The English Musical Renaissance 1860 1940

This controversial study isolates and identifies the intellectual, social, and political assumptions which surrounded English music in the early-20th century. The authors deconstruct the established meanings of music in this period, arguing that music was not just for the elite, but it had come to represent a stronghold of national values, reflecting the reassuring "Englishness" of middle-class life as well.

The importance of nineteenth-century writing about culture has long been accepted by scholars, yet so far as music criticism is concerned, Victorian England has been an area of scholarly neglect. This state of affairs is all the more surprising given that the quantity of such criticism in the Victorian and Edwardian press was vast, much of it displaying a richness and diversity of critical perspectives. Through the study of music criticism from several key newspapers and journals (specifically The Times, Daily Telegraph, Athenaeum and The Musical Times), this book examines the reception history of new English music in the period surveyed and assesses its cultural, social and political, importance. Music critics projected and promoted English composers to create a national music of which England could be proud. J A Fuller Maitland, critic on The Times, described music journalists as 'watchmen on the walls of music', and Meirion Hughes extends this metaphor to explore their crucial role in building and safeguarding what came to be known as the English Musical Renaissance. Part One of the book looks at the critics in the context of the publications for which they worked, while Part Two focuses on the relationship between the watchmen-critics and three composers: Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar. Hughes argues that the English Musical Renaissance was ultimately a success thanks largely to the work of the critics. In so doing, he provides a major re-evaluation of the impact of journalism on British music history.

The turn of the 20th century was a time of great change in Britain. The empire saw its global influence waning and its traditional social structures challenged. There was a growing weariness of industrialism and a desire to rediscover tradition and the roots of English heritage. A new interest in English folk song and dance inspired art music, which many believed was seeing a renaissance after a period of stagnation since the 18th century. This book focuses on the lives of seven composers--Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Ernest Moeran, George Butterworth, Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock), Gerald Finzi and Percy Grainger--whose work was influenced by folk songs and early music. Each chapter provides an historical background and tells the fascinating story of a musical life.

Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.

Filling a significant gap in current scholarship, the fourteen original essays that make up this volume individually and collectively reflect on the relationship between music and Orientalism in the British Empire over the course of the long nineteenth century. The book is in four themed sections. 'Portrayal of the East' traces the routes from encounter to representation and restores the Orient to its rightful place in histories of Orientalism. 'Interpreting Concert Music' looks at one of the principal forms in which Orientalism could be brought to an eager and largely receptive - yet sometimes resistant - mass market. 'Words and Music' investigates the confluence of musical and Orientalist themes in different genres of writing, including criticism, fiction and travel writing. Finally, 'The Orientalist Stage' discusses crucial sites of Orientalist representation - music theatre and opera - as well as tracing similar phenomena in twentieth-century Hindi cinema. These final chapters examine the rendering of the East as 'unachievable and unrecognizable' for the consuming gaze of the western spectator.

Examines the trajectories, linearities and paradoxes which have constituted contemporary British music. Provides an account of how British music came to be what it is in the 1990s.

The rehabilitation of British music began with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. Ralph Vaughan Williams assisted in its emancipation from continental models, while Gerald Finzi, Edmund Rubbra and George Dyson flourished in its independence. Stephen Town's survey of Choral Music of the English Musical Renaissance is rooted in close examination of selected works from these composers. Town collates the substantial secondary literature on these composers, and brings to bear his own study of the autograph manuscripts. The latter form an unparalleled record of compositional process and shed new light on the compositions as they have come down to us in their published and recorded form. This close study of the sources allows Town to identify for the first time instances of similarity and imitation, continuities and connections between the works.