Gloucester Three Choirs in 2001 did an English programme and it sold out!
The English Music Festival cannot get funding from the Arts Council. The only political organisation to give support was the Campaign for an English Parliament and their name worried some sponsors who wanted it removed from the programme, for fear of political embarrassment. Several high-profile companies declined as they wanted to be associated with pop and rock. Some firms first pledged their support and then declined.
It is up to us to support it.
The English Music festival booking office for 2010 will soon be open. Their website is:
http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/
http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/programme.html
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/44183/sec_id/44183
As T.S.Eliot noted, traditions have to be renewed. The English Music Festival presents English Classical music from Medieval to Contemporary and is renewing a tradition.
Yehudi Menhuin wrote to the Times in 1995, “English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.”
Why is it neglected? Like other aspects of English culture it is the victim of a negative ideology that devalues it with pejorative labels like “elitist” or “narrow” but the labels do not fit reality. English music is not imitative, but innovative. It has developed significantly from the early twentieth century but is still rooted in the English tradition - it is tuneful, melodic, tonal and recognisably English. English Classical Music is hidden by a cloud of prejudice and ignorance and is stigmatised as “elitist” or “quaint” when in fact it has the tonal qualities that people enjoyed before modernism set out to destroy them.
In 2005, the Proms had a number of all-English programmes and all but one sold-out, whereas other non-English music programmes did not. The Gloucester 3 Choirs Festival in 2001 did a special Festival of only English music and sold out swiftly. The BBC Music Magazine has a Top 20 Best sellers list and there is some really interesting English music discs there, often by obscure composers.
Despite a noble heritage, much of this glorious music is overlooked. “English Music” festivals tend to either fail at the outset for lack of funds or become internationalised and absorbed into the Social Engineering Culture. The Cheltenham Festival was founded as “The Cheltenham Festival of British Music”, but went “international” and now stages the same as everywhere else.
Without renewal our culture would die and the Festival renews by commissioning works. An oratorio “Prayerbook”, written and performed specially for the first Festival by David Owen Norris was acclaimed by the audience. The Clarinet and viola heralding Vaughan Williams's Norfolk Rhapsody No 1 was a beautiful performance. (1906).
Frederick Cliffe’s First Symphony of 1889, was only revived after 83 years' neglect. The Daily Telegraph of 22 April 1889, published a review: “It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon "Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.”'
Over a century later The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds as the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of “Dynamic Tryptich.” Conductor Sakari Oramo explained, Foulds composed "some of the most original music ever conceived". Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo, believes: "There's no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: "I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it. ”Foulds's daughter " took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she's been left by her mother." Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book “Music Today” Foulds's, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits.”
In the Baroque period we produced composers of immense skill like Purcell, Byrd, Arne, Tallis and Blow. The period between Arne and Parry has been dismissed as a “musical Ice-Age” though we had Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, who were on a par with their foreign contemporaries, but not progressive enough for international attention. In 1769, Englishman Philip Hayes, who built Oxford’s beautiful Holywell Music Room, composed the world’s first piano concerto! Some great composers died young: Edward Bache, composer of exquisite chamber works, died at 25, and Thomas Linley, died aged 22 in a boating accident in 1777, yet produced wonderful anthems, odes and oratorio, about one of which was written “Neither Purcell nor Mozart ever gave stronger proof of original genius than can be traced in this charming ode”.
Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century there was a renaissance of music in England. Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself; Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner. Richard Strauss described Elgar as “the first Progressivist in English Music”, and Hans Richter told his orchestra of Elgar’s First, “Gentleman, now let us rehearse the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer”! Others found inspiration abroad and incorporated the sounds into something uniquely “English”; Delius turned to the continent and Negro spirituals to develop a unique sound with lush, rich harmonies. Vaughan Williams returned to English roots in folk and Tudor to revive an English music, rebelling against the ubiquitous Teutonic schools. English solo song grew from parlour song and folk roots into a beautiful, high-art form; at the other end of the scale, England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, “the Cockney Wagner”, composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music – to rival Wagner’s Ring, and epic orchestral works. Writing about Holbrooke’s The Raven, Irish composer Hamilton Harty said “there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays!” There are other composers of this period to listen to include Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells. These, and many more, are known by a small corpus of recorded works.
Yehudi Menhuin, also stated: “I am drawn to English music because I love the way it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometime dramatically. The music … is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man’s experience of today as related to a particular place…”
In 1927, Holst wrote incidental music to a mystery play "The Coming of Christ" which has never been recorded. As I mentioned, Cliffe’s first symphony, an acclaimed masterpiece, has not had a professional public performance for over 90 years. His second symphony has not been published; none of the symphonies by Walford Davies, Coleridge Taylor and Somervell are available, nor is Bowen’s first symphony which was so popular that The Times devoted a whole column to analysing it; Delius’ opera, "A Village Romeo and Juliet", considered by many the first great modern English opera, has not been performed at either the Royal Opera House or English National Opera for over half a century.
Contemporary artists have similar repertoires and only a small number of works are considered “acceptable.” Concert managers are not prepared to take risks, so they programme what they know, usually popular classics for government funding. A programme of Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Verdi is familiar and safe but to present say, Moeran, Gibbs and Farrar a risk. English music is not fashionable. It is not politically correct and managers hesitate to promote anything English, as if inimical to other cultures. In an era of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” English culture is shunned. It is not the done thing to seem nationalistic by celebrating our traditions: the ending of Elgar’s Caractacus is stigmatised because it points forward to a great British Empire! We are supposed to be ashamed of our culture and ignore it or apologise. Composers of the early twentieth century are dismissed as the “English pastoral composers," lesser musicians whose works are put below the Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian schools. But the pastoral tradition has always inspired composers and poets.
It is often based in a particular location or built from folk song-like melodies - Williams’ three "Norfolk Rhapsodies" (1905-07), and "In the Fen Country" (1904); Holst’s "A Somerset Rhapsody" (1906-7); Butterworth’s "Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad" (1912), his "Two English Idylls" (1911) and "The Banks of Green Willow" (1913); and Finzi’s "A Severn Rhapsody" (1923). The sleeve notes to a recording of "A Severn Rhapsody" read: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’. A pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. These works bespeak a retreat from the care, complexity, or harshness of society. English classical music has its roots in the country; is rooted in our landscape but not necessarily a picturesque one. Gustav Holst was walking in the desolate Dorsetshire country between Wool and Bere Regis in 1926 when visited by inspiration and he started "Egdon Heath", also prompted by the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native". The music is stark and austere. As for elitism anyone can go to these concerts without passing a test. They just have to like the music. Furthermore, composers like Holst wrote music for brass bands. “The Moorside Suite” was used in the brass band competition at the Crystal Palace in 1928 which was won by the Black Dyke Mills Band.
Most works in the English pastoral tradition are not large-scale works but representative of the pastoral genre, though degree of intersection with other forms and genres like the ‘rhapsody’ is characteristic. Some English composers are known collectively as a pastoral ‘school,’ the creative background to both composition and reception, and that their music is so closely bound to landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style shares aspects of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folk song. It is for this reason that Elgar, Parry and Stanford had individual voices yet developed their style from the German musical idiom but are often excluded from the pastoral canon though their importance to the English Musical Renaissance is recognised.
Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite varied influences and often different styles, played an important part in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style.
Three aspects of English pastoralism: setting, language and sensibility. ‘Setting’, the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece; ‘language’, the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition; ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides the pastoral ‘outlook’, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folk song and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature” Amberley Wild Brooks” and Vaughan Williams’s “Fifth Symphony” though disparate are of the English pastoral tradition.
Ireland’s music belongs to the school of ‘English Impressionism’. Having been steeped in German classics, especially Brahms, he was strongly influenced in his twenties and thirties by the music of Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Stravinsky and Bartók. Contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams and Holst developed a language strongly characteristic of English folk song, Ireland developed a complex harmonic language like French and Russian. He was very influenced by poetry and his settings of such poets as A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke are among the best known of his works. He was susceptible to the spirit of place. “Chelsea Reach” is a depiction in the form of a barcarolle of the great sweep of the Thames as it flows past the Houses of Parliament. He loved the Channel Islands but his main love was Sussex, a landscape of undulating downs and then isolated villages, including Amberley whose ‘Wild Brooks,’ coursing through the fields, inspired the most brilliant of his piano pieces.
Many contemporary composers are writing tonal, innovative, exciting and melodic music which spreads from the English tradition which is difficult to hear in concert, yet is too good to be ignored. There are record labels releasing this music like Naxos, Dutton, Lyritia, Hyperion, Chandos and they sell well. The BBC music magazine has a classified chart and they usually get in. But concerts are not put on because they are not part of the productions fashionable with the ruling elites even though they are enjoyed. The Gloucester Three Choirs in 2001 did an English programme and it sold out!
The English Music Festival cannot get funding from the Arts Council. The only political organisation to give support was the Campaign for an English Parliament and their name worried some sponsors who wanted it removed from the programme, for fear of political embarrassment. Several high-profile companies declined as they wanted to be associated with pop and rock. Some firms first pledged their support and then declined.
It is up to us to support it.
The English Music festival booking office for 2010 will soon be open. Their website is:
http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/
http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/programme.html
ay, 25 October 2009
BIZARRE PERCEPTION
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2009/08/english.htm
ALISTAIR HINTON discusses
a recent article on English music
by David Hamilton
I was recently alerted to an article by David Hamilton on the neglect of English music published in the New English Review when my attention was drawn to it by a reference on an online discussion forum by Canadian pianist and composer Gordon Rumson; it contained a number of points with which I felt impelled to take issue -- and by no means because I am a Scottish composer!
The author opens with a quotation from Yehudi Menuhin writing in The Times in 1995 in which Menuhin observes that
English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.
I find this to be at the very least unhelpful; Menuhin avoids specifying to which English composers he refers (it can't possibly be all of them!) and in any case he seems to make a sweeping generalisation here. What in any case is the 'Englishness' of these composers and how can we tell that it remains 'intact'? His notion that 'the mercantilistic world has gone all-American', irrespective of its truth or otherwise, seems to have no obvious relevance in that American music can hardly be said to have taken some kind of precedence over that of other nations.
Much of the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article seems redolent of a kind of narrow parochialism in its suggestion that 'English' music is somehow identifiably different to any other and may and should accordingly be more strongly supported in England as such. I am all for supporting English music that is worthy of support, but I cannot help but return to the questions 'who are these English composers?' and 'what makes them and their music identifiably English?' One has only to consider the immense differences between a handful of English composers born in England between 1943 and 1946 to realise that there is no obvious commonality besides the country and origins of their birth -- I refer (in chronological order of birth) to Brian Ferneyhough, David Matthews, Robin Holloway, John Tavener, Colin Matthews and Michael Finnissy; can it reasonably be said that all of these identifiably represent what can be called an 'English musical tradition' -- and the same one at that?
Thanks to a variety of researchers, performers, record companies and the like, we know far more English music now than was the case thirty years ago and there can, of course, be no doubt that some of this unearthing has proved to be of immense value in reviving the justifiable fortunes of music that has for far too long been overlooked. The case of John Foulds, to which a paragraph is devoted, is a classic example of this, whereas that on Frederick Cliffe borders on the fatuous; is it reasonable to expect to class his 1889 symphony with the early symphonies of Mahler, Brahms's and Bruckner's final symphonies and Tchaikovsky's last two symphonies?
Whilst it is obvious that the term 'land without music' in the period between Purcell and Elgar in England was always an exaggeration, can we really be expected to believe that the works of Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, Hayes, Bache, Linley and others whose names the author might have mentioned but decided to omit 'were on a par with their foreign contemporaries', irrespective of whether or not they were considered 'progressive enough for international attention'? In what ways were any of these on such a par? Who were the contemporary English equivalents of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bellini, Rossini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Alkan, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Bruckner, Smetana, Brahms, Dvorák and others? There were undoubtedly some interesting figures in English music during this period, but I remain unconvinced that England could field anyone of the order of these composers.
The paragraph beginning 'Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century' prompts the hackles of suspicion to rise before its very credibility is undermined by its leading to the claim 'there was a renaissance of music in England at which 'Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself'; leaving aside the facts that Stanford and Parry did no such exalted thing and that a substantial proportion of their mature music was in any case composed after Brahms's death, what on earth is meant here by 'the ravages of Modernism' and when were they supposed to have 'ravaged' what?
We are then told that 'Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner.' That Elgar was, by the time of his first symphony, the most important English composer for many decades is surely beyond doubt and he certainly knew well his Brahms and Wagner, although he felt influenced more by Schumann than either. But how did he 'continue the creation of an English style'? How could he in any case have 'created' one 'through merging Brahms and Wagner'? He developed his own, to be sure and was subject, like all composers, to certain influences in his earlier days, but he seems to have taken little from anyone in that list of earlier English composers that the author provides. Richard Strauss certainly recognised Elgar's greatness; his claim for him as 'the first Progressivist in English Music' was no more patronising towards Elgar than it was towards English music, but taken at face value it might at the same time be seen as somewhat misleading, in that Elgar's finest work had more to it than mere 'English Progressivism' (as I am sure Strauss also recognised).
Perhaps even more improbably, we are expected to believe that 'England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, "the Cockney Wagner", composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music -- to rival Wagner's Ring, and epic orchestral works'; to begin with, no one was asking a question (so how did England come up with an answer?) and, important as Holbrooke was, the idea that his orchestral epics 'rival' Wagner's Ring would surely have been as absurd to him as it should be to the rest of us -- and almost as risible as the idea of anyone being able to assume a mantle such as 'the Cockney Wagner'!
We are then given another long list of English composers active during the twentieth century -- 'Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells'; phew! -- pause for breath needed. I was unaware that Macs kenzie, Cunn and Ewen -- or Harty -- were 'English' in any case and it might likewise be salutary to question the extent and validity of Goossens' and Moeran's 'English' credentials. We certainly know more about most of these composers' works nowadays and some of the explorations have again yielded many treasures, yet do they all belong on anything like the same plane? -- Rubbra, Howells, Rawsthorne, Goossens, Foulds, Ireland, Bliss, Bax and Bridge seem to stand pretty much head and shoulders above most of the remainder (although the jury might yet be out on the standing of Bowen among this group) -- but what does this lengthy list of names prove in any case, beyond the author's ability to create lists?
Menuhin's Times piece is then reinvoked in a quoted statement that he was
drawn to English music because ... it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometimes dramatically.
If that isn't woolly thinking, I don't know what is! Leaving aside the dubious topographical claims, how can or does any English music identifiably reflect those things? -- and was there ever in any case climate, vegetation and the rest in England that was so utterly distinguishable from their equivalents anywhere else on earth that they somehow begat music that is likewise so very different from that of other nations and instantly recognisable for its origins, irrespective of who wrote it? I remain mindful of the need to justify my questions here without putting my remarks firmly to the test, so next time I listen to Rubbra's First Symphony, Ferneyhough's Third Quartet, Bridge's Second Piano Trio or Birtwistle's Earth Dances (English earth, is it? -- and producing vegetation devoid of sharp edges?), I promise to make a point of looking out for -- er -- something or other that offers even a tenuous thread of commonality and continuity that might accord in some way to Menuhin's somewhat strange vision of England and things English, though I suspect in advance that the search will be at least as fruitless as those identified in the Scottish writer Norman Douglas' reference to looking for 'a needle in a haystack or a joke in the Bible'.
Menuhin continues
The music ... is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man's experience of today as related to a particular place ...
What is he talking about? Is musical humanity the exclusive province of English composers? (One would hope not!) If there are no 'shattering utterances' in Brian's Gothic Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony I'm an Englishman! Is there a prevalence of 'pronouncements of right or wrong' in non-English music? Is Ferneyhough's music free from 'abstract intellectual processes'? How is English music uniquely given to 'a single man's experience of today as related to a particular place', whatever that is in any case supposed to mean (and why only a single man?!).
Since the principal points are largely already made, I will refrain from picking apart the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article (which readers may sample for themselves) and confine myself to a few brief final observations.
I am unaware of the nature and extent of conspiracy against the promotion and performance of English music that the author strongly and repeatedly suggests is predicated upon the giving of priority to the promotion of non-English music in England, an argument that is at best suspect and at worst specious.
With his references to 'English pastoralism', the author seems to be regarding the notion of 'tradition' with which he opens as something locked in the past but which is at the same time possessed of some kind of justifiable immutability that ought to ensure its perpetuation. Many of us are familiar with the term 'cowpat school' ascribed to Constant Lambert -- one of many English composers overlooked by the author as well as the barb from Elisabeth Lutyens -- another one -- about 'folky-wolky modal melodies on the cor anglais' but, amusing as these are, what about 'English pastoralism' in present-day music? -- is it not, for example, alive and well (albeit in what is arguably a reified form) as a palpable influence over some of the music of David Matthews -- yet another one -- for example The Music of Dawn, In the Dark Time and the Sixth Symphony?
The author writes of an 'age of diversity' that supposedly acts against the recognition of English music; why does he therefore say so little about the sheer range and diversity of English music itself?
To return to Elgar -- the author cites his Caractacus. The admittedly imperialist tone of its ending is as nothing to the unalloyed embarrassment of the same composer's Crown of India which I understand is shortly to be revived (albeit only momentarily, one hopes!); now if anything by a great composer could really be regarded as absurdly and emptily jingoistic and utterly beneath both him and contempt, then that work surely well surpasses the second and third of Shostakovich's symphonies! Much has often been made of the 'Englishness' of Elgar's music; not only can I simply not hear it but I had initially been put off the very idea of it by what I had read and heard about this supposedly pompously-circumstantial antediluvian imperialist Edwardian land-on-which-the-sun-never set music -- which was a great pity, since I had therefore to be dragged kicking and screaming to a performance of his first symphony, fearing the very worst, yet what I heard thrilled me intensely and still does to this day.
Elgar's finest work is arguably of an order of importance equal to any work produced by non-English composers in his own time, yet what is there that is so quintessentially 'English' about it? (and, let's face it, it seems that nothing can be deemed to be truly and uniquely 'English' without that woefully overused knee-jerk qualifying adverb!). Those very characteristics about which I had initially felt so queasy are rarely present at all -- which is hardly surprising, given such factors as Elgar's lower-middle-class origins, his Roman Catholic faith (and his doubts about that) and his frequent bouts of unconfidence, all of which identify him as a most unlikely candidate for the 'English establishment figure' of his day into which mould people tried to force him (although, notwithstanding Elgar's virtuosity as a cyclist, shouldn't one of his 'friends pictured within' have gently persuaded him to shave off those handlebars?). One does not have to be a Roman Catholic or an English person to be profoundly moved by The Dream of Gerontius, as well I know (and I doubt that it had been any kind of perceived 'Englishness' in Newman's text that discouraged Dvorák from setting it before it came Elgar's way).
Finally, it is blindingly obvious that very few of the examples that the author provides are post-World War II, so where this article really falls down is in its omission of, among others, Tippett from the past century's first decade, Lloyd, Britten, Searle and Arnell from its second, Arnold and Simpson from its third, a clutch of 1930s-born composers (Wood, Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, Payne, Crosse, McCabe, etc), those whom I have already mentioned from the 1940s, Knussen from the 1950s, Benjamin from the 1960s and Adès from the 1970s; if that's all a mere coincidence, it's a pretty drastic one! (and the author is clearly not the only writer capable of listing English composers) ...
Music that is any good must stand -- and, yes, sometimes needs to be helped to stand -- on its own two feet, but because it is worth bothering with, not because it is 'English'; do we only or mainly care about Debussy and Dutilleux because they were/are French or Copland and Carter because they were/are in someone's bizarre perception the offspring of Menuhin's 'mercantilistic all-American society'?
Copyright © 30 August 2009 Alistair Hinton,
Herefordshire UK
ALISTAIR HINTON discusses
a recent article on English music
by David Hamilton
I was recently alerted to an article by David Hamilton on the neglect of English music published in the New English Review when my attention was drawn to it by a reference on an online discussion forum by Canadian pianist and composer Gordon Rumson; it contained a number of points with which I felt impelled to take issue -- and by no means because I am a Scottish composer!
The author opens with a quotation from Yehudi Menuhin writing in The Times in 1995 in which Menuhin observes that
English composers will not slavishly follow some arbitrary theory or construction, whether political or musical. They have kept their Englishness intact, whilst the mercantilistic world has gone all-American.
I find this to be at the very least unhelpful; Menuhin avoids specifying to which English composers he refers (it can't possibly be all of them!) and in any case he seems to make a sweeping generalisation here. What in any case is the 'Englishness' of these composers and how can we tell that it remains 'intact'? His notion that 'the mercantilistic world has gone all-American', irrespective of its truth or otherwise, seems to have no obvious relevance in that American music can hardly be said to have taken some kind of precedence over that of other nations.
Much of the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article seems redolent of a kind of narrow parochialism in its suggestion that 'English' music is somehow identifiably different to any other and may and should accordingly be more strongly supported in England as such. I am all for supporting English music that is worthy of support, but I cannot help but return to the questions 'who are these English composers?' and 'what makes them and their music identifiably English?' One has only to consider the immense differences between a handful of English composers born in England between 1943 and 1946 to realise that there is no obvious commonality besides the country and origins of their birth -- I refer (in chronological order of birth) to Brian Ferneyhough, David Matthews, Robin Holloway, John Tavener, Colin Matthews and Michael Finnissy; can it reasonably be said that all of these identifiably represent what can be called an 'English musical tradition' -- and the same one at that?
Thanks to a variety of researchers, performers, record companies and the like, we know far more English music now than was the case thirty years ago and there can, of course, be no doubt that some of this unearthing has proved to be of immense value in reviving the justifiable fortunes of music that has for far too long been overlooked. The case of John Foulds, to which a paragraph is devoted, is a classic example of this, whereas that on Frederick Cliffe borders on the fatuous; is it reasonable to expect to class his 1889 symphony with the early symphonies of Mahler, Brahms's and Bruckner's final symphonies and Tchaikovsky's last two symphonies?
Whilst it is obvious that the term 'land without music' in the period between Purcell and Elgar in England was always an exaggeration, can we really be expected to believe that the works of Stainer, Wesley, Potter, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, Hayes, Bache, Linley and others whose names the author might have mentioned but decided to omit 'were on a par with their foreign contemporaries', irrespective of whether or not they were considered 'progressive enough for international attention'? In what ways were any of these on such a par? Who were the contemporary English equivalents of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bellini, Rossini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Alkan, Weber, Verdi, Wagner, Bruckner, Smetana, Brahms, Dvorák and others? There were undoubtedly some interesting figures in English music during this period, but I remain unconvinced that England could field anyone of the order of these composers.
The paragraph beginning 'Even during the ravages of Modernism in the twentieth century' prompts the hackles of suspicion to rise before its very credibility is undermined by its leading to the claim 'there was a renaissance of music in England at which 'Stanford and Parry were at the fount and in a Brahmsian style created English music equal to Brahms himself'; leaving aside the facts that Stanford and Parry did no such exalted thing and that a substantial proportion of their mature music was in any case composed after Brahms's death, what on earth is meant here by 'the ravages of Modernism' and when were they supposed to have 'ravaged' what?
We are then told that 'Elgar continued the creation of an English style through merging Brahms and Wagner.' That Elgar was, by the time of his first symphony, the most important English composer for many decades is surely beyond doubt and he certainly knew well his Brahms and Wagner, although he felt influenced more by Schumann than either. But how did he 'continue the creation of an English style'? How could he in any case have 'created' one 'through merging Brahms and Wagner'? He developed his own, to be sure and was subject, like all composers, to certain influences in his earlier days, but he seems to have taken little from anyone in that list of earlier English composers that the author provides. Richard Strauss certainly recognised Elgar's greatness; his claim for him as 'the first Progressivist in English Music' was no more patronising towards Elgar than it was towards English music, but taken at face value it might at the same time be seen as somewhat misleading, in that Elgar's finest work had more to it than mere 'English Progressivism' (as I am sure Strauss also recognised).
Perhaps even more improbably, we are expected to believe that 'England had answers to Wagner in the music of Bantock and Holbrooke, "the Cockney Wagner", composers of long, deeply romantic, intense music -- to rival Wagner's Ring, and epic orchestral works'; to begin with, no one was asking a question (so how did England come up with an answer?) and, important as Holbrooke was, the idea that his orchestral epics 'rival' Wagner's Ring would surely have been as absurd to him as it should be to the rest of us -- and almost as risible as the idea of anyone being able to assume a mantle such as 'the Cockney Wagner'!
We are then given another long list of English composers active during the twentieth century -- 'Bridge, Bowen, Moeran, Finzi, Sainton, Bainton, Mackenzie, Gibbs, Berners, Dyson, Bax, Bliss, Ireland, Lambert, Boughton, Coles, Coleridge Taylor, Dunhill, Foulds, Dale, Goossens, William Lloyd Webber, MacCunn, Armstrong, Harty, Friskin, McEwen, Phillips, Scott, Rawsthorne, Rubbra, Hadley and Howells'; phew! -- pause for breath needed. I was unaware that Macs kenzie, Cunn and Ewen -- or Harty -- were 'English' in any case and it might likewise be salutary to question the extent and validity of Goossens' and Moeran's 'English' credentials. We certainly know more about most of these composers' works nowadays and some of the explorations have again yielded many treasures, yet do they all belong on anything like the same plane? -- Rubbra, Howells, Rawsthorne, Goossens, Foulds, Ireland, Bliss, Bax and Bridge seem to stand pretty much head and shoulders above most of the remainder (although the jury might yet be out on the standing of Bowen among this group) -- but what does this lengthy list of names prove in any case, beyond the author's ability to create lists?
Menuhin's Times piece is then reinvoked in a quoted statement that he was
drawn to English music because ... it reflects the climate and the vegetation which know no sharp edges, no definitive demarcation, where different hues of green melt into each other and where the line between sea and land is always joined and changing, sometimes gradually, sometimes dramatically.
If that isn't woolly thinking, I don't know what is! Leaving aside the dubious topographical claims, how can or does any English music identifiably reflect those things? -- and was there ever in any case climate, vegetation and the rest in England that was so utterly distinguishable from their equivalents anywhere else on earth that they somehow begat music that is likewise so very different from that of other nations and instantly recognisable for its origins, irrespective of who wrote it? I remain mindful of the need to justify my questions here without putting my remarks firmly to the test, so next time I listen to Rubbra's First Symphony, Ferneyhough's Third Quartet, Bridge's Second Piano Trio or Birtwistle's Earth Dances (English earth, is it? -- and producing vegetation devoid of sharp edges?), I promise to make a point of looking out for -- er -- something or other that offers even a tenuous thread of commonality and continuity that might accord in some way to Menuhin's somewhat strange vision of England and things English, though I suspect in advance that the search will be at least as fruitless as those identified in the Scottish writer Norman Douglas' reference to looking for 'a needle in a haystack or a joke in the Bible'.
Menuhin continues
The music ... is a very human music, not given to shattering utterances, to pronouncements of right or wrong, not to abstract intellectual processes, to human emotion in the abstract, but to a single man's experience of today as related to a particular place ...
What is he talking about? Is musical humanity the exclusive province of English composers? (One would hope not!) If there are no 'shattering utterances' in Brian's Gothic Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony I'm an Englishman! Is there a prevalence of 'pronouncements of right or wrong' in non-English music? Is Ferneyhough's music free from 'abstract intellectual processes'? How is English music uniquely given to 'a single man's experience of today as related to a particular place', whatever that is in any case supposed to mean (and why only a single man?!).
Since the principal points are largely already made, I will refrain from picking apart the remainder of Mr Hamilton's article (which readers may sample for themselves) and confine myself to a few brief final observations.
I am unaware of the nature and extent of conspiracy against the promotion and performance of English music that the author strongly and repeatedly suggests is predicated upon the giving of priority to the promotion of non-English music in England, an argument that is at best suspect and at worst specious.
With his references to 'English pastoralism', the author seems to be regarding the notion of 'tradition' with which he opens as something locked in the past but which is at the same time possessed of some kind of justifiable immutability that ought to ensure its perpetuation. Many of us are familiar with the term 'cowpat school' ascribed to Constant Lambert -- one of many English composers overlooked by the author as well as the barb from Elisabeth Lutyens -- another one -- about 'folky-wolky modal melodies on the cor anglais' but, amusing as these are, what about 'English pastoralism' in present-day music? -- is it not, for example, alive and well (albeit in what is arguably a reified form) as a palpable influence over some of the music of David Matthews -- yet another one -- for example The Music of Dawn, In the Dark Time and the Sixth Symphony?
The author writes of an 'age of diversity' that supposedly acts against the recognition of English music; why does he therefore say so little about the sheer range and diversity of English music itself?
To return to Elgar -- the author cites his Caractacus. The admittedly imperialist tone of its ending is as nothing to the unalloyed embarrassment of the same composer's Crown of India which I understand is shortly to be revived (albeit only momentarily, one hopes!); now if anything by a great composer could really be regarded as absurdly and emptily jingoistic and utterly beneath both him and contempt, then that work surely well surpasses the second and third of Shostakovich's symphonies! Much has often been made of the 'Englishness' of Elgar's music; not only can I simply not hear it but I had initially been put off the very idea of it by what I had read and heard about this supposedly pompously-circumstantial antediluvian imperialist Edwardian land-on-which-the-sun-never set music -- which was a great pity, since I had therefore to be dragged kicking and screaming to a performance of his first symphony, fearing the very worst, yet what I heard thrilled me intensely and still does to this day.
Elgar's finest work is arguably of an order of importance equal to any work produced by non-English composers in his own time, yet what is there that is so quintessentially 'English' about it? (and, let's face it, it seems that nothing can be deemed to be truly and uniquely 'English' without that woefully overused knee-jerk qualifying adverb!). Those very characteristics about which I had initially felt so queasy are rarely present at all -- which is hardly surprising, given such factors as Elgar's lower-middle-class origins, his Roman Catholic faith (and his doubts about that) and his frequent bouts of unconfidence, all of which identify him as a most unlikely candidate for the 'English establishment figure' of his day into which mould people tried to force him (although, notwithstanding Elgar's virtuosity as a cyclist, shouldn't one of his 'friends pictured within' have gently persuaded him to shave off those handlebars?). One does not have to be a Roman Catholic or an English person to be profoundly moved by The Dream of Gerontius, as well I know (and I doubt that it had been any kind of perceived 'Englishness' in Newman's text that discouraged Dvorák from setting it before it came Elgar's way).
Finally, it is blindingly obvious that very few of the examples that the author provides are post-World War II, so where this article really falls down is in its omission of, among others, Tippett from the past century's first decade, Lloyd, Britten, Searle and Arnell from its second, Arnold and Simpson from its third, a clutch of 1930s-born composers (Wood, Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, Payne, Crosse, McCabe, etc), those whom I have already mentioned from the 1940s, Knussen from the 1950s, Benjamin from the 1960s and Adès from the 1970s; if that's all a mere coincidence, it's a pretty drastic one! (and the author is clearly not the only writer capable of listing English composers) ...
Music that is any good must stand -- and, yes, sometimes needs to be helped to stand -- on its own two feet, but because it is worth bothering with, not because it is 'English'; do we only or mainly care about Debussy and Dutilleux because they were/are French or Copland and Carter because they were/are in someone's bizarre perception the offspring of Menuhin's 'mercantilistic all-American society'?
Copyright © 30 August 2009 Alistair Hinton,
Herefordshire UK
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