10 favourite British Composers

[Ken B]

Hmmm. No particular order except the first
Purcell
Fayrfax
Tallis
Byrd
Dunstable
Vaughn Williams
Dowland
Ravenscroft
Handel

Harder after that. Arne, Britten, Bridge, Simpson.

[Ken B]

Hmmm. No particular order except the first
Purcell
Fayrfax
Tallis
Byrd
Dunstable
Vaughn Williams
Dowland
Ravenscroft
Handel
Rawsthorne

Harder after that. Arne, Britten, Bridge, Simpson.
Actually I forgot Rubbra and Rawsthorne! So I snuck the later in

[Ken B]

"Catalunya" is how I happen to have spelled it ... But Catalonia is of course the accepted English (because: Latin) spelling.

Hmm. Count me skeptical. Catalan is itself a Romance language. If you said "Because French" then I'd find it more plausible.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Let me think of 10 i really like currently

Benjamin Britten
Helen Grime
Brian Ferneyhough
Rebecca Saunders
Charlotte Bray
Thomas Adès
Oliver Knussen
Harrison Birtwistle
Richard Barrett
Jonathan Harvey
Sally Beamish
Peter Maxwell Davies
James Dillon

Idk if that's 10 but those are british composers who are my current favourites

[Mirror Image]

I don't think I could list ten now since I'm not too much into Brit music anymore with the exception of the following composers:

Vaughan Williams
Britten
Elgar
Rubbra
Arnold
Finzi
Moeran

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I don't think I could list ten now since I'm not too much into Brit music anymore with the exception of the following composers:

Vaughan Williams
Britten
Elgar
Rubbra
Arnold
Finzi
Moeran

I think you'll be pleased to know that I'm really getting more into Elgar! He hasnt quite made my favourites list yet though

[Mirror Image]

I think you'll be pleased to know that I'm really getting more into Elgar! He hasnt quite made my favourites list yet though

Excellent! Very good to hear.

[71 dB]

I think you'll be pleased to know that I'm really getting more into Elgar! He hasnt quite made my favourites list yet though

Good to hear you are at least getting into Elgar. 

To me it is horrible to see how many exclude Elgar from their top 10 British composers list. It's like excluding J. S. Bach from your top 10 baroque compors list!

[SymphonicAddict]

1. Vaughan Williams (the best IMHO)

In no especific order:

Arnold
Bantock
Bax
Elgar
Rubbra
Walton
Alwyn
Holst
Moeran

Honorable mentions:

Finzi, Britten, Tippett

[bwv 1080]

Ferneyhough
Christopher Fox
Richard Barrett
James Dillon
Michael Finnessy
Michael Erber
Richard Rodney Bennett
Reginald Smith Brindle
Bryn Harrison

[Christo]

First attempt:

Bate
Berkeley (père)
Bliss
Brian
Gipps
Goossens
Holst
Moeran
Tippett
Vaughan Williams

Second attempt:

Alwyn, Arnold, Howells and Rubbra in - how could I have overlooked them - for poor Gipps. More I cannot miss.

[Trout]

Byrd
Delius
Dowland
Finnissy
Finzi
Harvey
Nyman
Purcell
Tallis
Vaughan Williams

[amw]

This is a bump.

In my experience, the rather inconvenient truth - that composers who immigrate after a full and earlier life of training, their 'voice' and career already well-established, are -- as composers -- of their 'native' and not their adopted nationality. 

I think self-identification, and identification by others, is more important than where someone happens to have been born and raised, though.

Handel definitely saw himself as British to a certain degree, and also Italian, as well as German; the British also saw him as one of their own. Clementi also considered himself British. I'm not sure Medtner ever came to consider himself British even though he did become a naturalised subject of the Crown. On the other side of things, Stravinsky saw himself as an American, but was never completely accepted as being American by other Americans.

(When Americans talk about the "Greatest American Composers" the answers are never Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg and Hindemith, even though all four were American citizens, whereas the British will almost always identify Handel as one of the "Great British Composers".)

After a while, insisting on referring to him as Georg Friedrich Händel and considering him solely a German composer ends up feeling rather petty, sort of like all the people on this forum who still refer to Wendy Carlos by a name she stopped using four decades ago because I guess they need some outlet to advertise that they have negative and inflexible beliefs about transgender people. Handel is a German-born, Italian-trained British composer, or... something like that. There's really no need to reduce him or anyone else to a single nationality. This isn't a big secret or anything, but countries aren't real. >.>

[Jo498]

We had this before somewhere I guess. In the baroque time the musical "national idioms" were not directly connected with political nations. For the "Germans" there apparently was an "italian style" although there was no Italian nation and even musically one can distinguish the styles of Venice, Rome and Naples.
The Germans in turn came in at least two varieties, namely the (mostly) protestant central/northern Germans and the southern (usually catholic) Germans + Austrians and maybe the Bohemians, too. (Of course there was no political Germany then).
There might have been something of a British/English tradition (Locke, Purcell etc.) but there was not really a goût anglais recognized through Europe in the way there was a French or Italian style. (Bach's English suites are a later misnomer.) And none of these musical traditions (maybe the French to some extent) had the nationalist undertones the "nationalist" styles/composers of the mid/late 19th century had.

For Handel, it will always be an oversimplification to classify him as either German or English (or even as Einstein did in a little book, the greatest "Italian composer" of his time). One basically has to at least outline the story how he had first a central German "church style" and then an Italian (mostly) operatic education. But he also drew upon some elements of the particularly English anthem/ode/pastoral style in his English language works. And arguing not from the past but towards the future he did become a more important composer for later 18th century (or even 19th century) Britain than for Germany and "founded" the English/vernacular language choral oratorio.

[DaveF]

Hmmm. No particular order except the first
Purcell
Fayrfax
Tallis
Byrd
Dunstable
Vaughn Williams
Dowland
Ravenscroft
Handel

A damn fine list, if I may say so.  Had to check back that I hadn't contributed to this thread - if I had, your first 7 would have been mine, too.  Dunstable! Fayrfax! There were giants on the earth in those days.

[vandermolen]

Second attempt:

Alwyn, Arnold, Howells and Rubbra in - how could I have overlooked them - for poor Gipps. More I cannot miss.

Could, yet again, be my list probably without Tippett although I do like 'A Child of Our Time' and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra.

[Maestro267]

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Edward Elgar
Havergal Brian
George Lloyd
Arnold Bax
Malcolm Arnold
William Mathias
Benjamin Britten
William Alwyn
William Walton

Honourable mentions, if I may: Tippett, Rubbra and Moeran.

[bwv 1080]

Dunstable
Tallis
Byrd
Dowland
Walton
Britten
Ferneyhough
Barrett
Fox
Finnissy

[kyjo]

Elgar
RVW
Walton
Britten
Bax
Rubbra
Arnold
Bridge
Delius
Alwyn

Had to leave Holst out because aside from The Planets and a few other works I'm not wild about most of his oeuvre. Hated having to leave Finzi out. There are many British composers who I need to get to know better - Lloyd, Bantock, Rawsthorne, Arnell, Bowen, Moeran, Dyson...

[Karl Henning]

Maybe these:

Benjamin Britten
William Byrd
Erik Chisholm
John Dowland
Edward Elgar
Gustav Holst
Ivan Moody
Luke Ottevanger
Thomas Tallis
Ralph Vaughan Williams

I stand pat, here.