I was thinking of starting this thread to gather together a list of compositions in the English pastoral idiom. My definition of this would be: "orchestral, concerto or chamber works where the material is largely English folksong, or material based on English folk-idiom, and the music doesn't show much influence of eg late-Romantic or chromatic harmonies, or C20 'modern' harmonies and compositional practices".
My list is surprisingly short. Of course all these composers wrote more pieces than this, these are simply those which I judge to be in this, all right, rather constricted idiom. Even amogst these pieces there are those which depart a little (or a lot) from my definition. Also Moeran is Anglo-Irish and Miriam Hyde and Grainger Australian!
Butterworth: The Banks of Green Willow; Shropshire Lad Rhapsody; Two Elegies
Delius: Brigg Fair
Finzi: Severn Rhapsody
Grainger: Green Bushes; My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone; Shepherd's Hey
Holst: Fantasia on Hampshire Folksongs; Somerset Rhapsody; Two Songs without Words; Brook Green Suite
Howells: Phantasy String Quartet; Rhapsodic Clarinet Quintet; String Quartet No.3 ('In Gloucestershire'); Piano Quartet; Pastoral Rhapsody
Hyde, Miriam: Piano Concertos 1& 2; Village Fair
Moeran: Lonely Waters; String Quartets 1 & 2; String Trio; Sonata for Two Violins; Phantasy Oboe Quartet; In the Mountain Country; Rhapsodies Nos 1 & 2 for Orchestra
Vaughan Williams: Norfolk Rhapsodies 1 & 2; In the Fen Country; The Lark Ascending; A Pastoral Symphony; Symphony No.5; The Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus; The Running Set; String Quartet No.1; Phantasy String Quintet
Any further additions or discussion welcome....
Well, if the criterion is, based on English folksong, meseems you must include the RVW Folk Song Suite and the Holst Suites for Military Band.
Quote from: calyptorhynchus on January 30, 2013, 01:43:18 AM
I was thinking of starting this thread to gather together a list of compositions in the English pastoral idiom. My definition of this would be: "orchestral, concerto or chamber works where the material is largely English folksong, or material based on English folk-idiom, and the music doesn't show much influence of eg late-Romantic or chromatic harmonies, or C20 'modern' harmonies and compositional practices".
My list is surprisingly short. Of course all these composers wrote more pieces than this, these are simply those which I judge to be in this, all right, rather constricted idiom. Even amogst these pieces there are those which depart a little (or a lot) from my definition. Also Moeran is Anglo-Irish and Miriam Hyde and Grainger Australian!
Butterworth: The Banks of Green Willow; Shropshire Lad Rhapsody; Two Elegies
Delius: Brigg Fair
Finzi: Severn Rhapsody
Grainger: Green Bushes; My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone; Shepherd's Hey
Holst: Fantasia on Hampshire Folksongs; Somerset Rhapsody; Two Songs without Words; Brook Green Suite
Howells: Phantasy String Quartet; Rhapsodic Clarinet Quintet; String Quartet No.3 ('In Gloucestershire'); Piano Quartet; Pastoral Rhapsody
Hyde, Miriam: Piano Concertos 1& 2; Village Fair
Moeran: Lonely Waters; String Quartets 1 & 2; String Trio; Sonata for Two Violins; Phantasy Oboe Quartet; In the Mountain Country; Rhapsodies Nos 1 & 2 for Orchestra
Vaughan Williams: Norfolk Rhapsodies 1 & 2; In the Fen Country; The Lark Ascending; A Pastoral Symphony; Symphony No.5; The Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus; The Running Set; String Quartet No.1; Phantasy String Quintet
Any further additions or discussion welcome....
What about the Vaughan Williams English Folksong Suite or Holst Miltary Suites? I'd think you could add much more Grainger too. I'll have to think about this though, because I am not entirely clear what you mean by the last part of the definition (after 'e.g.'), but don't really have time to think about this now.
EDIT: Karl got those in before me, but seems we thinking of the same thing...
How 'about this?
http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,12260.0.html
I'm fairly happy with OP's list.
Quote from: Opus106 on January 30, 2013, 02:25:37 AM
How 'about this?
http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,12260.0.html
Thanks for the reminder, Nav. Cheers! : )
Quote from: karlhenning on January 30, 2013, 05:03:28 AM
Thanks for the reminder, Nav. Cheers! : )
Thanks to calyptorhynchus as well; he's given me enough to explore for a few days.
Peter Warlock:
The Curlew
Six English Tunes
Capriol Suite
Serenade for Strings
Sarge
Thanks for the comments eveyone. Of course I missed the VW and Holst works for brass band.
What was interesting in compiling the list was how almost every composer on the list composed an awful lot more music in a more C20 style besdies these works (Butterworth died in the Trenches young, but he too would have probably not have stayed in the pure folk style).
Even composers like Finzi who are supposed to be the quintessence of English pastoral don't write in this style very often (The Severn Rhapsody is an early work, showing influence of Butterworth's a Shropshire Lad and VW's Pastoral Symphony; his works such as the Introit for Violin and Orchestra, or Prelude for Strings, are very English, but not folky).
Miriam Hyde, BTW, was an Austrialian composer, I only know the works listed here (on budget price CD in the Eloquence label) and a double CD of her chamber music. Mostly she seems to lean towards Debussey and Ravel as influences, but on balance the Piano Concertos and Village Fair are more English.
There are of course several works by Britten and Richard Rodney Bennett alluding to this style (like Britten's A Time There Was: Suite on English Folksongs). But these are retrospectives on this style, not really in it (cf Britten's title in the past tense). After WW2 no-one seems to have written in it seriously.
Yeah, Warlock, I don't know all those peices listed, but the Capriole Suite is based on Renaissance dance music, like Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, and other works of his are more chromatic rather than modal.
Obviously these composers, and these works, aren't exactly well-known, I wonder though, whether there were equivalent movements in Scotland and Wales and Ireland (composers in these schools would be even less well-known). Bax's string quartets have Irish jigs as finales, but the rest of these works are more late-Romantic in idiom. Also curious that there wasn't a composer from the north of England writing Rhapsodies on Northumberland Folksongs or whatever.
:-)
Holst: St Paul's Suite
The bane of amateur string orchestras nationwide... :D The last movement is based on two english folk songs- the Dargason and 'Greensleeves' (which is sort of a folk song)...
Quote from: calyptorhynchus on January 30, 2013, 12:50:31 PM
Thanks for the comments eveyone. Of course I missed the VW and Holst works for brass band.
Careful, buddy: you're talking to a woodwind-player here....
Quote from: ElliotViola on January 30, 2013, 02:43:29 PM
Holst: St Paul's Suite
The bane of amateur string orchestras nationwide... :D The last movement is based on two english folk songs- the Dargason and 'Greensleeves' (which is sort of a folk song)...
Hm, did he recycle the notion from the Military Band Suite, or vice versa?
Holst's The Golden Goose and A Moorside Suite too.
English Pastoral Impressions and Heroic Elegy are very good (the latter more war related):
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Quote from: karlhenning on January 30, 2013, 03:40:55 PM
Hm, did he recycle the notion from the Military Band Suite, or vice versa?
The Military Band suites were written in 1909, and the second one in 1911, premiered in 1920. The St Paul's suite was written in 1911 and not published until 1922 because it was revised. Possibly because the Band suite was a success, so he thought 'hmm...' xD
So yes Karl, apparently he did recycle it from the Military Band Suite. Case solved!
When I made up this list I surprised how short it was. Now I have to say I should subtract Miriam Hyde's works. I listened to the disk of the piano concertos and Village Fair again, and although there are plenty of English sounding tunes in the PCs, they are definitely not modal and have plenty of influences from Ravel and Rachmaninov &c. (Very good works, just not really in the category I was trying to shoehorn them into). Village Fair is a later work than I'd thought (1940s) and I think falls into the retrospective phase of English pastoralism, rather than the thing itself.
Can someone please educate me on English Pastoralism? I absolutely love this style of music and would like to better understand why that is. When I think of English Pastoralism, you usually think of RVW but there are many other examples. Was RVW the originator or did he get it from someone else? Does the style still exist or is it really between the wars? What are the qualities that makes a work English pastoralism? For example, if I was to compose an English Pastoral piece, what would the characteristics of that work be? What are your favorite examples of this style?
To me, I hear some strong French influence, so I presume it didn't exist before Debussy/Ravel? Let's say I was to program a concert called "English Pastorlism", what works would you suggest should be programmed as perfect examples of this style?
I don't know anything about English Pastoralism in musical terms, but I might suggest Eclogue for piano and strings by Finzi, Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 by VW, and Pastoral Rhapsody by Howells. There are many others, of course, but at the moment I recall these ones.
Believe it or not, there is actually a thread on this already: http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php?topic=21411.0
Interesting question. I do not agree that there is any influence from across the channel or that it was originated from a particular composer. When I hear American music I more often then not have a vision of wide open spaces, vast tracks of land, openness. I do not believe American composers set out to mirror that in their music, it just happens as that is the enjoinment they were born and brought up in. No different for British composers, who like composers world-wide are sensitive souls, some consciously others unconsciously compose music from England's green and pleasant land - ish.
Sadly - I would say "pastoralism" used as a descriptive is more often meant in a negative sense rather than a positive one - music somehow watered down with all the "famous" quotes about rolling over and over in a muddy field or Lutyens "cow pat music" comment ringing in your ears.
Personally I love it but as with all terms it is as neat as it is inaccurate and limited. In its simplest form I guess you would argue that composers turned to the national music derived from folksong and the much older music of the church to break away from the stiffling academism of Germanic music and conservatories. Worth remembering that the best prize you could win as a composer at the Royal College was the "Mendelssohn prize" - first awarded to Sullivan - which allowed you to go to Leipzig to study.
Folksong/Church music provided composers with building blocks not based on standard academic/musical practice. It was not a complete answer in and of itself but it did provide an initial breaking away point from the influence of Beethoven/Brahms and of course Wagner. Of course RVW was privately rich and could afford the time to go and study in France or collect folksongs or edit a hymnal - all of which helped form the composer he became. Elgar was never a pastoral composer in part because he could not afford to become one! His influences of the British Choral Society tradition and the like sprang from a financial imperative to write music that would generate him an income. Given that Elgar never had any formal/academic musical training by rights he should be the ultimate pastoralist.....
I have no technical knowledge of music but the 'folk song/church music' observation above rings true to me. In the case of Vaughan Williams there was an attempt to develop an original style, yet rooted in the English past and to break-away from the Brahmsian-type Germanic influence in music. The music often sounds like it's influenced by folk song even when it isn't actually based on folk song. VW and Holst went round recording folk-songs before the oral tradition died out.
Not sure there is a 'perfect' example of the style but there is the ubiquitous Lark (RVW). You could try George Butterworth's A Shrophire Lad; Rhapsody for Orchestra. Sadly, Butterworth was killed in action in 1916 so we don't know how he would have developed in the brave new world of post-war music.
Quote from: Biffo on March 15, 2019, 03:11:19 AM
Not sure there is a 'perfect' example of the style but there is the ubiquitous Lark (RVW). You could try George Butterworth's A Shrophire Lad; Rhapsody for Orchestra. Sadly, Butterworth was killed in action in 1916 so we don't know how he would have developed in the brave new world of post-war music.
Yes, Lark is a perfect example. It's sort of an interesting thing that in a way these composers who were of the same generation sort of all contributed to a style but RVW living the longest is most associated with it.
Roasted Swan and vandermolen are spot on that folk music being the driving force of English pastoralism.
I have often wondered how Delius fits into this. Lived most of his life abroad and believe he said on more then one occasion that living in England did not appeal to him. He loved nature and lived the latter part of his life in rural France so his music could echo that, and yet to my ears his music is the most quintessential English of all. One of his most popular works, "Brigg Fair" obviously has an English setting.
Quote from: Irons on March 16, 2019, 02:36:44 AM
Roasted Swan and vandermolen are spot on that folk music being the driving force of English pastoralism.
I have often wondered how Delius fits into this. Lived most of his life abroad and believe he said on more then one occasion that living in England did not appeal to him. He loved nature and lived the latter part of his life in rural France so his music could echo that, and yet to my ears his music is the most quintessential English of all. One of his most popular works, "Brigg Fair" obviously has an English setting.
I have the opposite view of Delius finding him cosmopolitan rather than English. For me he only wrote two English works - Brigg Fair and North Country Sketches. He certainly loved nature but was greatly inspired by the landscapes of France, Florida and Norway. After leaving for Florida he only briefly returned to live in England during WW1, much preferring France. Like RVW he loved the country but preferred to live in the city - as well as spells in New York and Leipzig he lived nearly 20 years in Paris.
Moeran's 'Serenade', his last orchestral work, strikes me as a possible example:
(//)
Quote from: Roasted Swan on March 15, 2019, 01:06:05 AM
Sadly - I would say "pastoralism" used as a descriptive is more often meant in a negative sense rather than a positive one - music somehow watered down with all the "famous" quotes about rolling over and over in a muddy field or Lutyens "cow pat music" comment ringing in your ears.
And don't forget this fun quote: "Listening to the fifth symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes." - Aaron Copland ;D
Did Elgar write any piece that can be considered a candidate for "English Pastoralism"?
Quote from: relm1 on March 16, 2019, 07:34:49 AM
Did Elgar write any piece that can be considered a candidate for "English Pastoralism"?
Sure, how about
Sospiri or
Dream Children?
Quote from: Biffo on March 16, 2019, 02:55:34 AM
I have the opposite view of Delius finding him cosmopolitan rather than English. For me he only wrote two English works - Brigg Fair and North Country Sketches. He certainly loved nature but was greatly inspired by the landscapes of France, Florida and Norway. After leaving for Florida he only briefly returned to live in England during WW1, much preferring France. Like RVW he loved the country but preferred to live in the city - as well as spells in New York and Leipzig he lived nearly 20 years in Paris.
Well put and you are probably correct. To my ears when I listen beside the works you mention, On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring, Summer Night on the River and In a Summer Garden I hear English music not French. That he lived most of his life abroad is the point I am attempting to make, indeed as you say "greatly inspired by the landscapes of France, Florida and Norway". We have a saying from my neck of the woods "You can take the man out of the East End but you can't take the East End out of the man".
Quote from: Irons on March 17, 2019, 01:33:19 AM
Well put and you are probably correct. To my ears when I listen beside the works you mention, On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring, Summer Night on the River and In a Summer Garden I hear English music not French. That he lived most of his life abroad is the point I am attempting to make, indeed as you say "greatly inspired by the landscapes of France, Florida and Norway". We have a saying from my neck of the woods "You can take the man out of the East End but you can't take the East End out of the man".
Delius grew up in the filthy industrial city of Bradford. The family home was on the very edge of the city and young Fritz and his sister used to go out riding on their ponies. The countryside they rode through isn't really like
Cuckoo or
Summer Night, more like
Winter from
North Country Sketches , even in the summer, and signs of industrialisation are never very far away.
This may be a bit feeble but to me those works don't sound English or French, just Delius.
Quote from: Biffo on March 17, 2019, 02:02:39 AM
This may be a bit feeble but to me those works don't sound English or French, just Delius.
Not feeble at all and Delius would love you saying that.
Quote from: relm1 on March 16, 2019, 07:34:49 AM
Did Elgar write any piece that can be considered a candidate for "English Pastoralism"?
Maybe parts of the Enigma Variations such as 'Nimrod'.
I think Frank Howes in his wonderful book "The English Musical Renaissance" summed up Elgar in the opening of the chapter devoted to him "Elgar was the first composer of full stature to be thrown up by English music since Purcell. He was not a direct product of the renaissance movement initiated by Parry, nor like Vaughan Williams had he dug in English soil to thrust his roots to the life-giving waters of nationalism. He is a curious figure, enigmatic from whatever aspect he is regarded........"
Quote from: Irons on March 19, 2019, 01:01:14 AM
I think Frank Howes in his wonderful book "The English Musical Renaissance" summed up Elgar in the opening of the chapter devoted to him "Elgar was the first composer of full stature to be thrown up by English music since Purcell. He was not a direct product of the renaissance movement initiated by Parry, nor like Vaughan Williams had he dug in English soil to thrust his roots to the life-giving waters of nationalism. He is a curious figure, enigmatic from whatever aspect he is regarded........"
A great quote. Thanks.
Elgar never wrote any music that could be described as pastoralism. HOWEVER, there are clearly passages influenced by the countryside be it the Woodland Interlude from Caractacus through to the late chamber works written in Sussex where Lady Elgar quoted him as saying (I paraphrase because I haven't got the right book to hand!) "The trees are singing my music.... or I am singing theirs?". Dream Children and Sospiri have nothing to do with English pastoralism in the truest sense.
Quote from: Roasted Swan on March 25, 2019, 01:02:03 PM
Elgar never wrote any music that could be described as pastoralism. HOWEVER, there are clearly passages influenced by the countryside be it the Woodland Interlude from Caractacus through to the late chamber works written in Sussex where Lady Elgar quoted him as saying (I paraphrase because I haven't got the right book to hand!) "The trees are singing my music.... or I am singing theirs?". Dream Children and Sospiri have nothing to do with English pastoralism in the truest sense.
This is so interesting to me. Where did "English Pastroalistm" come from? It's such a unique and distinctive sound but I'm confused as to its origins.
I think the whole idea of English 'pastoralism' or whatever you want to call it is completely bogus and is something some music historian thought about putting into a book, so hence the phrase was born. In other words, it means absolutely nothing.
Quote from: Roasted Swan on March 25, 2019, 01:02:03 PM
Elgar never wrote any music that could be described as pastoralism. HOWEVER, there are clearly passages influenced by the countryside be it the Woodland Interlude from Caractacus through to the late chamber works written in Sussex where Lady Elgar quoted him as saying (I paraphrase because I haven't got the right book to hand!) "The trees are singing my music.... or I am singing theirs?". Dream Children and Sospiri have nothing to do with English pastoralism in the truest sense.
Yes, not English pastoralism, but at the same time British to its core (which opens another can of worms). Turn that on its head and thinking aloud is there difference between pastoralism and English pastoralism in music? My favourite Beethoven symphony is the 6th, if he happened to have been English would we claim the 6th as the greatest example of English pastoralism? That doesn't work though, as much of Dvorak's music is pastoral in nature and yet it is decidedly Czech and not English. A conundrum.
I certainly know what is meant by "English Pastoralism" but like many categorizations of art, it tends to fall apart in your hands if you try to define it too strictly. Generally I associate it with music depicting verdant countrysides and music derived from folk or vernacular music of the British Isles, Five Variants of 'Dives and Lazarus, Fantasia on Greensleeves, The Lark Ascending, and all that. (I notice that everything that comes to mind is RVW.) Musically it seems to be associated with a lot of open intervals in harmony and a certain kind of dissonance, perhaps related to modal techniques. That is not to say that the British have a monopoly on "pastoralism," just that the British have their own flavor of it, which has something to do with climate and folk traditions in Britten.
Morley: Now is the month of maying
Purcell: King Arthur ("How blest are the shepherds, how happy their lasses" etc., "For Folded Flocks, on Fruitful Plains", "Your hay it is Mow'd, and your Corn is Reap'd")
Handel: Acis & Galathea
:D
Quote from: Mirror Image on March 25, 2019, 05:38:26 PM
I think the whole idea of English 'pastoralism' or whatever you want to call it is completely bogus and is something some music historian thought about putting into a book, so hence the phrase was born. In other words, it means absolutely nothing.
Not so - the term as such may be a neat (potentially flawed in the way that all "neat" collective descriptions are) way of describing a certain style of English music. Yet is was undoubtedly driven by a need in those composers to break free of the perceived musical tyranny of the Austro-Germanic dominance. Hence the "roots" of English music found in Tudor polyphony or folksong allowed that liberation. "Pastoralism" is simply a one word signpost with implies much but can also mislead. The same can be said about just about any musical "-ism". Once you get beyond the basic generalisation of the term caveats, contradictions and exceptions apply
Quite so. Categories are flawed, but we need a vocabulary for talking about music.
No one has mentioned Vaughan Williams Third Symphony? Pastoral with a little dash of Debussy.
Quote from: BasilValentine on March 27, 2019, 03:52:55 AM
No one has mentioned Vaughan Williams Third Symphony? Pastoral with a little dash of Debussy.
Is it though? The title of the third is misleading and the work has nothing to do with English pastoralism. RVW himself described the 3rd as "wartime music". There were no cows looking over a gate in the WW1 battlefields of France.
Quote from: Irons on March 27, 2019, 04:26:52 AM
Is it though? The title of the third is misleading and the work has nothing to do with English pastoralism. RVW himself described the 3rd as "wartime music". There were no cows looking over a gate in the WW1 battlefields of France.
I didn't know cows were required! ;)
I'll have to listen again. It's been a while.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Fourth? That's wartime music.
Interesting article (Originally published in Town and Country, edited by Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton, Jonathan Cape, 1998) by David Matthews :
http://www.david-matthews.co.uk/writings/article.asp?articleid=14
"In the face of this profound melancholy about our future, how can we continue to rejoice? How can we not take refuge in the past? And if we try, in an old-fashioned way, to celebrate the beauty of nature, how can we avoid lapsing into sentimentality?"
Quote from: Irons on March 27, 2019, 04:26:52 AM
Is it though? The title of the third is misleading and the work has nothing to do with English pastoralism. RVW himself described the 3rd as "wartime music". There were no cows looking over a gate in the WW1 battlefields of France.
I seem to recall reading, presumably in the linear notes of some recording or another, that in the case of Vaughan Williams 3rd, "Pastoral" is to be taken in the sense of a clergyman being the "pastor" of his congregation.
Quote from: Irons on March 27, 2019, 08:26:08 AM
Moooo.
I like the description of 'A Pastoral Symphony' as being a musical depiction of 'Vaughan Williams rolling over and over in a ploughed field on a wet day'.
Quote from: BasilValentine on March 27, 2019, 05:41:55 AM
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Fourth? That's wartime music.
No. I extracted the "wartime music" quote from the notes of the Previn recording of the 3rd. Interestingly, Frank Howes said this about the 4th in his book "The English Musical Renaissance" "In 1935 came the more cosmopolitan and uncompromisingly 'modern' (i.e. dissonant) No.4, which bore no ostensible programme but which to some commentators spoke of the violence in European totalitarian politics just as clearly as his No.6 (1948) spoke of war."
"It's really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset. It's not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted."
Ralph Vaughan Williams was talking about one of his most controversial and misunderstood pieces, A Pastoral Symphony, his third, which he completed in 1922. It's easy to see where the confusion comes from: here is that master of nostalgic evocation calling a piece "pastoral", immediately asking audiences to hear it – you'd have thought – as the acme of all things quaintly, gently rustic, the sound of an imagined idyll of English landscape turned into sound.
So perhaps the symphony's mixed reception is partly Vaughan Williams's own fault: had he originally called it simply Symphony No 3, he wouldn't have planted that pastoral seed in the minds of his listeners and his critics. Constant Lambert said that its four movements – nearly all of them slow, lyrical, and strange – have a "particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood [that] outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form".
But it's not just Vaughan Williams's testimony that should make us realise that the landscape of A Pastoral Symphony isn't some Arcadian part of Surrey – if it is about landscape at all, it's rather the blasted terrain of the fields of horror of the first world war. In fact, throughout this symphony there's a disturbing doubleness, in which images and ideas that are usually thought to provide consolation instead suggest emotional instability and ambiguity. The pastoral title is, I think, almost ironic, since what Vaughan Williams is doing in this piece is turning the idea on its head, so that instead of being a source of comfort, this pastoral is instead a confrontation with loss, with lament, with death. And it's also a genuinely adventurous attempt to write a kind of symphony that no-one had attempted so completely before, the secret of which lies in another interpretation of Lambert's idea that the piece rethinks those "exigencies of symphonic form".
More on that later, but first, let's hear the Pastoral as critique of the pastoral. The most obvious wartime memorial in the piece is the trumpet cadenza in the second movement, a dream of a Last Post-like fanfare that drifts into the music's consciousness. In the frame of a pastoral, this military reminiscence is already seemingly out of place, and in fact there's a specific memory that Vaughan Williams is invoking. In that "Corot-like landscape" that he saw during the war: "A bugler used to practise and this sound became part of that evening landscape and is the genesis of the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement of the symphony". You would have thought this obvious reference would have alerted the symphony's early listeners to the real location of this music, in the wake of the First World War, but that's only the clearest of many ways in which the idea of the pastoral is subverted.
More generally, there's the continual elusiveness of the music, something you hear from the start of the first movement. Vaughan Williams's harmonic idiom in this symphony is continually slipping from one tonal centre to another, from one "mode" to another (different divisions of the scale), so that, for all the music's superficially quiescent surface, there's an unsettling feeling to the way the symphony moves. There are melodies and motives you'll certainly recognise and hold in your brain when you're listening to the piece, and there's a network of connections between the main ideas in the piece that stretches across all four movements. Yet moment by moment, Vaughan Williams makes the ground slide beneath your ears, so to speak: and it's not just the harmony, it's the music's hauntingly subtle orchestration, too, in which instrumental timbres seem to melt into one another.
Even the third movement, which functions as a kind of scherzo in the symphony, manages to throw you off balance with its lopsided dance rhythms, and especially the weightless music of Mendelssohn-like gossamer that ends the movement, suspending you in the ether rather than placing down on the earth. But the final movement is the quintessence of the symphony, with yet more slow, subtly tortured music framed by two solos from a wordless soprano, marked "distant" in the score, and often performed offstage. As Daniel Grimley shows in a brilliant essay on A Pastoral Symphony, this solo line moves from "relative stability to complete harmonic ambiguity". And yet, the effect in performance is singularly devastating. After the symphony has wrenched itself to its most insistent and loudest climax, the music's return to this lamenting song for the soprano is all the more moving. It is the sound of absence somehow made present, music that echoes with the lives lost in those French fields, and it's the distillation of a pastoral symphony that's really an anti-pastoral.
Which finally bring us back to Constant Lambert: in situating his symphony in this mode of slow, reflective concentration, Vaughan Williams risked forfeiting this piece's "symphonic" credentials. Yet in its "critique and reimagining of the pastoral", as Grimley has it, Vaughan Williams not only vindicated his personal vision, and the pain of his wartime experiences, but achieved a new idea of the symphony, too.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/11/symphony-guide-vaughan-williams-pastoral-symphony
Quote from: pjme on March 28, 2019, 01:22:44 AM
"It's really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset. It's not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted."
Ralph Vaughan Williams was talking about one of his most controversial and misunderstood pieces, A Pastoral Symphony, his third, which he completed in 1922. It's easy to see where the confusion comes from: here is that master of nostalgic evocation calling a piece "pastoral", immediately asking audiences to hear it – you'd have thought – as the acme of all things quaintly, gently rustic, the sound of an imagined idyll of English landscape turned into sound.
So perhaps the symphony's mixed reception is partly Vaughan Williams's own fault: had he originally called it simply Symphony No 3, he wouldn't have planted that pastoral seed in the minds of his listeners and his critics. Constant Lambert said that its four movements – nearly all of them slow, lyrical, and strange – have a "particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood [that] outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form".
But it's not just Vaughan Williams's testimony that should make us realise that the landscape of A Pastoral Symphony isn't some Arcadian part of Surrey – if it is about landscape at all, it's rather the blasted terrain of the fields of horror of the first world war. In fact, throughout this symphony there's a disturbing doubleness, in which images and ideas that are usually thought to provide consolation instead suggest emotional instability and ambiguity. The pastoral title is, I think, almost ironic, since what Vaughan Williams is doing in this piece is turning the idea on its head, so that instead of being a source of comfort, this pastoral is instead a confrontation with loss, with lament, with death. And it's also a genuinely adventurous attempt to write a kind of symphony that no-one had attempted so completely before, the secret of which lies in another interpretation of Lambert's idea that the piece rethinks those "exigencies of symphonic form".
More on that later, but first, let's hear the Pastoral as critique of the pastoral. The most obvious wartime memorial in the piece is the trumpet cadenza in the second movement, a dream of a Last Post-like fanfare that drifts into the music's consciousness. In the frame of a pastoral, this military reminiscence is already seemingly out of place, and in fact there's a specific memory that Vaughan Williams is invoking. In that "Corot-like landscape" that he saw during the war: "A bugler used to practise and this sound became part of that evening landscape and is the genesis of the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement of the symphony". You would have thought this obvious reference would have alerted the symphony's early listeners to the real location of this music, in the wake of the First World War, but that's only the clearest of many ways in which the idea of the pastoral is subverted.
More generally, there's the continual elusiveness of the music, something you hear from the start of the first movement. Vaughan Williams's harmonic idiom in this symphony is continually slipping from one tonal centre to another, from one "mode" to another (different divisions of the scale), so that, for all the music's superficially quiescent surface, there's an unsettling feeling to the way the symphony moves. There are melodies and motives you'll certainly recognise and hold in your brain when you're listening to the piece, and there's a network of connections between the main ideas in the piece that stretches across all four movements. Yet moment by moment, Vaughan Williams makes the ground slide beneath your ears, so to speak: and it's not just the harmony, it's the music's hauntingly subtle orchestration, too, in which instrumental timbres seem to melt into one another.
Even the third movement, which functions as a kind of scherzo in the symphony, manages to throw you off balance with its lopsided dance rhythms, and especially the weightless music of Mendelssohn-like gossamer that ends the movement, suspending you in the ether rather than placing down on the earth. But the final movement is the quintessence of the symphony, with yet more slow, subtly tortured music framed by two solos from a wordless soprano, marked "distant" in the score, and often performed offstage. As Daniel Grimley shows in a brilliant essay on A Pastoral Symphony, this solo line moves from "relative stability to complete harmonic ambiguity". And yet, the effect in performance is singularly devastating. After the symphony has wrenched itself to its most insistent and loudest climax, the music's return to this lamenting song for the soprano is all the more moving. It is the sound of absence somehow made present, music that echoes with the lives lost in those French fields, and it's the distillation of a pastoral symphony that's really an anti-pastoral.
Which finally bring us back to Constant Lambert: in situating his symphony in this mode of slow, reflective concentration, Vaughan Williams risked forfeiting this piece's "symphonic" credentials. Yet in its "critique and reimagining of the pastoral", as Grimley has it, Vaughan Williams not only vindicated his personal vision, and the pain of his wartime experiences, but achieved a new idea of the symphony, too.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/11/symphony-guide-vaughan-williams-pastoral-symphony
Excellent posting *****
Quote from: Irons on March 28, 2019, 08:11:19 AM
Indeed it is.
Yes, I agree. Michael Kennedy considered it Vaughan Williams's greatest symphony although I wouldn't go that far myself.
Quote from: vandermolen on March 28, 2019, 10:33:08 AM
Yes, I agree. Michael Kennedy considered it Vaughan Williams's greatest symphony although I wouldn't go that far myself.
The most misunderstood perhaps. I listen to the 3rd as much if not more then the others at the present time. That does not make it the greatest though. I listen to the 8th repeatedly too. The 2nd and 7th not so much, and the 1st never. The deservedly most popular being 5th and 6th.
Quote from: Irons on March 28, 2019, 11:16:55 AM
The most misunderstood perhaps. I listen to the 3rd as much if not more then the others at the present time. That does not make it the greatest though. I listen to the 8th repeatedly too. The 2nd and 7th not so much, and the 1st never. The deservedly most popular being 5th and 6th.
I also often listen to No.8 - possibly the most underrated of them all. It was the symphony which Boult chose to perform on VW's 100th birthday concert 12/10/1972 at the Festival Hall.
The time I have available for listening to music makes it hard for me to listen to these works often enough to feel I know them well, but except for 1 and 7 and find myself equally attracted to all of them (especially now that I "get" #3 after listening to Previn's marvelous recording). I think I actually started with 8 and 9, listening to the Haitink disc.
Herbert Howells' (a close namesake; not Herbert I hasten to add!) "In Gloucestershire" is a very fine example of English pastoralism. It must be difficult to depict the English countryside with a string quartet and without the colour of instruments of an orchestra. Howells achieves this splendidly, the only similar SQ I can think of is Delius (Late Swallows).
I listen to Nos 2, 3 & 5 the most and Nos 1, 8 & 9 the least with Nos 4, 6 & 7 somewhere in the middle. I probably, over the years, have listened to Job (with its pastoral episodes) as often any of the symphonies.
Quote from: Irons on March 29, 2019, 12:48:07 AM
Herbert Howells' (a close namesake; not Herbert I hasten to add!) "In Gloucestershire" is a very fine example of English pastoralism. It must be difficult to depict the English countryside with a string quartet and without the colour of instruments of an orchestra. Howells achieves this splendidly, the only similar SQ I can think of is Delius (Late Swallows).
My last exposure to Howells was some of his music for string orchestra, which I was sort of luke-warm to. I should try that string quartet.
Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on March 29, 2019, 07:52:22 AM
My last exposure to Howells was some of his music for string orchestra, which I was sort of luke-warm to. I should try that string quartet.
I think I know the piece you are referring to. I was not over-keen either. Howells composed much choral music later in life which is not my thing really. I was not expecting too much from "In Gloucestershire" (see Purchases Today thread) as circumstances did not bode well. An early work (1916) of which Howells managed to lose the parts on a train journey! There have been numerous versions since but none performed. In 1930 the work stood "in manuscript, with no slow movement and an illegible finale". Instead of a dogs dinner I was expecting, I listened to a highly coherent string quartet very well performed and recorded. Recommended.
Had to check my notes to refresh my memory.
The concerto for string orchestra actually made a very good impression, particularly for a poignant central slow movement. The Elegy for Viola and orchestra likewise made a good impression. (Hickox recording on Chandos) The Serenade and First Suite for Strings were disappointments, and I the second piano concerto was likewise so-so.
I wouldn't say these pieces are overtly "pastoral" but the whole tradition of 20th century English music for string orchestra (with the prevalence of modal writing and dissonance in a contrapuntal context) seems to be i the same tradition.
I think my favorite piece by Howells may be the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (Thea King with Clifford Benson on Hyperion).
Review by John France here http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/May01/Howells_Dyson.htm
Sometimes called "the English Hindemith" I was both surprised and delighted to discover a recording of Arnold Cooke's "The Seamew", a work that is most pastoral in nature. There are similarities with Peter Warlock's wonderful "The Curlew". Both use the bird of the title as a symbol for deep emotions. Also both are written for voice and augmented string quartet.
The work is made up by three songs, two short, "The Swallows" and "The Empty Cage" either side of the much longer "The Seamew" The first verse of the middle movement gives a flavour of the work -
I heard the seamew's plaintive cry,
And shuddered, scarcely knowing why.
How strange the trick's that memory plays
When we invoke our distant days!
A scent, a sound, a touch, a tear,
They fill the heart with joy or fear.
The past is broidered on the mind
As on some fine-spun silken blind.
Not great poetry by any stretch but a meaningful setting for Cooke's music.
The Meridian recording is outstanding. "Recorded at Eltham College, London, using a Kudelski Nagra 4S tape recorder, an AKG C24 Microphone and Agfa PEM 468 magnetic tape".
(https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/TMEAAOSwo4pYmCPT/s-l300.jpg)
Quote from: Irons on April 10, 2019, 12:02:04 AM
Sometimes called "the English Hindemith"
As an admirer of Arnold Cooke's music, I'm always a bit ambivalent about this comparison with Hindemith: in the heart of Cooke's music you'll always find a lyricism that makes her anything but businesslike or abstract. Didn't know about this recording of the 'Seamew' (nor about the existence of the Saxon word "mew" for gull, for that matter, though it's obviously the same word as "Möwe" in German or "meeuw" in Dutch :)). ;D
Quote from: Irons on March 29, 2019, 12:48:07 AM
Herbert Howells' (a close namesake; not Herbert I hasten to add!) "In Gloucestershire" is a very fine example of English pastoralism. It must be difficult to depict the English countryside with a string quartet and without the colour of instruments of an orchestra. Howells achieves this splendidly, the only similar SQ I can think of is Delius (Late Swallows).
I've nearly addressed you as 'Jeremy' on a couple of occasions! 8)
Hymnus Paradisi is one of my all-time favourite works and much as I enjoy his other music it has not made a great impression on me.
Quote from: vandermolen on April 10, 2019, 01:13:40 AM
I've nearly addressed you as 'Jeremy' on a couple of occasions! 8)
Hymnus Paradisi is one of my all-time favourite works and much as I enjoy his other music it has not made a great impression on me.
Call me what you like, Jeffrey. My family and close friends have called me "Lol" for ever. As you can imagine in the social media age we now live in this moniker has led to some confusion. On the other hand........ :laugh:
Quote from: Christo on April 10, 2019, 12:18:05 AM
As an admirer of Arnold Cooke's music, I'm always a bit ambivalent about this comparison with Hindemith: in the heart of Cooke's music you'll always find a lyricism that makes her anything but businesslike or abstract. Didn't know about this recording of the 'Seamew' (nor about the existence of the Saxon word "mew" for gull, for that matter, though it's obviously the same word as "Möwe" in German or "meeuw" in Dutch :)). ;D
Excellent. The only other recording I have by Cooke is a Lyrita of 3rd Symphony coupled with the suite of Jabez and the Devil. Thanks for explanation of source of "seamew". All the notes inform is that "Seamew" is a generic term for a seabird.
Quote from: Irons on April 10, 2019, 06:47:21 AM
Call me what you like, Jeffrey. My family and close friends have called me "Lol" for ever. As you can imagine in the social media age we now live in this moniker has led to some confusion. On the other hand........ :laugh:
OT
LOL Lol 8)
I like the Herman Hesse quote as well. Narziss and Goldmund was an influential book in my student days. I've always admired his writings.
Quote from: Irons on April 10, 2019, 07:02:14 AM
Excellent. The only other recording I have by Cooke is a Lyrita of 3rd Symphony coupled with the suite of Jabez and the Devil. Thanks for explanation of source of "seamew". All the notes inform is that "Seamew" is a generic term for a seabird.
The first one will be the 'old' Lyrita LP; on CD the coupling is
Symphony No. 1 with the
Jabez and the Devil Suite,
Symphony No. 3 has been coupled with Havergal Brian's 6th and 16th symphonies (I love both CD's).
As to "mew" meaning gull or seabird in general: both options could be equally valid; Amsterdam slang distinguishes between two types of birds only:
sèssies and
drèfsèssies (roughly translated as
birdies and
floating-birdies). ;)
Quote from: vandermolen on April 10, 2019, 07:38:47 AM
OT
LOL Lol 8)
I like the Herman Hesse quote as well. Narziss and Goldmund was an influential book in my student days. I've always admired his writings.
I would like to have used the complete quote but, of course, not enough room:
At once, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish metal funnel spat out, without more ado, its mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of the gramophone and radio sets are prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble outline of that divine music.The sort of thing that an enthusiastic CD collector would say about the humble LP. :laugh:
What would you say is the last (or one of the last) works of the English Pastoral style? I assume no one writes this way now, right? It's pretty much between the great wars. Sometimes I'll hear it in a film but in that case it's a period film evoking a time and place.
Quote from: relm1 on April 11, 2019, 06:01:14 AM
What would you say is the last (or one of the last) works of the English Pastoral style? I assume no one writes this way now, right? It's pretty much between the great wars. Sometimes I'll hear it in a film but in that case it's a period film evoking a time and place.
I think you have answered your own question. It is still being produced as film music.
I was tempted to say Howells and Hadley were the last gasp - not sure how much orchestral music Howells wrote post-war.
I have a few pieces in my collection that might qualify.
Tarn Hows by Maurice Johnstone written in 1949;
The Path across the Moors by Arthur Butterworth (1958) but not much else comes to mind. Britten took an interest in folk music but I don't think he used it in his later works.
Quote from: relm1 on April 11, 2019, 06:01:14 AM
What would you say is the last (or one of the last) works of the English Pastoral style? I assume no one writes this way now, right? It's pretty much between the great wars. Sometimes I'll hear it in a film but in that case it's a period film evoking a time and place.
Not sure if this is addressed to me but the slow movement 'Cavatina' of Vaughan Williams's 8th Symphony comes to mind (mid 1950s). Here it is in an unusual Soviet performance:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUDglGA0L4
Oh, this crossed with Biffo's post and I agree with his comments as well.
Quote from: vandermolen on April 11, 2019, 06:43:19 AM
Not sure if this is addressed to me but the slow movement 'Cavatina' of Vaughan Williams's 8th Symphony comes to mind (mid 1950s). Here it is in an unusual Soviet performance:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EGUDglGA0L4
Oh, this crossed with Biffo's post and I agree with his comments as well.
I sort of think of RVW as the poster child/father of English Pastoralism but this isn't so much because he first/last did it but because he exemplifies what it is. An English version of French impressionism of sorts. RVW having French roots is very important to his sound though he made it individual. I think English Pastoralism is English Impressionism. Not quite French but has some of the same characteristics. I do believe Impressionism influence extends to today but not quite sure about English Pastoralism.
Quote from: relm1 on April 11, 2019, 04:06:27 PM
I sort of think of RVW as the poster child/father of English Pastoralism but this isn't so much because he first/last did it but because he exemplifies what it is. An English version of French impressionism of sorts. RVW having French roots is very important to his sound though he made it individual. I think English Pastoralism is English Impressionism. Not quite French but has some of the same characteristics. I do believe Impressionism influence extends to today but not quite sure about English Pastoralism.
A good summery well put. I agree with much you say including the last sentence. I do need to be convinced that English Pastoralism is a form of French Impressionism though. As in all music there is some cross-pollination but I think they originated from a different source and stand apart.
Quote from: relm1 on April 11, 2019, 04:06:27 PM
I sort of think of RVW as the poster child/father of English Pastoralism but this isn't so much because he first/last did it but because he exemplifies what it is. An English version of French impressionism of sorts. RVW having French roots is very important to his sound though he made it individual. I think English Pastoralism is English Impressionism. Not quite French but has some of the same characteristics. I do believe Impressionism influence extends to today but not quite sure about English Pastoralism.
Very interesting point as is Irons's post responding to it. I'll have to give some thought to the difference, if one exists, between 'Pastoralism' and 'Impressionism' in the context of English music.
Quote from: vandermolen on April 12, 2019, 12:08:40 AM
Very interesting point as is Irons's post responding to it. I'll have to give some thought to the difference, if one exists, between 'Pastoralism' and 'Impressionism' in the context of English music.
To muddy the waters a bit more, while this thread has been progressing I have been pondering the difference between pastoralism and landscape. Several works already mentioned are really landscapes -
In the Fen Country, North Country Sketches, Tarn Hows - and bleak ones at that, not really 'pastoral' as I interpret the OP to mean. There are also several fine seascapes - Bridge, Britten, Bax etc. All these
possibly are better described as Impressionist influenced.
As to other influences, while listening recently to Barbirolli recordings of Delius
A Song of Summer I thought it owed as much to Wagner's Forest Murmurs as any English or French models. But, as I said earlier I don't really think of Delius as an 'English' composer.
To test the water, if RVW had written "Gigues" would it sound the same?
Quote from: Irons on April 12, 2019, 07:03:34 AM
To test the water, if RVW had written "Gigues" would it sound the same?
Probably not, it would have sounded more like his teacher, Ravel.
Quote from: Irons on April 12, 2019, 07:03:34 AM
To test the water, if RVW had written "Gigues" would it sound the same?
Actually, he
did write a
Gigues:
https://www.youtube.com/v/tgBHr3z-jlg
Quote from: Biffo on April 12, 2019, 12:59:32 AM
To muddy the waters a bit more, while this thread has been progressing I have been pondering the difference between pastoralism and landscape. Several works already mentioned are really landscapes - In the Fen Country, North Country Sketches, Tarn Hows - and bleak ones at that, not really 'pastoral' as I interpret the OP to mean. There are also several fine seascapes - Bridge, Britten, Bax etc. All these possibly are better described as Impressionist influenced.
As to other influences, while listening recently to Barbirolli recordings of Delius A Song of Summer I thought it owed as much to Wagner's Forest Murmurs as any English or French models. But, as I said earlier I don't really think of Delius as an 'English' composer.
I think of Delius as English. And having just finished listening to a work by him which I think fits very well into the Pastoral despite its ostensible subject. So perhaps the best resolution is along the lines of the idea that Pastoralism is linked to Impressionism in some way.
The work in question btw is Paris Song of a Great City.
Quote from: Christo on April 12, 2019, 11:13:11 AM
Actually, he did write a Gigues:
https://www.youtube.com/v/tgBHr3z-jlg
Thanks for link. Listening, this come to mind. ;D https://youtu.be/1knSQRRee3I
Quote from: Irons on April 13, 2019, 12:28:09 AM
Thanks for link. Listening, this come to mind. ;D https://youtu.be/1knSQRRee3I
:D (Yes, remember it). I forgot another 'Gigues/Jig', namely the
Finale of the marvelous (1947)
Suite for Pipes:
https://www.youtube.com/v/KVisNSu-APA
Quote from: Biffo on April 12, 2019, 12:59:32 AM
To muddy the waters a bit more, while this thread has been progressing I have been pondering the difference between pastoralism and landscape. Several works already mentioned are really landscapes - In the Fen Country, North Country Sketches, Tarn Hows - and bleak ones at that, not really 'pastoral' as I interpret the OP to mean. There are also several fine seascapes - Bridge, Britten, Bax etc. All these possibly are better described as Impressionist influenced.
As to other influences, while listening recently to Barbirolli recordings of Delius A Song of Summer I thought it owed as much to Wagner's Forest Murmurs as any English or French models. But, as I said earlier I don't really think of Delius as an 'English' composer.
Fascinating point. I think of English pastoralism as representing the tranquility of the English countryside in its various incarnations (sunrise, dusk, morning fog, maybe animals grazing, etc). They are meditative in nature, almost like a shepherd watching his flock. Landscapes are terse. Cliffs, Jagged coastlines, the northern winds, frequent swells, etc., more Sibelius, Bax, and Arthur Butterworth. Less Delius, Vaughan Williams, and Finzi. All these composers do inhabit both soundscapes from time to time, but there is a general association. For example, RVW can be very craggy but he has purity in his pastoralism to which I think he is most identified with which is why at premieres of his 4th, they fair less well because there is a sonic expectation of what the composer will create.
I think generalisations are tricky. As RVW said of the "Pastoral" "not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted".
Quote from: Irons on April 15, 2019, 11:30:41 PM
I think generalisations are tricky. As RVW said of the "Pastoral" "not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted".
Indeed. I believe Vaughan Williams thought of the
Pastoral Symphony as some kind of memorial or elegy for the slain soldiers that he knew personally, but also a quest for peace and for things to be restored as they once were. I think by the time he got to
Symphony No. 4, it is clear that the world that he yearned for would never come back and there's simply nothing he could do about it. There was also some turmoil in his personal life after this time that also played a part in it I'm sure.