Abstract
Musical life in Britain between the wars underwent enormous change. The period saw the coming of age of the gramophone and the cinema, and the birth and rapid development of radio broadcasting. (Television also made an early start — Albert Coates’s Pickwick was the first opera to be televised in Britain, in 1936 — but did not develop broadly until after World War II.) The introduction of electrical recording in 1926 set the gramophone companies on a firm footing, and Elgar’s late use of the medium for making recorded performances of his own works and his relation with Fred Gaisberg of the Gramophone Company (HMV) provide a fragment of British musical history to compensate in some measure for the general creative decline of his last decade.1 The cinema provided employment for thousands of instrumental musicians and organists during its silent heyday in the 1920s and laid them off overnight when the ‘talkies’ arrived; where they all went to is a mystery.2 Broadcasting supported sectors of the musical profession almost from the start: the BBC took over the ailing Promenade Concerts in 1927 and enabled Henry Wood not only to provide a summer music festival for Londoners but to make it available to all those elsewhere who possessed wireless sets. The BBC Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1930 with Adrian Boult as conductor (Boult, and later Bliss, were to become music directors of the BBC).
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Notes
J. N. Moore, Elgar on Record: the Composer and the Gramophone (London, 1974).
C. Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: a Social History (Oxford, 1985).
R. Graves and A. Hodge, The Long Weekend: a Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London, 1940).
I. Whitcomb, After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock (London, 1972), 172.
D. Godfrey, Memories and Music (London, 1924); see list of his performances.
J. Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: the Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London, 1977).
Repr. in A. Bliss, As I Remember (London, 1970), 248–55.
J. Longmire, John Ireland: Portrait of a Friend (London, 1969), 20.
E. M. Forster, Collected Short Stories (Harmondsworth, 1954), 86.
Ivor Gurney: War Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester, 1983), 262.
H. Howells, ‘Vaughan Williams’s “Pastoral” Symphony’, ML, iii (1922), 127.
U. Vaughan Williams, R. V. W.: a Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford, 1964), 121.
P. Fussell, ‘Arcadian Recourses’, in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London, 1975), 231.
W. Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (London, 1963).
A. Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (London, 1960), 148.
F. Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1966), 160.
S. Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century (Cambridge, 1985), i, 265.
M. Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1964, 3/1980), 245.
S. Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London, 1976).
M. Kennedy, Britten (London, 1981), 13.
D. Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties: the Year 1936 (London, 1981), 19.
Bibliographical Note General Background
The history of Britain in the period is voluminously covered in A. J. P. Taylor, English History: 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965; Harmondsworth, 1970),
or at shorter length in H. Pelling, Modern Britain 1885–1955 (London, 1960),
and D. Thomson: England in the Twentieth Century, The Pelican History of England, ix (Harmondsworth, 1965).
None of these books has much to say about culture and the arts. For those topics one might turn first to R. Graves and A. Hodge, The Long Weekend: a Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London, 1940), for an entertaining account of the social background;
then to J. Montgomery, The Twenties (London, 1957);
D. Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties (London, 1945);
M. Muggeridge, The Thirties (London, 1940)
and J. Symon, The Thirties (London, 1960).
Further general reading might include C. L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars 1918–1940 (London, 1968);
L. C. B. Seaman, Post-Victorian Britain 1902–1951 (London, 1968)
and the study text, S. Constantine’s Social Conditions in Britain 1918–1939 (London, 1983).
For the relationship of art and life, P. Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London, 1975) cannot be bettered;
on a different topic, there is S. Hynes’s The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London, 1976).
Music’s public face is dealt with in J. Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: the Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London, 1977);
C. Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: a Social History (Oxford, 1985);
and A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (1961- ), this last a dull, multi-volume affair.
D. Russell’s recent Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: a Social History (Manchester, 1987) awaits its twentieth-century sequel,
but I. Whitcomb’s After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock (London, 1972) covers much ground entertainingly.
Music
The standard history of British music in the period is still F. Howes’s The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1966).
Its pro-establishment bias is ineffectually countered in P. Pirie’s book of the same title (London, 1979). The sixth volume of the Blackwell History of Music in Britain, The Twentieth Century, is in preparation. British Music of Our Time (Harmondsworth, 1946), a little book edited by A. L. Bacharach, is still worth reading,
while The Mirror of Music: 1844–1944: a Century of Musical Life in Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the ‘Musical Times’, ed. P. Scholes, 2 vols. (London, 1947) is an encyclopedic reference work.
S. Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1985), deals with most of the composers of the period and with much of the background,
as does Lewis Foreman, From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900–1945 (London, 1987), in its refreshing anthology format.
Foremost among essays is C. Lambert: Music Ho!: a Study of Music in Decline (London, 1934, 3/1966);
see also R. Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays (Oxford, 1963, 2/1987),
and the various volumes of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand!, particularly Laughter in the Next Room (London, 1948).
Composers who wrote informative autobiographies include Bliss, Lutyens and Goossens, in As I Remember (London, 1970),
A Goldfish Bowl (London, 1972)
and Overture and Beginners (London, 1951) respectively.
Bax’s autobiography, Farewell, My Youth (London, 1943), is splendid but stops before the First World War.
For coverage of individual composers, Grove6 is a first recourse; The New Grove 20th-century English Masters (London, 1986) has been published as an updated offprint. British Composers in Interview (1963), ed. R. Murray Schafer (London, 1963), is stimulating and sometimes revealing.
A. Whittall’s The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques (Cambridge, 1982, 2/1990), is a formidable and all-too-rare comparative study.
Informative books on individual composers include Lewis Foreman: Bax: a Composer and his Times (London, 1983);
M. Hurd, Immortal Hour: the Life and Period of Rutland Boughton (London, 1962);
P. Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979);
D. Mitchell, Britten and Auden in the Thirties: the Year 1936 (London, 1981);
J. Laongmire, John Ireland: Portrait of a Friend (London, 1969);
R. Shead, Constant Lambert: his Life, his Music, and his Friends (London, 1973);
I. Kemp, Tippett: the Composer and his Music (London, 1984);
M. Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1964, 3/1980);
and U. Vaughan Williams: R. V. W.: a Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford, 1964).
Several books set to become standard sources have recently appeared or made their mark. Some take their place to a greater or lesser extent within established modes of writing and scholarship; such are Tippett’s autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues (London, 1991),
Letters from a Life: the Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten: 1913–1976, ed. D. Mitchell, 2 vols (London, 1991),
M. Kennedy, Portrait of Walton (Oxford and New York, 1989),
M. and S. Harries, A Pilgrim Soul: the Life and Works of Elisabeth Lutyens (London, 1989),
and C. Palmer, Herbert Howells: a Centenary Celebration (London, 1992).
Others, however, bear witness to an increasingly contextual or deconstructive approach to artistic creation. Susana Walton’s William Walton: Behind the Façade (Oxford and New York, 1988) chronicles the dynamics of creativity within a marriage,
A. Motion’s The Lamberts: George, Constant & Kit (London, 1986) those within a family,
and H. Carpenter’s Benjamin Britten: a Biography (London, 1992) epitomizes the ‘whole truth’ approach.
Ehrlich’s Harmonious Allegiance: a History of the Performing Right Society (Oxford and New York, 1989) furthers his work on the socio-economics of British musical life,
and M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981) offers the broadest possible contextual trajectory along which British music may be seen to have travelled throughout the period.
Above all, music as a cultural signifier has moved from the margins to the centre of some historians’ agendas. The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983) includes an essay by D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: the British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–1977’,
which highlights music and lies behind J. Crump’s chapter on ‘The Identity of English Music: the Reception of Elgar 1898–1935’ in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. R. Colls and P. Dodd (London, 1986);
the critical stance towards the creation of national identities taken by these authors is furthered in the chapters on Elgar, Delius, and Hoist and Vaughan Williams (by M. Hughes, R. Stradling and P. Harrington respectively) in Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. C. Norris (London, 1989).
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Banfield, S. (1993). England, 1918–45. In: Morgan, R.P. (eds) Modern Times. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11291-3_9
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