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Saturday 22 November 2008

We need the English music that the Arts Council hates

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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