Rewriting the renaissance: History, imperialism, and British music since 1840

Music and Letters

Volumn 84, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 241-257

  Frogley, Alain ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61449492429     PISSN: 00274224     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ml/84.2.241     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. I shall not attempt here to disentangle 'British' and 'English' as terms for national identity, though I shall for the most part use the former; their conflation was, of course, highly significant, indeed thematic, for the period in question
2. Those musicologists who did range more widely were not at this time drawing on the newer trends in British cultural history
3. See e.g. Vic Gammon, 'Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843-1914', History Workshop Journal, 10 (1980), 61-89
4. Ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London, 1986). The two essays are Alun Howkins, 'The Discovery of Rural England', 62-88, and Jeremy Crump, 'The Identity of English Music: The Reception of Elgar 1898-1935', 164-90
5. The essay is Alun Howkins, 'Greensleeves and the Idea of National Music', iii. 89-98
6. Ed. Christopher Norris (London, 1989)
7. The essays are Meirion Hughes, 'The Duc d'Elgar - Making a Composer Gentleman', 41-68
8. Robert Stradling, 'On Shearing the Black Sheep in Spring: The Repatriation of Frederick Delius', 69-105
9. and Paul Harrington, 'Hoist and Vaughan Williams: Radical Pastoral', 106-27
10. Music and Society (Manchester, 1993)
11. Some notable collaborative examples of this trend have been, in no particular order, the British Musical Renaissance Study Days organized on a regular basis by Stephen Banfield at the University of Birmingham; a session entitled 'Marketing Britishness' at the 1996 annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore (the first of its kind at an AMS meeting); the symposium on Finnish and British music organized by the Finnish Institute in December 1992, which resulted eventually in the volume Tomi Mäkelä (ed.), Musical Nationalism in 20th-century Great Britain and Finland (Hamburg, 1997)
12. and the recent upsurge of activity weighted towards the earlier part of this period, reflected in volumes such as Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley (eds.), Musk and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford, 2000)
13. and in the first instalment of the new Ashgate series Nineteenth Century British Music Studies, ed. Bennett Zon (Aldershot, 1999)
14. pp. x + 534. Studies in Imperialism (Manchester and New York, 2001, £17.99. ISBN 0-7190-61430-1)
15. See e.g. their letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 12 Nov. 1993, p. 17, responding to a review of the book by Calum MacDonald ('The Chauvinistic Lark', Times Literary Supplement, 5 Nov. 1993, pp. 3-4)
16. The English Musical Renaissance, 292. Heffer's recent biography of Vaughan Williams (Vaughan Williams (London and Boston, 2001)) does nothing to alter this description
17. Ed. Stephen Banfield (Oxford, 1996)
18. Music and Society (Manchester, 1997)
19. 'The BBC and the Ultra-Modern Problem: A Documentary Study of the British Broadcasting Corporation's Dissemination of Second Viennese School Repertory, 1922-1936' (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1993)
20. Ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge, 1996)
21. Ed. Lewis Foreman (Taunton, 1998)
22. The one exception is the removal of a photograph of the bombed-out Queen's Hall in 1941, which carried the caption 'The Luftwaffe deconstructs the English Musical Renaissance'
23. See Calum MacDonald's review cited earlier (n. 12), and Julian Onderdonk's in Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, 52 (Sept. 1995), 63-6. Onderdonk emphasizes the important point that Stradling and Hughes fail to distinguish the attitudes of composers from those of critics and other writers on music, even though they acknowledge that much of the most important construction of the Renaissance fell primarily to the latter
24. See n. 12
25. See e.g. Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge, 1981)
26. Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London, 1934)
27. National Music, 70-1
28. See Jennifer Doctor, ' "Working for her own Salvation": Vaughan Williams as Teacher of Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams and Ina Boyle', in Foreman (ed.), Vaughan Williams in Perspective, 181-201. Aside from some passing references to Ethel Smyth, Stradling and Hughes give little attention to women composers, or to gender issues as a whole
29. See in particular 'Vaughan Williams and British Wartime Cinema', in Frogley (ed.), Vaughan Williams Studies, 139-65
30. and Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad's Army (London, 1997)
31. Culture and Imperialism, 52
32. A no doubt richly suggestive starting point for examining British imperialism and the symphony would be the pre-1914 symphonies of Elgar and Vaughan Williams; one thinks especially of Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony, centred as it is on the imperial metropolis, the focus of so much post-colonial literary criticism, and associated programmatically with H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, a novel in which the fevered social and economic ferment of Edwardian London and England is inextricably linked with the enticements and perils of imperialism. See Alain Frogley, 'H. G. Wells and Vaughan Williams's London Symphony: Politics and Culture in Fin-de-Siècle England', in Chris A. Banks, Arthur Searle, and Malcolm Turner (eds.), Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections. Presented to 0. W. Neighbour on his 70th Birthday (London, 1993), 299-308
33. 'Modernism and Imperialism', in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, 1990), 43-66