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Saturday 17 May 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

The English have always loved music, joining chamber groups, orchestras, operas and choirs just as soon as they can put two notes together. But it was not until Elgar that a distinctive national voice was heard in the concert hall. The Enigma Variations and Sea Pictures marked a turning-point in our musical culture: complete mastery of romantic polyphony, without the teutonic stodge of Parry and Stanford. This, at last, was the sound of modern England: gentle, nostalgic, an organic growth from a deeply settled landscape where many generations had been quietly at home.

While London audiences were being moved to tears by the noble pathos of Elgar’s first symphony and violin concerto — the latter the equal of any in the repertoire — other musicians, less great but in their way just as talented, were wandering the cathedral closes and green lanes of Old England, in search of the people’s voice. Cecil Sharp collected the modal folk-songs which still were sung in pubs and market-places. Arnold Dolmetsch and family dressed up to play the sackbuts, lutes and viols of the Tudor court. Vaughan Williams edited and added to the English hymnal before producing his lovely collection of Christmas carols. Holst and Delius used English folk melodies in works that are now lasting parts of the concert repertoire.

Thanks to that exuberant explosion of native musicianship, English composers discovered their national style. Imperial gloom gave way to a pastoral idiom that is as true a symbol of our national identity as anything that the English have achieved in painting, architecture or literature. Russians, Czechs, and Hungarians all relied on music to define their national consciousness. We did the same. Our modern music is one of the high achievements of the national spirit, one that does not merely express an idea of historical legitimacy but also triumphantly vindicates it, the 20th-century collapse notwithstanding. From the Vaughan Williams symphonies to the Tintagel of Bax, from the songs of Finzi and Gurney to the choral splendours of Herbert Howells, the first wave of modern English music speaks to us not merely of a beloved landscape and its rediscovered legends, but of the distinctively English way of life, in which conflicts are settled by law and apology rather than by force. The prevailing sentiment has nothing in common with the aggressive nationalism that was then on the march in Germany. It evokes an imaginary arcadia in which the very real gentleness of England would be idealised, and so placed at the service of mankind.

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