Eric Saylor mounts a compelling defense of English pastoral music of the first half of the twentieth century, based on a canon of works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, Herbert Howells, and others held dear by British audiences. Rarely performed in the concert hall, these works have nonetheless been widely disseminated through recordings and are often paraphrased by composers of music for film and television. Yet they have been largely eschewed by critical opinion, and the musicological literature has been small. As Saylor notes, composer Elizabeth Lutyens bluntly dismissed the “cow-pat school,” while revisionist historians Merion Hughes and Robert Stradling chose a more fragrant agrarian metaphor in The English Musical Renaissance, describing the phenomenon as “bullshit” (2).

Saylor, by contrast, offers an ambitious and often inspired cultural history of pastoral music from the Edwardian era to that of the young Elizabethans. His account is bifurcated by the unspeakable tragedy of the Great War, Before it, pastoral music was ascendant, its eclectic scope ranging from folksong collection and setting to grandiose Wagnerian chromaticism. After the war, a new spirit, inaugurated by Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony (1922), was marked by “the presence of a functionally modal language and a generally calm, understated expressive ethos” (6).

The term pastoral, of course, carries singular freight. The classical provenance of the term and its echoes in renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical culture (musical, literary, and visual) immediately suggest a cluster of tropes—escape from the city, dalliances of nymphs and shepherds, the horn-calls of huntsmen—that seem entirely at odds with the demands of modernity and the artistic strategies of modernism. In an opening chapter, Saylor offers a cogent account of literary precedents and critical debate about pastoral, emphasizing questions of gender as he notes that the so-called soft pastoral tradition in literature finds an analogy in the rhapsodic forms, mellow sonorities, and perceived lack of abstract, Austro-Germanic argumentative rigor in the music of Vaughan Williams, Frederic Delius, and their ilk.

Saylor's first chapter, “Arcadia,” begins its search for English analogues of the classical pastoral in a strange place—Edward Elgar's gloriously Straussian evocation of Italy in his concert overture In the South (1904). Elgar sits uneasily in the canon of English pastoral, despite the web of references linking his work to the landscapes of Worcestershire and Sussex, because he disavowed the insular musical sources beloved of the later generation, English madrigals and folk song (“I am English folksong,” he once snarled at a journalist). Elgar's Byronic music of historical tourism has precious little to do with the English pastoral.

We are on firmer ground with notions of an insular arcadia. This formulation appealed to both left and right, an idyll unencumbered by capitalism, industrialization, or any of the social and cultural challenges of modernity. Yet musical responses to it flirted with the absurd. In Edward German's light opera Merrie England (1914), Saylor recalls, a fully costumed Walter Raleigh sings an aria “Come to Arcadie.” Reaching even further into the lumber room of arcana, Saylor disinters the bizarre spectacle of The Pageant of London, held at the Crystal Palace in 1911. Vaughan Williams's contribution constituted a mélange of historical English music including the medieval round “Sumer is Icumen In” and “Shepherd's Hey,” a folksong recently collected by Percy Grainger.

It all changed with the war. There were always sobering elements in the pastoral, as in the haunting Nicolas Poussin painting in which rustics confront a tomb inscribed with the words of death itself: Et in arcadia ego (I, too, am in arcadia). But only after the horrors of industrialized warfare became known did the evocation of nature assume an overtly elegiac guise. Saylor offers compelling readings of Elgar's Une voix dans le désert and John Ireland's settings for voice and piano of the modest Soliloquies of a Subaltern Somewhere in France, where music suggestive of nature also poignantly suggests loss.

Turning to those killed in the war, Saylor devotes more attention to the mythos around George Butterworth's life and death than to his work. He is right to point out the extent to which the process of memorialization, underwritten by his wealthy father, canonized the young composer. More could be said about the classical origins of the distinctively homoerotic sense of longing that permeates Butterworth's orchestral rhapsody and songs derived from A. E. Housman's “Shropshire Lad,” poetry written by a classicist and steeped in the pastoral. For Saylor, the true musical martyr of the war is the Yorkshire composer Ernest Farrar, whose English Pastoral Impressions contains memorable folk-inflected melodic passages, but whose little known Heroic Elegy, completed at North Raglan Barracks, seems to enshrine both the bravery of the common soldier and, as the music of martial effort falls away into silence, the futility of the larger endeavor. Two months after its first performance in July 1918, Farrer was gunned down at the age of 33.

Some of the greatest of all pastoral music was written by survivors. Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony was mistaken in 1922 for an exercise in rustic escapism. But following recent scholarship, Saylor convincingly presents it as an “anti-monument,” an elegy or requiem rooted in the experiences of the shattered wartime landscapes of France, where the composer served as an orderly with the Royal Medical Corps. At the heart of the book lies Saylor's brilliant account of the slow movement of the symphony as a musical realization of Vaughan Williams's battlefield recollection, “We went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset” (84). The ambivalent, rhapsodic music reaches a tonal terra firma only with the plangent sound of a natural trumpet, a military rather than an orchestral instrument, playing a free cadenza reminiscent of the Last Post, offering a musical panorama of desolation and loss.

Saylor is especially deft in drawing out the associations, historical and personal, enshrined in musical landscapes, using both documentary sources and musical analysis to do so. There is no hint in the title of Herbert Howells's Piano Quartet in A Minor that its meanings and resonances relate to an eminence known as Chosen Hill in the Cotswolds. Yet Saylor's telling analysis, drawing on letters and reviews to reveal a web of affective linkages between composer and place, reveals this to be so. Might the undulating melodic lines refer indexically to Cotswold topography? More sybaritic is Delius's On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, where birdsong and Norwegian folksong are appropriated for a statement of blissful, pantheistic enjoyment of nature, manifested in lush orchestration and sumptuous added-note chords. The Lark Ascending, the romance for violin and orchestra by Vaughan Williams that is a perennial favorite of British radio audiences, receives a thoughtful reading here, but more surprising is the inclusion of Gustav Holst's austere, monochrome tone-poem Egdon Heath, suggested as much by the writing of Thomas Hardy as by the landscape of Dorset. Saylor finds in this modernist experiment a terse example of “hard pastoral” to contrast with the “soft pastoral” of the post-Wagnerian Somerset Rhapsody, which had announced Holst as a composer in 1910.

A final chapter gathers together disparate works under the heading “Utopia.” An unexpected presence is Constant Lambert, whose breezy musical criticism had no time for the local pastoral product, preferring the more structurally rigorous musical arguments of Jean Sibelius. Lambert's Aubade héroïque, recalling a pearly dawn in Holland in 1940 on the very morning of the Nazi invasion, emerges, however, as a close relative of Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony. Saylor discovers unexpected pastoral elements in Britten's Peter Grimes but ends on a visionary note with passionate advocacy for Gerald Finzi's valedictory In Terra Pax (1954), in which Christian and pastoral themes and music coalesce. It might have been appropriate to acknowledge that even the composers of this generation least willing to adopt the cow-pat idiom, the cosmopolitans William Walton and Michael Tippett, made use of pastoral tropes in, respectively, the slow movement of the Second Symphony and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, the latter a concerto grosso that, after a long-breathed slow movement with a plangent solo line soaring above sustained chordal accompaniment, breaks, in the finale, into a joyous diatonic folksong.

While Saylor invokes many salient literary comparisons, he is generally silent about the strongly visual components of the pastoral, a form ultimately based in looking at landscape. One rare foray into the visual turns to the memorial window to George Butterworth, belatedly installed at Radley School, where the composer taught, in 1985. Alas, this memorial tells us more about Thatcher-period nostalgia than about Butterworth's own time. Meanwhile, the publisher has bizarrely adorned the cover of Saylor's book with a radically anti-pastoral topographical study by the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown that has no connection whatever to the book's theme. Small cavils apart, however, this is a generous and innovative account that is necessary reading for anyone interested in modern British culture and the rural, important well beyond the hitherto rather hermetic world of British music studies. Anyone reading the book will surely rush to hear the neglected works of Farrer, Lambert, Ireland, Finzi, and others, who richly deserve to reenter the musical canon.