Monographs or multi-authored collections of essays on twentieth-century British music at large (as distinct from individual composers) have not been thick on the ground. British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 is the first book since 1995, the year that saw the publication of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century, edited by Stephen Banfield,Footnote ¹ to accord scholarly attention to a range of British composers. And it was with an essay by Arnold Whittall in the Blackwell collectionFootnote ² that the relationship between British music and modernism across the span of the twentieth century was first broached. Reading this it is often hard to work out the distinction between the terms ‘modern’, ‘modernist’, and ‘progressive’, and even ‘progressive modernism’, and to what extent the differences matter. Whittall is clear, though, that 1960 or thereabouts marked a watershed, ‘a rapprochement with modernism which has allowed a fruitful strain of relatively traditional romanticism to survive and prosper despite being overtaken, in aesthetic and technical terms, by an expressionism and, in some cases, an anti-organicism, all the more vigorous and iconoclastic for having been suppressed for so long’.Footnote ³ The years since the Blackwell History's publication have seen a burgeoning interest in exploring the relationship between British music and modernism, and less reticence amongst younger scholars, in particular, in labelling composers active well before 1960 as ‘modernist’. Thus in May 2006, the same year that J. P. E. Harper-Scott published a book boldly declaring Edward Elgar, Modernist,Footnote ⁴ the University of Birmingham held a conference entitled ‘British Music and Modernism 1901–1939’;Footnote ⁵ in February 2007 Gresham College hosted a conference on ‘Elgar and Musical Modernism’;Footnote ⁶ and in April 2008 a postgraduate study day on ‘Musical Modernism in Britain’Footnote ⁷ was organized in Oxford by the Royal Musical Association. In all these outlets, modernism is recognized not simply as determined by the extent of the music's emancipation of the dissonance, but also by the reimagining of notions of coherence, form, and syntax, as well as social function.

The Birmingham conference sparked the book under review.Footnote ⁸ If it had been a monograph, one would probably have expected a slightly different list of topics and issues. Given that it originated from a conference and was supplemented with commissions (in fact only two or three papers from the meeting have been included), the editor was of course dependent to a great extent on the dynamics of individuals' programmes of research, and this inevitably leads to a less integrated and less comprehensive coverage than in the single-author approach. So this is really a volume of ‘Essays on’ or ‘Studies in’ British (in actuality, English) music and modernism 1895–1960. Much of the scope of Matthew Riley's excellent introduction could easily be transferred to a monograph version, as could the sort of contextualizing found in Deborah Heckert's ‘Schoenberg, Roger Fry and the Emergence of a Critical Language for the Reception of Musical Modernism in Britain, 1912–1914’, Garweth Thomas's ‘Modernism, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in London, 1911–1929’, Tim Barringer's ‘Façades for Façade: William Walton, Visual Culture and English Modernism in the Sitwell Circle’, and Thomas Irvine's ‘Hindemith's Disciple in London: Walter Leigh on Modern Music’. The list of ‘featured’ composers – Elgar, Bridge, Holst, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Walter Leigh, Britten, Bliss, Lutyens, and Searle – includes some of the figures one might expect, though Britten is seen through the lens of some of his least significant music in Christopher Dromey's ‘Benjamin Britten's “Pierrot” Ensembles’, and Bliss's music is largely tangential in Matthew Riley's ‘Music for the Machines of the Future: H. G. Wells, Arthur Bliss and Things to Come (1936)’ – as Riley admits, ‘As an essay in modernism […] the interest of Things to Come lies in the nature of Wells's vision and the problems of its realization rather than any intrinsic merits in Bliss's score’ (251). Major absences are Delius – whose personal contact with the Scandinavian modernists Munch, Strindberg, and Ibsen, and his setting of Nietzsche, would seem to make him an essential figure for a comprehensive study of the topic – and Tippett, who might not have reached the full expression of his modernism by the book's cut-off date (King Priam was composed in 1958–61) but whose earlier music can certainly be regarded as modernist by the yardstick employed in this book. Others who have missed out include Rawsthorne and Bush, though the list of what are generally regarded as minor figures could easily be extended (Riley himself lists Bantock, Brian, Holbrooke, Foulds, Goossens, and Berners (2)).

Riley is well aware of the lacunae, noting that ‘This book is not the last word on British music and modernism before 1960, for its coverage is not comprehensive as regards composers, institutions or genres. Its main contribution lies in the application of new ideas and theoretical approaches’ (3). He goes on to describe the ‘three themes’ of the book: British responses to continental modernism; the relationship between music and the visual arts; and ‘analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality, pitch organization and hermeneutics’ (3). The last few succinctly expressed sentences in which Riley sets out the book's stall are especially important for understanding the purpose of the enterprise: ‘The book is not intended as an exercise in affirmative “re-branding”. “Modernism”, after all, has become a magic word: as a label it bestows authenticity. The “and” in the book's title is thus significant. All contributors keep an eye on the tensions inherent in the topics, and develop nuanced accounts of the phenomena they study’ (3). To the sceptic observing what might seem to be a vogue for the enthusiastic application of the term ‘modernism’ to repertory previously thought antithetical or at least tangential to it, much of the recent research I have listed above might well seem like ‘affirmative “re-branding”’ – an attempt to assert the significance of previously under-regarded work by applying the modernist label or, as Riley puts it, ‘a term of approbation extended to the fringe to bring it inside a “big tent”’ (5). The stance (or, as one should really say, stances, because the response is not monolithic) of British music with respect to modernism is certainly an issue that demands exploration, but to what extent does this genuinely deepen our understanding of the repertory or transform our experience of it (which is surely what musicology should aim to do)? Riley's view that ‘Technical innovation […] was seldom conceived as the necessary and inevitable response to the contemporary situation in either music or society’ and that ‘the new vocabulary of music took its place next to the old and could be drawn on freely and eclectically’ (9) suggests something rather like the agnostic Vaughan Williams's relationship to the Church of England: it provided a repository of customs and materials to be drawn upon as the need or desire arose, but he did not feel that it required his commitment to the faith. I would argue that, at least until the emergence of composers such as Birtwistle and Ferneyhough, this could be said of the British stance towards modernism in general.

The book opens with four chapters that explore the reception of ‘the new’ against the backdrop of wider cultural movements. In ‘Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post-Victorian Age’, Matthew Riley surveys the writings of three influential writers – the critic (and professional Classicist) W. H. Hadow and the composers Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford – whose aesthetics were heavily indebted to Victorian liberal ideals. There is perhaps little that is surprising here, Parry's and Stanford's views having been well aired elsewhere,Footnote ⁸ but the survey is important for the book's overall dynamic, and is elegantly done. The most stimulating section is the final one, ‘Survival’. The subtitle refers to the ‘resilience of the Victorian intelligentsia’ (28) and their attitudes, the most widely felt effects of which were probably seen at the BBC under John Reith, who ‘regarded culture as a means of self-improvement and the building of character’ (28). Drawing distinctions with the ruptures issuing in Germany from Expressionism, Riley notes that in Britain ‘liberal intellectuals continued well into the twentieth century to hope for a harmonious reconciliation of “civilization” and modern society’ (29): ‘the best music, they believed, whatever its technique, purifies and ennobles, drawing its listeners to some higher sphere where, as Matthew Arnold had it, they are “united, impersonal, at harmony”’ (30).

The British taste for evolution rather than revolution recurs in Gareth Thomas's detailed and considered study of the reception of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: ‘British critics at this time found modern musical innovations acceptable as long as they could be rationalized as evolutionary’ (71). Again, though, there is little that seems set to derail the assumption from which readers with experience of a range of the British music of the period are likely to proceed: Thomas's conclusion, ‘that the wider preference for pragmatism in the arts and the aversion to aesthetic discussions and intellectual frameworks hampered the foundation of any wider intellectual platform that might have permitted a native form of modernism to appear more consistently in Britain’ (91), surely replicates the prevailing folk wisdom. Not that pragmatism necessarily connotes a lack of ambitious artistic vision, as Elgar's actual music amply demonstrates – as against his literary tastes, which, as Meirion Hughes points out in ‘Elgar Reception in the Manchester Guardian, 1896–1908’, ‘eschewed modernist […] thought: not for him the challenging humanism and mental tactility of Thomas Hardy, the aesthetic individualism of Wilde, or the avant-garde subversion of Nietzsche's teachings’ (34). We get little sense from Hughes, however, of the role of that vision in Elgar's rise to prominence. He charts the Guardian's promotion of Elgar ‘as a radical and progressive modern who worked on the cutting edge of his art above and beyond any considerations of class, privilege, or national identity – in the spirit of what might be referred to as “free trade” in music’ (33), and concludes that, between them, Arthur Johnstone, Ernest Newman, and Samuel Langford ‘ensured that the Guardian, more than any other newspaper in the country, took a lead in transforming the composer from a regional musician into the national laureate and a composer of internationally recognized distinction’ (36). No doubt journalists did play their part, but surely the less easily captured recognition of the quality of Elgar's music by audiences and, perhaps above all, performers was the chief agent in this. Meanwhile Elgar's relationship with modernism refuses to come into focus: there is a brief exploration of the possibility that Johnstone might have heard in Gerontius ‘a Nietzchean monologue, a psyche in ferment when facing death’ (42), but, as Hughes himself notes, the Guardian critics used ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ interchangeably (35), and loosely, so exactly how Elgar's music might be modernist is left dangling.

Deborah Heckert's investigation of the change of tone in the reception of the first two British performances of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, on 3 September 1912 (the world première) and 17 January 1914 is the most thought-provoking of the reception studies, though the evidence she presents that ‘It seems likely that the success of the post-Impressionist movement in Britain contributed to Schoenberg's success with the London critics in January 1941’ (60) is not strong: there may be echoes of the language of the formalist approach that she finds in the art criticism of Roger Fry, but can we be certain of his direct influence? Also speculative is the suggestion that, in the second performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces conducted by Schoenberg himself (Henry Wood was at the helm for the première), the composer ‘undoubtedly understood his pieces on a deeper level than Wood, and so elicited a cleaner and more polished performance from the orchestra’ (57): even assuming a level of competence and communication with the orchestra comparable with that of full-time conductors, composers are not invariably better performers of their own music, nor do they have privileged insight into it. Towards the end of her chapter (64–6), Heckert describes a reception and concert held at the Grafton Gallery for Schoenberg (who, of course, was also a painter) just before that second performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces. Some of Schoenberg's pieces were played, and Heckert observes that ‘It is tempting to think that Schoenberg and others at the Grafton that night pondered the connections between what was heard and was seen’, paintings from the post-Impressionist Grafton Group being exhibited at the same time. She is right to say that this is ‘Food for flights of the imagination, perhaps’ (65), and I would extend this to the relationship between art and musical criticism that she is more generally trying to draw.

Fry and Schoenberg appear in Tim Barringer's essay on Façade – Fry very briefly, in the opening paragraph, as adviser to the Sitwell brothers on décor (125), Schoenberg as provider of a significant point of reference, Pierrot lunaire, for Walton's differently iconoclastic work, which acts as ‘a kind of anti-Pierrot, a teasing mirror image of Schoenberg's raging intensity’ (145). Barringer's attempt to place Façade ‘in a broader frame of cultural reference’, viewing it as ‘a work whose richness, wit and melancholy can be understood when it is removed from the ultimately self-defeating confines of a teleological historiography in which modernism (in music, art or literature) is only allowed one sanctioned iteration at a particular historical moment’ (144), can stand for what the book as a whole attempts to do, but only fitfully as well. Focusing on visual components (Barringer is primarily an art historian) of what he describes as ‘a multiple paradox: a pioneering English modernist Gesamtkunstwerk’ (127), but also literary and musical contexts, this is a persuasive case for the transformative effects of interdisciplinary research. What emerges from Barringer's argument is a work that ‘disrupts any narrative in which it is placed’, whose strength ‘lies precisely in its uniqueness, its blithe refusal to choose between radical and reactionary polarities, and in the rich intertextualities which link it to its own, changing, cultural contexts’ (132); it ‘simultaneously embraces, engages, dissembles and pokes fun at the full range of modernisms across the arts’ (145). Barringer's view that Façade is unique should be questioned, though: it may be the case that the work is sui generis, but its attitude seems typically English (other chapters certainly suggest so), and more might have been made of this, perhaps in the introduction.

References to visual art also play an important role in Daniel Grimley's ‘Landscape and Distance: Vaughan Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral’, in which he ‘seeks to challenge the assumption that the symphony constitutes an exclusively English musical idiom’ by revealing ‘tensions between inward and outward impulses, between notions of Englishness and a more cosmopolitan Continental European modernism, which in turn reflect a dialogue between abstraction and representation, tradition and innovation, stability and instability’ (148). The core of the essay is an analysis of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony that draws on notions of rotational form derived from Hepokoski and Darcy; historical, literary, and political context; and parallels with the official wartime work of the artist Paul Nash, in a reading that should banish any residual notions that the piece is a ‘rolling in the hay’ depiction of the English countryside. Quite how such a widespread misreading materialized is difficult to fathom, given the role of the natural trumpet in the slow movement, with its unmistakable echoes of the Last Post, and the acute sadness of the ending of the work, very different from the bucolic melancholy of the ending of The Lark Ascending (finely conceived and worked though that is). More easy to understand is criticism of the symphony on the basis of a degree of sameness across all four movements. Peter Evans is one who has observed that ‘The symphony's originality is less in doubt than its success: Vaughan Williams's preference for unassertive opening and niente close is here extended to three out of four movements, all predominantly quiet, leisurely and thick of texture.’Footnote ⁹ He expresses doubts too about the work's symphonic status: ‘Pentatonicism, with its ambiguity of final, rhythmic groups that freely mix triplets and duplets and suppress strong downbeats, harmony that parallels melody or juxtaposes triads for colour rather than tonal strategy: all these discourage the listener from bringing to the play of events the mental agility demanded by traditional sonata dialectic.’Footnote ¹⁰ Grimley agrees that a generic challenge is posed (151), but demonstrates how ‘the movement is […] able to exhibit the traditional symphonic functions of growth, development and synthesis, while ultimately resisting (at least at a deeper structural level) the application of familiar Formenlehre boundaries’: the ‘rotational cycles are generative, and not merely rhapsodic’ – an accusation often made of Vaughan Williams – ‘and are concerned both with a process of thematic expansion and elaboration and with the attainment of G major as a structurally meaningful point of tonic arrival’ (152). Grimley does at a few points talk about harmonic ‘drift’ (155, 169, 172), but the word conjures not the aimlessness that, again, is often thought to fill out sections of the composer's music, but movement of relaxed (often barely noticeable) purposefulness. And it is a kind of purposefulness that also operates over large spans. Drawing parallels with Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and another work of Vaughan Williams's from 1922, The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, he convincingly shows the way in which the work sets up an ‘elevated and seemingly life-affirming musical realm’ (171), only to offer ‘a momentary glimpse of the final point of arrival’: ‘the goal of salvation is ultimately withheld and becomes, on the symphony's final page, immeasurably distant’ (172).

It is possible to disagree with some of the details of Grimley's analysis, or want more from him on certain aspects. He could have said more to problematize the identification of the music from A^-2 in the first movement as ‘First Subject Group’, for instance (the tempo slows, the harmony shifts flatwards, and thematic material is initially presented by solo violin, all of which seems to counter expectations of what a first subject will be like); the ‘Climax/Apotheosis’ of the first movement (as labelled in Figure 8.1 (152) and discussed on page 157) seems more like an anti-climax in its failure to reach an actual point of culmination (likewise the ‘Apotheosis’ designation in the final movement Figure 8.2 (167) – this is after all ‘the goal of salvation’ which is ‘ultimately withheld’); ‘Introduction’ seems an odd term to describe the function of the vocal cadenza of the fourth movement (Figure 8.2); and I would interpret Example 8.6 a) and b) as moving away from F major and C major rather than towards D flat major and A flat major (these are further examples of ‘drift’, and Grimley himself writes of a ‘falling in whole-tone steps which proceed flatwards away from the initial modal field of the opening solo’ (169, emphasis added)). More substantially, aspects of Grimley's reading of the fourth movement assume that the vocal soloist is a soprano, but the score allows for a tenor:Footnote ¹¹ it would have been interesting to read if and how this might affect the movement's meaning, given that Grimley draws special attention to female connotations – the ‘sensual, eroticized voice (siren)’ and the similarity with the wordless female choir in the Sinfonia Antartica (167). But these are minor quibbles that hardly impact on the main arguments: the essay is a superb advertisement for the interdisciplinary, hermeneutical approach, and a major contribution to Vaughan Williams scholarship.

If the modernism in the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony is not the ‘more aggressively angular or dissonant form, but of distance, abstraction and remoteness’ (165), that of the Fourth Symphony seems at face value a modernism of a more (as we might say from today's vantage point) traditional kind. As J. P. E. Harper-Scott rather graphically puts it in ‘Vaughan Williams's Antic Symphony’, ‘Its stark harmonic and gestural language constitute a cataclysmic overthrow of Vaughan Williams's preceding output, a Grendel crunching bloodily through the flesh and bone of the style that produced the Tallis Fantasia and the “Pastoral” Symphony’ (175). Yet he sees the dissonance as ultimately ‘rather harmless’ (175): ‘the work has no trouble in projecting an essentially classically rooted tonality, and there is no modernist “disaster” lurking in the pages of the finale as a result’ (175–6). Rather, the work was ‘written in part with a galumphing, well-intentioned humour in mind’, and while Harper-Scott does not deny wholesale the generally held view, he sees the work primarily as a ‘“parody” of the genre of the symphony, the traditions of musical modernism, and his own style’ (176–7). It ‘cannot readily be pigeon-holed as a modernist, postmodern or conservative work; instead it engages the listener in fascinating semiotic games’ (176). Thus the ‘antic’ in the title: ‘Vaughan Williams, like Hamlet, adopts an antic disposition, behaving in certain grotesque ways that tend to disguise motivations’ (176).

As in his fine readings of Elgar's Second Symphony and Walton's First,Footnote ¹² Harper-Scott argues for work-spanning processes, and one's acceptance of his pivotal hypothesis that, in the final pages, ‘There is […] a drawing-together of loose threads – quite unthinkable in a modernist work – that strongly argues for an essential classicism in this symphony and pulls off the stern “modernist” mask to reveal a roguish grin beneath’ seems to depend on one's view of his Schenker-derived analyses of the individual movements and the whole work. For my own part I find the notion of voice-leading processes spanning whole works, across movement breaks, difficult to accept (it simply does not correspond to what I can hear). But my chief problem with Harper-Scott's analysis lies in his identification of the chord in bar 452 of the final movement (or Fig. 34 if you are referring to the Oxford score without bar numbers) as the structural dominant of the work, and therefore an apparently key element in what he sees as the work's ‘classically rooted tonality’. He says that ‘the un-modernist dominant function of the support for ♭2 cannot be questioned’ (195, n. 28), but I would do exactly that: given the strength of the F in the bass and the lack of any of the conventional dominant constituents other than the root, I would view this as an appoggiatura complex (G♭, A♮/B♭♭, D♭) over the tonic triad (to which it resolves while the dissonance is introduced in the lower part of the texture). Whether this seriously undermines the broader points of his technical analysis is, though, debatable: F is surely secure as the tonic from as far back as the beginning of the Epilogo fugato. I still find it hard to agree with the hermeneutics, though. As Peter Evans has observed, the F–E–G♭–F motive, generally inert because always returning to its starting-point, is in the Epilogo fugato ‘fertile at last in encounters with itself’,Footnote ¹³ and while there may be an element of the grotesque in the motive's contrapuntal treatment, the ‘cataclysmic resurgence of the opening proposition’, as Evans puts it, is a brutal dismissal of the fugato's ‘opening up’. I would argue that the effect is tragic, so I disagree ‘that the correct response is to laugh’ (195).

Stephen Downes's ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral: Wave Deformations in the Music of Frank Bridge’ matches Grimley's chapter for richness, breadth of reference, and interpretative sophistication. Focusing on The Sea as ‘a rich example of how musical forms and effects inherited from high romanticism are infused with the structural subversiveness and psychological anxieties of modernism’ (93), it explores ‘the musically depictive and deeper levels of psychological and political connotation’. In positioning the work within the repertoire of British works about the sea, it also makes some searching, if brief, points about Elgar's Sea Pictures and Delius's Sea Drift. The other analytically based chapters focus on a later generation of composers: Laurel Parsons investigates the role of Elizabeth Lutyens's interest in Purcell in the formation of her serially based approach, while Ben Earle puts forward a case – less than convincing and rather earnest in its theoretical positioning – for Humphrey Searle as ‘the British composer, perhaps more than any other, who genuinely deserves to be called a modernist’ (325). Holst is also seen as having been neglected by histories of twentieth-century British music, by Christopher M. Scheer, who usefully contributes towards reversing this lack in another essay that suggests the influence of Roger Fry on a British composer's modernist outlook. Meanwhile Thomas Irvine's ‘Hindemith's Disciple in London: Walter Leigh on Modern Music 1932–40’ is unique within this collection in its detailed and sustained examination of a composer's writings. As in several of the chapters there are resonances that another kind of book would probably develop (in this case links between Leigh's views of the role of the composer in society and those of, say, Bush, Tippett, and Britten). And again modernism is a less than fully focused entity. But perhaps, given the array of not always fully aligned theoretical positions on the topic in the humanities at large, the most productive studies of modernism are likely to be constituted as studies of its reception, and much of this book is indeed productive in this sense. It is, though, for its insights into specific composers and compositions that I chiefly value it.