The wonders of cowpats
What is it about bovines and criticism of early 20thcentury British music? There’s a strange symbiosis between insults thrown at the music of everyone from Vaughan Williams to Delius, from Bax to Finzi – and cows. Their music embodies the vacant gaze of ‘a cow looking over a gate’ – that’s
Philip Heseltine (aka Peter Warlock) on Vaughan Williams’s style (see p70). An entire swathe of musical history amounted to nothing more than a ‘cowpat school’ for Elisabeth Lutyens. Sixty years and more a er cowpat-gate, I think it’s possible both to understand why a British modernist like Lutyens wanted and needed to distinguish her music from her predecessors, and to rehabilitate the composers and repertoires that she disparages so flatly.
For Lutyens and the mid-20thcentury modernists, the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland and others belonged to a Britain that no longer existed – if it was ever a reality. Instead of dreams of idealised landscapes and nostalgic wistfulness, the world demanded music of bracing energy. Which meant that Lutyens, Humphrey Searle and Elizabeth Maconchy, and later Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle, had to make an aesthetic di erence between their work and the past purveyors of pastoralism. Where that music was heard as parochial, backward-looking and sentimental, the new music would be internationalist, original and future-proofed.
Well: history is never so simple. And what’s now clear is that the pat-pile composers are vastly di erent from one another in their inspiration and ambition, and that their work is much more open-eared that it may have seemed. To take just one example:
The modernists’ new music would be internationalist, original and future-proofed
Frederick Delius. Bradford-born Delius was one of the most cosmopolitan composers of his time, as influenced by the African-american musical cultures in which he steeped himself when he was in Florida in the 1880s as he was by his training in Leipzig, his relationship with Grieg or his infatuation with the writings of Nietzsche. And yet Delius’s profoundly internationalist yet hyperromantic idiom is still associated for many people with parochial pattery.
But in reality, Delius’s music is as far from that as it’s possible to imagine: listen without prejudice to everything from his Mass of Life to the Double Concerto to see what I mean. I could make a similar case for Bax, whose craggily inspired music dreams not of English fields but a Celtic sublime; or for Vaughan Williams, whose supposed pastoralism was never the passive nostalgia that some heard in it, but a war-stricken cry of pain, as in his Pastoral Symphony, or a scream of anger, as in his Fourth. That’s the point: take away those pat-preconceptions, and prepare to be shocked by the radical imagination of this music.