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Wednesday 23 July 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

So fertile has English music been that there is less and less room in the concert hall for the neglected masterpieces. Yet at this time when we English are beginning to rediscover our primary attachments it is more than ever necessary to connect to our national music — the most vital and consoling part of the culture that defines us. Luckily the matter has been taken in hand by Em Marshall, the young enthusiast who founded the English Music Festival, with the express purpose of bringing back into the repertoire all the masterpieces that have fallen out of it or which don’t attract the attention of the official sponsors. The Festival takes place in Oxfordshire from 23 until 27 May, and provides a rare opportunity to hear Holbrooke’s Birds of Rhiannon, Rawsthorne’s deeply nostalgic Practical Cats, Mackenzie’s lovely Benedictus and Bantock’s Celtic Symphony, performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth. Bliss, VW, Bridge and Delius are all represented, along with surprising premieres of works by Britten. Music lovers are urged to find out for themselves by visiting www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk; just to read the programme is to feel a spasm of national pride.

It is an interesting fact about our country, however, that its culture is the target of systematic repudiation from those entrusted with preserving it. Em Marshall’s approaches to the Arts Council have been repeatedly rebuffed. To seek funding for something consciously English offends against political correctness, and multicultural orthodoxy has required the Council to turn its back on England and on anything that might invoke our national greatness. Such an attitude to the national culture would be unthinkable in France. And it bespeaks a profound ignorance of what England stands for. Our culture has been a generous host to other outlooks, other places, other faiths. That is part of what it is to be English, and part of what our English music conveys. You don’t have to look very far to grasp the point. Names like Bax, Delius, Finzi, Dolmetsch and Holst bear witness to an immigrant-friendly island. Bax loved Ireland as much as England, and evoked its landscape as no other composer has. From Holst’s Vedic Hymns and Delius’s Koanga to Britten’s Curlew River our music has reached out to the world in a spirit of inclusion, and if ‘multiculturalism’ means anything, then Curlew River (a ‘church parable’ in the form of a Noh play) is the quintessential instance of it — and all the more English for that.

For the time being we English must live under governments and institutions that have our cultural annihilation as their hidden goal. All the more reason, therefore, to support the private attempts to keep the memory of our country alive, and to rally support for its real achievements. So let’s all meet up in Oxfordshire this May.

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