Indian national music, spirituality, and Theosophy as a global movement

Some modernist composers also became interested in spirituality. As old religious and rationalist certainties broke down from the mid nineteenth century, many Britons turned away from the established churches to join one of the numerous esoteric and religious movements that were gaining ground.Footnote ¹¹ The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 in New York by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, was one of them. Its aim was to study comparative religion, and especially the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. This was in order to investigate the spiritual element in human beings and the world, so as to promote a ‘universal brotherhood of man’, irrespective of race, creed, colour, or sex. Mainly on the basis of Blavatsky’s writings (often as expanded by later writers) and Orientalist interpretations of Buddhist and Hindu sources, Theosophists claimed to bring a new enlightenment based on the ancient wisdom of ‘spiritual’ India, and generally advanced their ideas in a polarizing manner as being superior to Western knowledge and science. The Society does not have many followers today, but during the first half of the twentieth century it had around forty-five branches worldwide. These were mostly in Britain and India, but also in the Netherlands, the Dutch East Indies, Ireland, the United States, Australia, Vietnam, and several countries in Africa and Latin America. Some famous European Theosophists were the poet Yeats, the composers Schoenberg and Scriabin, the painters Kandinsky and Mondrian, and the architect Le Corbusier. Moreover, the movement influenced such Indian national leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Hence, importantly, Theosophists not only followed an anti-Christian rationality that supposedly had a scientific foundation in the emergent science of comparative religion but also, as a worldwide cosmopolitan movement, had a role in the development of radical anti-establishment and anti-colonial politics at once in metropoles and colonies.Footnote ¹²

After the deaths of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, the Irish Annie Besant (1847–1933) became the Society’s president from 1907. She was a close friend of the staunch socialist George Bernard Shaw, and was initially affiliated to the socialist-reformist Fabian Society, whose members in its early years were as interested in spirituality as in politics.Footnote ¹³ In 1890, however, she turned her back on the Fabians and, to the disgust of Shaw, joined the Theosophists. Conversely, despite the socialist ties of some of its members, Theosophists over time came to see socialism and communism as narrow, materialistic, and ‘non-spiritual’ movements.Footnote ¹⁴

In 1877, the Theosophical Society moved to India, and established its headquarters in Adyar, Madras. Besant founded Central Hindu College, which later developed into Benares Hindu University, learned Sanskrit, and made an influential translation of the Bhagavad gita (1905). Furthermore, she became much involved in the revival and dissemination of the Hindu tradition, social reform (female education in particular), and Indian nationalist politics. During the First World War, she modelled a Home Rule League on the Irish example, and was actually elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. On the whole, importantly, the Theosophical Society (like the Christian missions) provided Indians with the example of a voluntary association: how to establish schools, to use modern print culture for public debate, to advance the position of women, and so on. Indians were especially attracted to the Theosophists because, unlike the missionaries, they judged British imperial rule negatively. Moreover, they praised the Brahmanism of the Vedic age, and re-interpreted it in scientific evolutionary terms. Consequently, South Asian reformers and nationalists confronted with Western science and Christianity found inspirational solidarity in the Theosophical Society and, hence, it had some influence on the definition of what I have labelled Indian (Hindu) ‘moral languages’.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, unlike the Hindu social reformers of the Arya samaj for example, the movement was an all-India organization and, besides Hindus, it initially attracted Parsees, Christians, Sikhs, and even some Muslims. That said, with its revivalism of the supposedly ‘golden age’ of the Aryas and the Brahmanical Vedas, Theosophy eventually became part of a wider neo-Hindu movement.Footnote ¹⁶

Significantly, the Theosophist reading of a Hindu golden age, and especially the superior place therein of the Brahmin caste, also worked as a catalyst in the definition of nationalist South Indian music and dance traditions, which emerged in response to British rule. Lakshmi Subramanian and Amanda J. Weidman have recently argued that Karnatic music and dance became a crucial nationalist identity marker for the Madras Brahmin elite. Music, for the latter, aesthetically represented the ‘authentic’ and ‘spiritual’ Hindu self and, accordingly, they institutionalized and canonized a modern ‘classical’ Karnatic music tradition in line with Western classical music, in terms of notation, violin technique, canonical composers and repertoire, music schools (the Madras Music Academy was founded in 1928), concert arrangements, and so forth.Footnote ¹⁷ What should be stressed here is the critical role of Theosophists such as Margaret Cousins, Rukmini Devi Arundale, and the president of the Society between 1933 and 1945, George Arundale.

In 1913, the Irish couple Margaret and James Cousins (the latter the writer, poet, and critic who, towards the end of his life, became a Hindu) travelled to India at the expense of Besant. Both were well-known public figures in Ireland. Among other things, Margaret had founded the Irish Women’s Franchise League and supported Irish independence, while James was part of a literary circle that included Yeats and Joyce, and published widely on Theosophy.Footnote ¹⁸ In India, Margaret soon became known as a campaigner for women’s rights: she founded the Indian Women’s Association (1914), organized the first all-India Women’s Conference (1928), and in 1922 was actually appointed the first woman magistrate in the subcontinent. Besides being a reformer and politician, Margaret Cousins was a musician, who had earned a music degree in Ireland. In her influential Music of the Orient and the Occident: essays towards mutual understanding (1935) and other writings, she emphasized the uniqueness of Indian music in terms of its ‘spirituality’ or ‘an instrument of yoga’.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, she played a critical role in the institutionalization and teaching of South Indian music. In 1917, in response to the movement for national education (which among its members included Besant and Rabindrinath Tagore), a national university was set up in Madras. Accordingly, together with members of the Madras elite, Cousins established a music curriculum. In one course, she not only emphasized the significance of music notation to spread ‘scientific’ music but, importantly, also underlined the value of music for the ‘spiritual’ revival of the Indian nation:

Indeed, how proud she was when, in 1933, the first woman graduate in music came out of the University of Madras: ‘When one remembers that all music was taught orally and individually, only about ten years ago, it will be seen that this change to class teaching and the placing of Indian music within the purview of standardized examination is in the nature of a revolution’.Footnote ²¹

Likewise, the Theosophical Society was vital to the revival of South Indian Bharatanatyam dance, through the efforts of Rukmini Devi. Her husband, George Arundale, served as principal of the National University of Madras and, like Besant, was interned for his involvement in the Home Rule League.Footnote ²² In 1936, the couple started Kalakshetra, as a cultural academy for the preservation of ‘authentic’ and ‘spiritual’ Indian music and dance. Generally, Rukmini Devi emphasized – more or less in line with the Victorian idea of the ‘sensitive’ and ‘intuitive’ female spirit – the special relationship between women and the fine arts. As a result, a new kind of female dancer emerged: one who was ‘an individual interpreter, rather than merely a hereditary practitioner of the art’.Footnote ²³

All in all, the Theosophical Society was a self-conscious and well-organized global movement, which strengthened indigenous nationalist movements through its solidarity. In particular, Theosophists confirmed the growing self-confidence of the colonized in terms of the imperialist trope of Eastern ‘spiritualism’ versus Western ‘materialism’. By doing so, the movement was explicitly important to the definition of modern nationalist non-Western art traditions.Footnote ²⁴ Otherwise, the Society’s influence on both Indian and Irish politics (as in the cases of Besant and the Cousins) remains an intriguing example of what Elleke Boehmer labelled ‘resistance in interaction’, that is ‘the development of national selfhood in the context of interrelationship’.Footnote ²⁵ Ironically, however, while Theosophy in the West emerged as anti-establishment movement, opposed to Christianity in particular, over time the movement defended orthodox revivalism in both India and Ireland, and, in the case of James Cousins, even advanced Aryan Indo-Irish analogies.Footnote ²⁶

British national music and Theosophical spirituality

At the age of twelve, Cyril Scott’s fairly wealthy parents sent him to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. During a second stint in Germany, from 1895 to 1898, he formed the so-called ‘Frankfurt Group’ of five ‘British’ composers (including the Australian Percy Grainger), who ‘stood apart in outlook and education from the mainstream of the conservative British musical establishment’.Footnote ²⁷ After his return to Britain, Scott established a considerable name for himself as a modernist composer. In particular, his First piano sonata (1909) was groundbreaking.Footnote ²⁸ He was admired, for example, by George Bernard Shaw, and by Edward Elgar, who was seen by the national music orthodoxy as the quintessential English composer, although there is still much debate about his personal relationship to the empire.Footnote ²⁹ Scott became known as ‘the English Debussy’, and the conductor and composer Eugène Goossens even labelled him ‘the father of modern British music’. As a cosmopolitan composer, Scott was acquainted with famous contemporary composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky, who all praised his music. Subsequently, he signed a contract with Elkin to produce innumerable short songs and piano pieces, which were very successful in the emergent mass music market. Indeed, the Orientalist piece Lotusland (1905) remains his biggest hit. At the same time, his music was played at the Promenade concerts (Second symphony in 1903 and the patriotic Britain’s war march in 1914, both in the years of their composition), as well as conducted or performed by such celebrities as Beecham, Grainger, Kreisler, and, during Scott’s piano tour through the United States in 1920, Stokowski.

From the very beginning, nonetheless, there were recurring hesitant reviews of Scott’s works in the British press, in which he was depicted as an enfant terrible rather than a musical pioneer. Hence, to his own frustration, what he called his ‘trifles’ received most attention in Britain, while his serious music was more appreciated in Germany, and was published with Schott. That said, at the time his First symphony (1899) was premièred in Darmstadt during the South African Boer war period, when the British were very unpopular in Germany, Scott’s fellow student in Frankfurt, Balfour Gardiner, overheard one member of audience say: ‘they should play that to the Boers, and then they would run to the Equator’!Footnote ³⁰

Born in Manchester, John Foulds joined the Hallé Orchestra in 1900 as a cellist under Hans Richter, who later also launched him as a conductor. Largely self-taught, Foulds composed abundantly from childhood. From the 1890s, he was one of the first to introduce quartertones in Western music. Like Scott, he earned himself a reputation as a critical progressive composer, who over time counted Milhaud, Stravinsky, Varèse, and other musical modernists among his contacts. Following the performance of his Epithalamium (1906) at the 1906 Promenade concerts, Foulds decided to concentrate on composing, and he soon achieved success as a composer of light orchestral and salon music. What is more, the British music society (founded in 1918 by the uncritical biographer of the first half of Cyril Scott’s life, Arthur Eaglefield Hull, to disseminate the work of British composers and performers),Footnote ³¹ recommended Foulds’ A world requiem (1921) for national performance. In memory of the dead of all nations, the work was performed yearly on Armistice night from 1923 to 1926. Performed by up to 1,200 singers and instrumentalists, it became the origin of the annual Festival of Remembrance. Though the music was a great success with the public, most critics found it superficial. One of the criticisms levelled against the work was that it was not Christian and patriotic enough.Footnote ³² According to Malcolm MacDonald, there was evidently intrigue against Foulds, and his Requiem became ‘the first notable casualty of that depressing tendency in British Music, after the Great War, to distrust anything which seemed too large-scale, too serious, or too visionary in conception’.Footnote ³³ Foulds believed that the failure of his Requiem to establish itself in the English musical canon was the crucial setback in his career as a serious composer, and helped to validate his reputation as simply a composer of light music. He spent the later 1920s in Paris, the centre of modernist music at the time, where he worked as an arranger, accompanist for silent films, and copyist, and, indeed, on the whole went through a period of profound creativity, as discussed below in relation to his Three mantras (1919–30), Dynamic triptych (1929),and other compositions.

All in all, the work of Scott and Foulds cannot be seen simply in disagreement with what was propagated by the British national music establishment. Although, unlike such contemporaries as Grainger and Vaughan Williams, they were not involved in folk music research, some of their early music did refer to British and Irish folk music. Scott’s Gentle maiden (1912) and Irish suite (1917), and Foulds’ immensely popular Keltic lament (1911), which was performed at the 1911 Promenade concerts, are only a few examples. Furthermore, as remarked above, their music was regularly performed at official celebrations, and was praised by Elgar.Footnote ³⁴

So why did Scott and Foulds become outsiders to the mainstream of British music making? To begin with, there was their social background. Akin to the Roman Catholic Elgar, they did not belong to the elitist circle of the British music establishment educated at Oxford, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music, or the Royal College of Music. Perhaps of some importance was the fact that they were northerners, whereas Elgar, Gustav Holst, and Vaughan Williams, for example, came from Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. Moreover, Scott and Foulds never became part of any educational institution. Hence, they composed many popular pieces to earn a living and became all-round composers, for which they were criticized by the orthodox. In the end, however, it seems that they particularly became outsiders because of their outspoken interest in Theosophical spirituality and India.

Like many of his contemporaries, Cyril Scott was unsatisfied with the organized Christian church. By the 1920s, he had become seriously interested in Indian philosophy and studied the writings of Swami Vivekananda, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad gita, Max Müller’s The sacred books of the East, and others. After hearing a lecture by Annie Besant, Scott became a Theosophist, while remaining critical of any sectarianism within the movement.Footnote ³⁵ Subsequently, he wrote many occult books. Appearing under the pseudonym ‘His Pupil’ was the immensely successful Initiate trilogy (1920, 1927, and 1932) and, under his own name, An outline of modern occultism (1935), and its sequel, The greater awareness (1936). Also within the world of the occult, he wrote numerous works about homeopathy and ethics. In his most famous book, Music: its secret influence throughout the ages (1933), he combined his occult and musical worlds, arguing that composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner had been ‘mediums,’ who changed society and guided humanity through their music. It has been argued that Scott’s all too obvious interest in spirituality was unacceptable to many within the British music establishment. In her study of the BBC archives, for example, Diana Swann maintains that, from the 1930s onwards, the BBC consistently rejected his music because it did not measure up to their ‘hidden set of criteria which had to conform to the [musical] Renaissance image, whose characteristics included distrust of any religious or philosophical element that was not based on muscular Christianity or healthy agnosticism’.Footnote ³⁶

In 1944, Scott briefly gave up composing altogether, only to pick it up again at the behest of his Tibetan Master, Mahatma Koot Hoomi, who was certain that his music would be appreciated again in the future. According to the Theosophists, the spiritual development of individuals is or can be guided by a secret set of Masters living in Tibet. Later, Scott himself wrote that this would happen because of the healing quality of his music in an increasingly noisy and insensitive world.Footnote ³⁷ Religious universalism motivated him to compose his Hymn to unity (1947), though without the expectation of its performance during his lifetime, because he believed that no British choral society would produce ‘an English Oratorio which embraced other religions besides the Christian’.Footnote ³⁸ With few notable performances of new works in an advanced idiom through the 1950s and 1960s, Scott continued composing until his death in 1970, but wrote bitterly about the injustice done to him and his work in his second autobiography, Bone of contention (1969).Footnote ³⁹

John Foulds’ early interest in spirituality was boosted after he met his second wife, Maud MacCarthy (1882–1967), an Irish-born violinist, singer, writer, poet, and esoteric teacher, who studied at the Royal College of Music and had some successful performances in London during the 1900s. She had collected Indian folk melodies as early as 1909, while touring the subcontinent with Annie Besant, and at the time was considered an expert on South Indian music by British audiences.Footnote ⁴⁰ Particularly as a singer, violinist, and assistant, MacCarthy was Foulds’ muse, also, for example, compiling the text of A world requiem, which included passages of the sixteenth-century Hindu devotional poet Kabir. It remains unclear, however, if Foulds ever really became a Theosophist. It seems better to assume that, in line with the times, in his ideas about music he was greatly inclined towards spirituality, and that his early orientation towards Theosophy was boosted after he met Maud MacCarthy in 1915. Possibly, then, both he and MacCarthy, like many other (pseudo-)Theosophists, distanced themselves from the mainstream when, in 1925, Annie Besant proclaimed Krishnamurti to be the new ‘world teacher’.Footnote ⁴¹

Through MacCarthy, Foulds undeniably had the most direct link to Indian music of all contemporary British composers. He passionately claimed that Western musicians could learn from Indian music ‘lessons of melodic purity and rhythmic emancipation, new methods of tuning, the expressive use of micro-intervals, new timbres, and the value of meditation, timelessness, and spontaneous improvisation’.Footnote ⁴² Perhaps because of his firm propagation of the exotic music of an imperial subject race, he distanced himself from the mainstream of British music making. In any event, Foulds had fallen by the wayside when he returned from Paris, where MacCarthy lectured on Indian music and performed with the Indian dancer Uday Shankar in ‘Dances et chants de l’Orient’.Footnote ⁴³ In 1933, just after his Dynamic triptych for piano and orchestra was broadcast by the BBC, he actually complained in a letter to the conductor of the BBC symphony orchestra, Adrian Boult, that the BBC continually broadcast his light music but did not dare to touch his more serious works.Footnote ⁴⁴ Eventually, Foulds and MacCarthy moved to India, where he studied Indian music and died unexpectedly of cholera in Calcutta in 1939. Years later, MacCarthy wrote about her marriage with Foulds in her esoteric autobiography, published under the name of Swami Omananda Puri: ‘We were entirely at one on inner things, and he was truly dedicated to his art. His life was tragically wasted, however, for we were so dreadfully poor that most of his work had to be of the pot-boiler sort.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Following their repeated participation in national music making, and especially in the light of Scott’s standing as ‘the father of modern British music’, it certainly remains surprising that Scott and Foulds did not make it into the modern British musical canon. Were they simply not patriotic enough? Was it their commercialism, musical modernism, or all-roundedness? It has also been suggested that Foulds’ socialism alienated him from the establishment.Footnote ⁴⁶ Like Cyril Scott, he was acquainted with George Bernard Shaw, for whose Saint Joan he composed the music in 1925. The fact that they did not strive to belong to any group or institution, and largely kept to their own company, remains critical here, although, throughout his life, Scott stayed in contact with the members of the ‘Frankfurt Group’, especially Percy Grainger. Their complaints about the neglect of their work, however, show that they actually wanted to be accepted by the orthodox. Yet, again, Scott and Foulds did not make their case any easier when they straightforwardly propagated their interest in Theosophy and India, and, as discussed below, directly related it to their radical cosmopolitan (read: anti-national) ideas about modernist music and aesthetics in some intriguing books of cultural history.

Cosmopolitan radicalism: progress and Theosophical spirituality in music

John Foulds’ Music to-day: its heritage from the past, and legacy for the future (1934), as well as Cyril Scott’s The philosophy of modernism: its connection with music (1917) and Music: its secret influence through the ages (1933), are definitely very different from the national music writings of, for example, Edward Elgar or Ralph Vaughan Williams.Footnote ⁴⁷ Scott and Foulds shared interests in a wide range of issues: the stylistic changes in modernist music; the conservatism of the British music establishment; the pre-Raphaelite movement as a source of inspiration; frustration about music critics; the magical and healing effects of music; Orientalism in music; the relationship between sound and colour; and intriguing vignettes of contemporary composers. Specifically, in their opinion, there were aesthetic limits to progress in music. Both respected Schoenberg, a Theosophist, but simultaneously found his musical thinking too systematic. In the words of Foulds:

Likewise, Scott discussed Grainger in opposition to Schoenberg, whom he labels a ‘Futurist’,Footnote ⁴⁹ as a great harmonic inventor, who ‘does not lead us into the excruciating’.Footnote ⁵⁰

As said before, Scott and Foulds found a common ground in Theosophy. So, for example, they employed the Theosophical notion of Deva-music based on ‘vibration types’ to classify hierarchically the aesthetic achievement reached by different composers.Footnote ⁵¹ The following excerpt, in which Foulds resolutely promoted progress in music, gives an idea of the esoteric language involved:

Meanwhile, they used the Theosophical idiom to explain the relationship between colour and music. Both refer to a table in Madame Blavatsky’s Secret doctrine (1888), wherein each tone corresponds to a colour: C–Red; D–Orange; E–Yellow; F–Green; G–Blue; A–Indigo; B–Violet.Footnote ⁵³ It comes as no surprise that they were great admirers of the Russian master of synaesthesia, devout Theosophist, and fellow musical modernist, Scriabin. Interestingly, in Music: its secret influence through the ages, Scott compared Scriabin’s masterwork Prometheus (1910), in which a colour organ is used, with Foulds’ A world requiem. In his opinion, Foulds’ attempt to reach a high aesthetic stage, similar to that of Scriabin, through the employment of quartertones was unsuccessful, and solely ‘gave rise to the idea that the orchestra was playing out of tune’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Music to-day, Foulds replied that, if he reached out at all for such an aesthetic, quartertones definitely were not central to the composition.Footnote ⁵⁵ In spite of this occult discussion, however, he still mentions Scott as a leading contemporary British composer.

On the whole, the two composers shared a somewhat defensive, sometimes bitter, writing style. For instance, Foulds wrote about the contemporary music scene in Britain: ‘there seems to be a natural conspiracy to deprecate, even to negate, creative endeavour, and to exalt mere hack-work’.Footnote ⁵⁶ While Scott’s writings are apolitical, the socialist Foulds often comes up with critical statements. Here is his straightforward attack on the making of a national music based upon folk music:

In accordance with ‘the main evolutionary trend of the art’, the cosmopolitan Foulds felt a historical destiny for his music whereby, he argued, the use of atonal music was crucial because it ‘entirely lost its nationalist character’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Scott shared Foulds’ musical utopianism and wrote in Music: its secret influence through the ages:

Despite their criticism of contemporary British music making (if not society), however, Scott and Foulds were both influenced by some of the dominant values and perceptions of British ‘imperial culture’. So, for example, the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who both wrote about the origin of music, undeniably underlay the two composers’ notion of progress in music. Also for Scott and Foulds, all music represented a stage in an evolutionary process: from Western ‘primitive’ folk music, which was often seen as ‘pure’ by nationalist musicians, and ‘exotic’ non-Western music traditions, to contemporary Western classical music. Specifically in this context, one can delineate how their thinking was influenced by imperial racialism. So, for example, their dislike of jazz overtly depended on the trope of the African other as ‘wild’, ‘sexual’, and ‘uncivilized’. In the view of Scott, jazz ‘was definitely “put through” by the Dark Forces’ and followed up by ‘a very marked decline in sexual morals’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The two composers had particular problems with the syncopated rhythm, which was exactly what many of their fellow cosmopolitan musical modernists found most attractive in jazz. Scott thought jazz rhythm was orgiastic, and Foulds found it simply banal, though on the whole he recognized the importance of the improvisatory aspects of jazz.Footnote ⁶¹

Moreover, without ever visiting the subcontinent, Scott’s judgement of Indian music and culture was stereotypical racial. From an evolutionary perspective, he described it as non-progressive and related this to the ‘characteristic lethargy’ of Indians, among whom ‘apart from the warrior caste there are few men of action; the bulk of the people are dreamy, meditative, and given over in excess to the things of the spirit’.Footnote ⁶² Here, indeed, much in contrast to his overall interest in Indian philosophy, Scott straightforwardly propagates the condescending, false, and essentialist imperial trope of ‘spiritual’ India, which was used by the British to deny Indians the capacity to rule themselves because, the British argued, their spirituality made them irrational. At the same time, however, it should be emphasized that the imperial racial notions of Scott and Foulds were in line with Theosophical philosophy, which overall was strongly evolutionary, hierarchical, and racial.Footnote ⁶³

Since the British music establishment did not acknowledge the originality of their work, Scott and Foulds increasingly turned away from the public. Scott absorbed himself in the writing of occult books and the systemization of his use of ‘chords built upon the interval of the fourth’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Foulds fled first to Paris and then to India. To some extent, their inward turn can be understood as a negative reaction to contemporary mass culture and modernity at large. So, for example, Scott and Foulds accepted the advantages of technology and eagerly wanted their works to be broadcast by the BBC. However, they were critical about the translation of music through the gramophone and radio, which Foulds labelled ‘mechanized music’, mainly because of the distortion of dynamics and timbre, and the commercialization of music.Footnote ⁶⁵ All this was against what Foulds called the ‘ensouling of music’,Footnote ⁶⁶ being an idea that closely paralleled Scott’s argument about music inspired by the Theosophical Masters in Music: its secret influence through the ages. On the whole, they began a dialogue with an imagined, ideal audience beyond the present British nation and more or less endured the eternal fate of so many individual artists before and after this time: a suffering for the sake of a future paradise. Obviously, the two composers’ withdrawal meant even further displacement for them from a British music establishment that emphasized the significance of the link between music and the national public. As Vaughan Williams put it:

For Scott and Foulds the direction of musical modernism aesthetically ended with Scriabin rather than with Schoenberg or Stravinsky, who early in his life was interested in Theosophy and was positively referred to by the two composers. Following their interest in the hidden, mysterious, and irrational activity of the mind, Scott and Foulds revolted against musical academicism and, in a closely related manner, emphasized in their writings the importance of spirituality in the making of progressive music. Foulds explicitly lamented that this aspect was completely ignored at British music schools and conservatories in favour of technique.Footnote ⁶⁸ Their propagation of the critical role of spirituality (the unconscious) in composition was not, nonetheless, unique. Schoenberg, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams and other contemporary composers also underlined the need of it in the creation of their music.Footnote ⁶⁹ All in all, the cosmopolitan radicalism of Scott and Foulds, and their urge for progress and utopianism in music, greatly reflected their Theosophical spiritual quests. Yet, how exactly was India and its ‘exotic’ music translated into their musical styles?

Exotic India in British modernist music

Musical exoticism is a stylistic label that obscures rather than explains, and compositions always have to be analyzed in their specific historical context.Footnote ⁷⁰ Until the nineteenth century, exoticism in Western music generally did not have anything to do with non-Western musical traditions, of which transcriptions look and sound like the music of the day. In fact, with concepts such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘ethnography’ still to come, musical exoticism often reflected a fear of the other’s ‘sexuality’ and ‘barbarism’. On the whole, a ‘timeless’ East was created, on the basis of changing Orientalist musical styles that were fashionable at a specific Western time and place. Under labels such as the ‘Alla Turca style’, ‘style Hongrois’, and ‘Indian Air’, the East was represented by bass drones and pedal points, Arabesques, repetitive rhythm, trills, whole tones, augmented seconds and fourths, parallel movements in fourths, fifths and octaves, and so on. During the twentieth century, however, the situation changed as, on the basis of fieldwork and gramophone recordings, a growing number of Western composers gained a more real knowledge of Asian musical traditions, and used them as a source of inspiration to create innovative musical styles.

The bibliography of Cyril Scott’s Music: its secret influence through the ages includes A.H. Fox Strangways’ influential and classic work of ‘comparative musicology’ (as ethnomusicology was called at the time), The music of Hindostan (1914). While Scott did not use the book’s numerous examples of Indian melodies and rhythms in staff notation, at least it shows that he was interested in India in this field also, although he was probably not glad that Strangways depicted the rhythm, or rather absence of rhythm, negatively in his First piano sonata, in comparison with Stravinsky’s in Petrouchka (1911).Footnote ⁷¹ As far as I know, Scott did not write anything about his two Orientalist ‘Indian’ cycles for piano: Impressions from the jungle book (1912) and Indian suite (1922). In these cycles, and in similar Orientalist works, Scott made use of many modernist musical innovations: exclusion of key signatures, constantly varying rhythms and metres, alternative chords to those founded upon the superposition of un-equal thirds, equal treatment of scale notes, longer melodic lines, new compositional forms, and so forth. As mentioned earlier, Scott used fourth chords extensively, to the point of becoming a ‘mannerism’, as he confessed.Footnote ⁷² Interestingly, these chords are the same as the upper part of the Scriabin’s so-called ‘mystic’ chord (D–G–C–F#–B–E), which served as the basis of his Prometheus and dispended with triadic thinking in favour of a combination of perfect, diminished, and augmented fourths.

Besides his employment of modernist musical techniques, however, Scott simply relied on the fashionable Orientalist musical practices and tropes of his time. Hence, the title of the Indian suite’s piece Juggernaut (a corruption of the Sanskrit Jagannath or ‘Lord of the universe’, used to describe an avatar of Krishna) remains a good example of Orientalist imagination in terms of India’s ‘religious barbarism’. It points to a Hindu procession held in the east of India (Puri, Orissa), in which an idol on a huge chariot is dragged through the streets by worshippers (the first part of the piece, with its processional drone, is to be played ‘religiously’), and occasionally persons throw themselves before the advancing wheels (the fourth chords of the middle part are to be played ‘fast and lively’). In the same way, the titles of two other pieces in the cycle, The snake charmer and Dancing girls, remain classic Orientalist reflections of the ‘mysterious’ and ‘exotic’ East. On the other hand, inspired by the heroism, adventure, and innocence of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle book, Scott perhaps composed his Impressions from the jungle book to criticize the stifling embrace of urbanized, materialist, and rationalist Western civilization, more or less as Percy Grainger composed his Kipling settings as a ‘protest against civilization’.Footnote ⁷³ While it generally remains difficult to assess how extra-musical influence affected Scott’s composition, his musical exoticism clearly had nothing to do with the reality of Indian music but reflected his (however superficial) awareness of it. Together with his enthralment with Indian philosophy and Theosophy, it thus seems that Indian music partially inspired him to write different melodies, chords, and rhythms. And by doing so, Scott appealed to something universal, and self-assertively created an aesthetic world separated from the conventions of British national music.

John Foulds was much irritated with what he termed ‘Orientalities’, as used by Scott and other British composers, and advocated a more genuine contact with Indian music. After his arrival in the subcontinent in 1935, he devoted much time and energy to the study of Indian music, which led to some works based on folk music, particularly in the Punjab and Kashmir. Also composed in those early years was The song of Ram Dass (1935), a miniature for small orchestra that follows an improvisation ‘in Indian style’ by Maud MacCarthy. Foulds’ use of the oboe in the style of a shenai (Indian double-reed instrument), and ‘Indian’ melodies played by the string section, undeniably make this piece closer to Indian music than any of Scott’s ‘Orientalities’, or the music of any other British composer for that matter. Even before the First World War, he was attracted to the idea of composing in non-diatonic modes.

Under the influence of MacCarthy, Foulds became particularly fascinated with South Indian (Karnatic) ragas or musical modes. His Gandharva music (1915–26) for piano, published by the Theosophical publishing house in London, was one of his first pieces inspired by India. The work is in the key of D Major and consists of a continuous unbarred and unaccented ripple of notes over a ground bass, repeated sixty-five times and barely rising above an almost inaudible volume. In his prefatory note, Foulds wrote that Gandharva music ‘does not represent human emotion, but is part of the music inherent in things themselves’. Thus stirred by an Indian philosophy ‘which taught him that emotion was only a preliminary aim of music’,Footnote ⁷⁴ he was distancing himself from musical romanticism. Another piece inspired by India is the orchestral Three mantras, originally planned as part of a large Sanskrit opera to be called Avatara. Although the work contains little that sounds Indian, in the third Mantra, Foulds makes consistent use of the forty-ninth of the South Indian seventy-two melekarta raga scheme, as originally devised in the seventeenth century by Venkatamakhi.Footnote ⁷⁵ Accordingly, he based his six Essays in the modes (1928) for piano on a table of ninety modes, of which seventy-two correspond to the melakarta system, and the remaining eighteen are logical derivations. Through his appropriation of this Karnatic musical system, Foulds set himself a task no less rigorous than that of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. Each of the Essays in the modes, as well as the first movement of the Dynamic triptych, stays within its mode and does not modulate or introduce unrelated notes. Though melodically this is in line with the Indian raga tradition, Foulds also based harmonies on the specific modes, which, reassuringly, were to be played on the equal-tempered pitches of the piano.Footnote ⁷⁶ Another example of Foulds’ innovative appropriation of Indian music remains the concerto Lyra celtica (mid-1920s) for solo female voice without words and orchestra. In this piece microtones are used. Foulds most probably wrote the piece for MacCarthy, who could sing the twenty-two microtones to the octave in Indian classical music.

In 1937, despite his earlier critical attitude towards the radio’s transmission of ‘mechanized music’, John Foulds accepted the job of director of European music at All India Radio (AIR) in New Delhi. There, he became very active as commentator, solo performer, and conductor. Moreover, he taught Indian musicians Western staff notation and formed an Indo-European orchestra, incorporating indigenous instruments. At the same time, like Indian musical nationalists, Foulds adhered to the idea that Indian music should remain ‘authentic’. Hence, in the footsteps of Margaret Cousins, Fox-Strangways, MacCarthy, and Tagore, he loathed the ‘foreign’ harmonium and sourly named it ‘harm-omnium’. Actually, his opinion that the instrument’s rigidly well-tempered scale straitjacketed Indian music’s flexible intonation and so ruined ‘the Indians’ ear for pitch’,Footnote ⁷⁷ made the director of AIR, Lionel Fielden, forbid the use of the instrument for broadcasting, a ban that was only lifted during the early 1970s. Interestingly, in contrast, the ‘foreign’ violin was accepted without discussion in South Indian music. This was not only because it could mimic the voice, the basis of all Indian music, but also because the emerging Indian middle class (like the European one) took the violin as a serious Western classical instrument and gave it more status than the harmonium. Though long forgotten in the West, however, the harmonium is today fully indigenized in South Asia and has developed in unique ways: for example, through the additions of drone stops and a scale-change mechanism.

Without doubt, Foulds’ notion of ‘authenticity’ belongs to the imperial world of a defined Western self and other: no music is ‘authentic’ because all music is represented and appropriated in a specific historical circumstance. His protective attitude towards ‘authentic’ Indian music therefore remains patronizing. The same accounts for his teaching of staff notation and the discipline of ensemble playing to the members of his Indo-European orchestra. So, for example, he saw no future for the orchestra as long as Indians kept neglecting their instruments, including the singer’s voice, and their quality of tone, or what MacCarthy described as ‘the ugly modern Indian convention of singing through the nose’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite his paternalism, however, Foulds was, without doubt, genuinely interested in Indian music and, hence, unlike in Britain, in India devoted himself to folk music research. His Indo-European orchestra above all should therefore be seen as an attempt at a musical syncretism between East and West, in line with his wider spiritual search.

To be sure, Cyril Scott and John Foulds were not the only early twentieth-century British composers fascinated by India.Footnote ⁷⁹ Gustav Holst (1874–1934), who was also informed about Indian music by Maud MacCarthy, is another obvious contemporary example. He studied Sanskrit and its literature and was interested in Hindu philosophy. He composed some works with Indian themes such as Sita (1906), Savitri (1908), Choral hymns from the Rig Veda (1912), and The cloud messenger (1913), a choral and orchestral work founded on Sanskrit poetry by Kalidasa. Holst remains best known, however, for his very successful The planets (1917), with its background in astrology. This orchestral suite was much admired by Scott and Foulds,Footnote ⁸⁰ though the latter thought Holst was ‘too much addicted to a pedantic fugal exposition of some of his ideas’.Footnote ⁸¹

So why did Holst not drop out of the canon of British national music like Scott and Foulds, given his interest in India and musical exoticism? This can partly be explained by his membership of the establishment through his education at the Royal College of Music, and his close friendship and musical interaction with Vaughan Williams, with whom he shared a profound interest in English folk music research and, as an editor, worked on The English hymnal. Holst also worked as a music teacher for almost his whole life.Footnote ⁸² True, he sought inspiration in Sanskrit literature and was interested in astrology, although it is not certain if he was influenced by Theosophy, and yet he certainly did not propagate his exotic interests as openly as Scott and Foulds. Instead, he was much preoccupied with the integration of English folk music into his musical language. Otherwise, while all three composers, each in his own way, were just as skilled and creative, Foulds’ musical style has more in common with that of Holst than Scott. My point, however, is that, of all British composers (Holst included), Foulds was most probably the only one who gained a profound insight into Indian music and appropriated his knowledge into his musical style.

Conclusion

Following rapid social changes after the industrial revolution, Britain predominantly defined itself as a secular, modern, and changing society, in opposition to a religious, traditional, and static India. What is more, while ‘concepts of nation, race, folk and evolutionary narrative shared the ideological stage with Orientalist constructions of India’Footnote ⁸³ – on the basis of such social sciences as ethnology and anthropology and through the influence of pseudo-scientific social Darwinism – racialism heavily influenced British ideas about India. Albeit rather erratically, Cyril Scott and John Foulds were affected by this dominant ‘imperial culture’ too. Even so, the empire particularly influenced them in terms of their Theosophical spirituality and Indian musical exoticism as part of an ‘alternative’ ideological cluster that included postures against Christianity, institutionalism, commercialism, nationalist music, and so on. As their cosmopolitan radicalism generally verged towards universalism, comparative religion, and ‘ethnomusicology’, in Foulds’ case this led to respect for Indian music and, as his work at All India Radio confirms, sympathy for the Indian nationalist cause.Footnote ⁸⁴

Theosophy and Indian musical exoticism obviously did not have much significance within the British music establishment and, as Scott and Foulds went deeper than a brief flirtation with both, they logically became outsiders. Rather than being escapists, however, they belonged to a larger group of European cosmopolitan radical artists, writers, and social reformers. Here, the perspective of Theosophy as a global movement remains critical because it demonstrates how Western self-questioning, modernist aesthetics, and anti-establishment thinking linked up with the emergence of non-Western, anti-imperial nationalism through an intricate network of personal relationships.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, the cases of Scott and Foulds show how the empire led to a radical Western elitist ‘inner critique’, and how the modern self is subjective and rational, but not necessarily secular.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nonetheless, it seems that the two composers were primarily preoccupied with aesthetic explorations of the limits of their art and, as romanticists, of their self-representations. Both wished to circumvent the dominant conventions of British music and culture, and in doing so make a name for themselves. To attain this goal, Theosophy and Indian musical exoticism proved a way for them to direct their spirituality, utopianism, universalism, criticism towards Western society, and musical modernism. As such, they can more or less be seen as forerunners to such contemporary British composers as Jonathan Harvey and John Tavener.Footnote ⁸⁷ Likewise, because of some his compositions, Foulds can be classed as a precursor of Western ‘Minimalist’ music. The fact that, unlike Scott and Foulds, Harvey and Tavener are successful can be partially explained by the contemporary popularity of ‘New Age’ forms, specifically the so-called ‘New Spiritual Music’ of Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and others. Indeed, it is for this very same reason that Scott’s non-musical writings are still in print.

Finally, it should be emphasized that, while Scott and Foulds sought to imbue their music with Indian ideas and, in the case of Foulds, musical techniques, their musical exoticism equally shows how, under the banner of aesthetics, Western artists commodified non-Western music traditions and kept them at bay at the very same time.Footnote ⁸⁸ Moreover, their world views were prone to imperialist tropes. In addition, their work met with aesthetic confusion, and was superseded both by other musical modernisms and by British national music. However, all this does not make these personalities less intriguing, or their music less original.Footnote ⁸⁹