English Pastoralism

[Irons]

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.

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

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.

[Jo498]

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 

[Roasted Swan]

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

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

Quite so. Categories are flawed, but we need a vocabulary for talking about music.

[BasilValentine]

No one has mentioned Vaughan Williams Third Symphony? Pastoral with a little dash of Debussy.

[Irons]

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.

[BasilValentine]

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.

[pjme]

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?"

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

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.

[Irons]

I didn't know cows were required!

Moooo.

[vandermolen]

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'.

[Irons]

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."

[pjme]

"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

[Biffo]

"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 *****

[Irons]

Excellent posting *****

Indeed it is.

[vandermolen]

Indeed it is.

Yes, I agree. Michael Kennedy considered it Vaughan Williams's greatest symphony although I wouldn't go that far myself.

[Irons]

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.

[vandermolen]

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.

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

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.