We need the English music that the Arts Council hates
19 April 2008
Roger Scruton hails the glorious achievements of the English composers, and their role in idealising the gentleness of the English arcadia — so loathed by our liberal elite
Some great works emerged from this first wave of modern English music — the late symphonies of Vaughan Williams, the Hymnus Paradisi of Howells, the D Minor Cello Sonata of Frank Bridge. But it was the second wave that established modern English music as one of our greatest cultural possessions. Benjamin Britten, William Walton and Michael Tippett emerged as composers who we could proudly set in the pantheon beside Messiaen, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Their works may have been booed by Pierre Boulez, but where are Boulez’s thinned-down trickles beside such solid statements as Britten’s Cello Symphony, Walton’s Viola Concerto and Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia? Between them those three composers shook our music free of its parochial roots and planted the shoots in a thousand fertile places. The only regrettable result of their musical triumphs is the shadow that they cast over their lesser contemporaries — truly talented composers like Robert Simpson, Alan Rawsthorne, John Ireland, Edmund Rubbra and George Lloyd, whose music is now unjustly dismissed as the work of ‘also rans’.
And the story continues. A third wave of modern English composers has overtaken the long withdrawing roar of the last one — with works in every genre and every idiom, from the religious monody of John Tavener to the exuberant Concerti for Orchestra of Robin Holloway. Not all of this new music appeals, and I for one have a growing reluctance to be bombarded with coagulated note-clusters from Harrison Birtwistle. But the thread of Englishness still ties our contemporary music to those original pilgrims to the Brigg Fair. English legend returns (though somewhat psychotherapised) in Birtwistle’s Gawain, the folk-song tradition lives on in Malcolm Arnold, a survivor from the second wave, Robin Walker, has even written a 40-part motet, as a companion piece to Tallis’s great ‘Spem in Alium’. And David Matthews’s 6th Symphony stirred the audience at its prom premier last year, by gradually unfolding into a rhapsodic meditation on ‘Come Down O Love Divine’ — one of the melodies that VW added to the English hymnal, and which he named ‘Down Ampney’, after the village where his father was vicar.
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David Lucas
April 17th, 2008 2:48pm Report this commentAnd also, of course, George Dyson's magnificent 'Canterbury Pilgrims'
Andy Hughes
April 17th, 2008 4:40pm Report this commentThank you, Roger Scruton, for articulating what many people (or, at least, I and my friends) feel about England, Englishness and English music.
You speak so eloquently that which we would like to speak ourselves, if only we had your words and your wisdom.
We wish that there were more conservative philosophers like you to combat the deluge of cultural Marxism engulfing and overwhelming our way of life and our values.
A Kendal
April 18th, 2008 2:54pm Report this commentHow surprising that Roger Scruton discusses the English composers that are, apparently, despised by the "liberal elite", and 'forgets' to mention Arthur Sullivan, particularly in terms of his work with WS Gilbert.
I do hope that it was just an oversight and not an indication of snobbery. Although it would be a disappointing oversight from someone who is supposed to know about music.
John Borstlap, Amsterdam
April 18th, 2008 10:50pm Report this commentRoger Scruton is very right. But not only in relation to the UK, also for the whole of Europe: only a hospitable 'Leitkultur' can be a symbol of cultural identity. To celebrate cultural identity is in itself not a conservative gesture but only common sense; it is 'cultural relativism' which denies the obvious and normal reality that a culture can be related to a geographic area and therefore, as a normal thing, be its main charateristic, without 'dominating', 'suppressing' etc. offshoots of other cultures in its midst. PC cultural politics is an udnerstandable reaction against cultural imperialism in the past but often it has gone much too far.
Spencer West
April 19th, 2008 7:47pm Report this commentAm I the only one who finds Scruton to be deeply CREEPY.
Nicholas
April 21st, 2008 11:15am Report this commentDeeply creepy? Not sure how you get that feeling from this article. Perhaps you are the only one. As I listen to the Tallis Fantasia I'm grateful to Roger Scruton for his well-articulated thoughts on English music.
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