A Child of Our Time

Abstract

It is not only in the painting and writing of the forties that a continuity and development of Romanticism is clear; it is apparent too in music. In a sense it is impossible to compare English music of the twentieth century with earlier English Romantic music since, at the time of the great explosion of Romanticism in European music, England still had few composers of stature. Yet in another sense the tradition of English music that developed in the present century is rooted very firmly in a longer tradition of English art and thought which may be termed Romantic, concerned as it is with fundamental relationships between humanity and the natural world, either through a modal style which is drawn from the idioms of folk music or through settings of texts which stress this relationship.