1 Julian Herbage, ‘Sir Arnold Bax’, British Music of our Time, ed. Alfred Louis Bacharach (London,1946), 113–29 (p. 115).

2 Lewis Foreman, Bax: A Composer and his Times (3rd, rev. edn, London, 2007), 126.

3 Edwin Evans, ‘Arnold Bax’, Musical Quarterly, 9 (1923), 167–80 (p. 173).

4 Ernest Newman, ‘BBC Concert’, Sunday Times, 21 February 1937, 7.

5 Following the 1931 recording by the Marie Wilson String Quartet (Marie Wilson, Gwendolen Higham, Anne Wolfe, Phyllis Hasluck) on the National Gramophonic Society label (ref. 153–55), the Griller Quartet was the second ensemble to record this work, in 1941 (reissued on Dutton CDBP 9762); they were succeeded by the English String Quartet on Chandos (CHAN 8391W) in 1984, and the Maggini Quartet on Naxos (8.555282) in 2001. The early performance history of the quartet can be summarized as follows: after the première of the work on 7 June 1918 by the Philharmonic String Quartet, the work was taken up by the Kruse String Quartet (14 January 1922, London); a further, unidentified group as part of the Goossens chamber concerts in 1923; a quartet led by Jean Pougnet on 4 July 1923 at the Royal Academy of Music (one movement only); the Yorkshire String Quartet (Sheffield, 1927); and the Kutcher String Quartet (21 November 1930): see ‘A Week's Music in London in War-Time’, Musical Times, 59 (1918), 324; ‘Chamber Music’, ibid., 63 (1922), 116; ‘Goossens Chamber Concerts’ and ‘Royal Academy of Music’, ibid., 64 (1923), 202–3 (p. 202) and 570; ‘Music in the Provinces’, ibid., 68 (1927), 362–4 (p. 364); and ‘London Contemporary Music Centre’, Musical Mirror, 10 (1930), 340. Two additional performances – those by the Flonzaley Quartet on 20 October 1922 in the Bradford subscription chamber concerts and by the Hirsch Quartet on 1 March 1933 – are of particular interest, as both were timed by the critic Herbert Thompson, at 24 and 23½ minutes respectively; see the annotated miniature score (published in London in 1921 by Murdoch Murdoch & Company), GB-LEbc MUSIC E-5 Bax.

6 Foreman, Bax, 176.

7 Letter from Bax to Elgar dated 3 March 1921, transcribed in Percy Young, Elgar O.M.: A Study of a Musician (London, 1973), 214.

8 See Farewell, my Youth and Other Writings by Arnold Bax, ed. Lewis Foreman (Aldershot, 1992), 26.

9 See Farewell, my Youth and Other Writings by Arnold Bax, ed. Lewis Foreman (Aldershot, 1992), 23.

10 Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 25.

11 Undated letter from Bax to Richard Tildesley, quoted in Foreman, Bax, 359.

12 ‘A British School of Composers’, Musical Herald, 810 (September 1915), 400–1 (p. 400).

13 See Bax's introduction to the programme for the Elgar Festival, Royal Albert Hall, 30 May – 15 June 1949, 2–5, reproduced as ‘Sir Edward Elgar’, Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 123–7 (pp. 124, 127).

14 Ibid., 125.

15 Ibid., 126.

16 Letter from Bax to Philip Heseltine, GB-Lbl Add. MS 538091, transcribed in Foreman, Bax, 139.

17 Recent studies of the significance of march movements in Beethoven and Tchaikovsky include Joseph C. Kraus, ‘Tonal Plan and Narrative Plot in Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 5 in E minor’, Music Theory Spectrum, 15 (1991), 21–47; Lawrence Kramer, ‘The Harem Threshold: Turkish Music and Greek Love in Beethoven's “Ode to Joy”’, 19th-Century Music, 21 (1997–8), 78–90; Timothy Jackson, Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 (Pathétique) (Cambridge, 1999), 45–50; and Rita Steblin, ‘Who Died? The Funeral March in Beethoven's Eroica Symphony’, Musical Quarterly, 89 (2006), 62–79.

18 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations and Annotations (London, 1985), 360.

19 For a discussion of this march in the context of British colonial rule, see Nalini Ghuman, ‘Elgar and the British Raj: Can the Mughals March?’, Edward Elgar and his World, ed. Byron Adams (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 249–86.

20 See the letter from Elgar to Ernest Newman, dated 4 November 1908, referring to the opening march theme of his First Symphony as ‘the sort of ideal call (in the sense of persuasion, not coercion or command) & something above everyday & sordid things’, transcribed in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime (Oxford, 1990), 199–200. Recent discussions of the opening march in relation to the symphony's structure and extramusical associations include Julian Rushton, ‘In Search of the Symphony: Orchestral Music to 1908’, The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (Cambridge 2004), 146–53; Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Elgar and Chivalry’, 19th-Century Music, 28 (2004–5), 259–67; and J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge, 2006), 65–106. Rushton, ‘Edward Elgar’, Music and Musicians, 22 (1973–4), 18–21 (pp. 20–1), also highlights ‘the invasion of the symphonic argument by the music of ritual, or ceremonial – the march, or a demonic distortion of it’ as a unifying feature of Elgar's Second Symphony – and places this within the wider context of the ‘absorption of the commonplace into otherwise quite disparate works of great seriousness and elaboration of language’ prior to the First World War: ‘the cabaret behind Pierrot lunaire; Mahler's cuckoos and trumpets; the [Richard] Strauss waltz; the street tunes of Petrushka; innumerable references in Debussy. Mahler particularly made music of extremely complex technical and emotional organisation out of simple dance metres, waltz and landler; the equivalent in Elgar is the march whose sinister shadow falls over the E flat Symphony.’

21 Bax, ‘Sir Edward Elgar’, 126. See also Bax's account of this concert in the foreword to the prospectus for the 1951 season of Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, reproduced in ‘The Proms’, Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 108–9: ‘The hall was inspissated (a word at one time dear to musical critics and ever associated with “gloom”) by one of London's most masterly fogs. The contrast between those slowly shifting nebulous veils choking the audience and the blare and glare of Elgarian brass was never to be forgotten. The famous and now much debated tune was greeted by thunders of applause’ (p. 108).

22 GB-Lbl Add. MS 54769.

23 See Graham Parlett, A Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax (Oxford, 1999), 219.

24 Parlett (ibid., 231) notes that Bax later reused the tune of this last ‘March’ as the trio of the Victory March (1945) and Coronation March (1952).

25 See, for example, the instrumental passage on p. 12 of the vocal score (London, 1909).

26 One might highlight, for example, the material at letter A, letter B, five bars after B, two bars before letter G, three bars after J, and a quick march nine bars after L.

27 The subsequent material at letter L is not dissimilar to the preparation for Henry V's coronation march in Elgar's Falstaff; the paragraph from five bars after letter P in the first movement, Allegro con moto, might also suggest a march approaching from distance, with varying reiterations of a descending bass pattern, followed by the entry of the tenor drum at letter Q and its gradual crescendo.

28 Hence Elgar's reference to a ‘conquering (subduing) idea’ in his own symphony; see Elgar's letter to Ernest Newman, 4 November 1908, transcribed in Moore, Edward Elgar, 199–200. One might also cite parallels with the triumphal march at the end of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony.

29 The critic writing in Musical Opinion (January 1933), 329, identified a ‘rhythmic force and power’ in the ‘march-like rhythms’ of the Fourth Symphony suggestive of ‘Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler’; the Musical Times, 74 (1933), 71, also appreciated the ‘rhythmic vigour’ of the symphony, but was ‘repelled by its blunt humour, by the twist of some of its themes, which aim at being funny and succeed only in being unnatural’.

30 Evans, ‘Arnold Bax’, 174.

31 ‘Arnold Bax's Symphony’, Musical Times, 64 (1923), 60, and ‘P. W.’, ‘Arnold Bax's Symphony’, ibid., 69 (1928), 451.

32 Herbage, ‘Sir Arnold Bax’, 123. The full score of the Second Symphony was actually completed in 1926.

33 Colin Scott-Sutherland, Arnold Bax (London, 1973), 118.

34 Foreman, Bax, 210, 207–8.

35 Paul Ludden, ‘A Song of War and Victory: An Edition, Commentary, and Analysis of the 1905 Tone Poem by Sir Arnold Bax’ (DDA dissertation, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, 2006), unavailable to the present writer, but referenced in Foreman, Bax, 44.

36 Foreman, Bax, 68; Foreman (ibid., 69) also notes how the score of In the Faery Hills uses coins on the timpani, marked ‘with pennies’, reflecting performing practice in the thirteenth variation of Elgar's ‘Enigma’ Variations. One might also identify an Elgarian influence in some of the string textures and rhetorical figures in Bax's Variations on the Name Gabriel Fauré (1949, an orchestration of the 1945 Suite for Fauré for solo piano) and the 1911 ‘Symphonietta – Finale’ fragment (completed by Graham Parlett). A recording of both these compositions has been issued on Dutton Epoch CDLX 7244; I am grateful to Lewis Foreman for highlighting these works, and allowing me access to an early version of this recording.

37 Given this link, one wonders if the descending scalic fourth at the piano's second entry constitutes an allusion to the opening motif from Elgar's choral work. The libretto quotation, reproduced in Foreman, Bax, 290, runs: ‘Legends that once were told or sung / In many a smoky fireside nook / Of Iceland, in the ancient day / By wandering Saga-man or Scald’.

38 Foreman, Bax, 337.

39 Foreman, Bax, 345, 347. The thematic material which Bax's concerto apparently references can be found towards the end of the scherzo in Dale's sonata, and 43 bars before the beginning of the finale; and at figure 49 and four bars after figure 59 in the slow movement of Elgar's concerto. The Dale is more convincing as the main source for this quotation, given the motivic repetition, the greater number of bars involved, and the possible incorporation by Bax of Dale's subsequent ‘turn’ motif. Bax and Dale (1885–1943) were exact contemporaries at the Royal Academy of Music, both studying composition with Frederick Corder.

40 J. Peter Burkholder, ‘The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field’, Notes, 50 (1994), 851–70 (p. 854); Burkholder's complete list of devices includes modelling, variations, paraphrasing, arranging, setting, cantus firmus, medley, quodlibet, stylistic allusion, cumulative setting, programmatic quotation, collage, patchwork and extended paraphrase.

41 Burkholder, ‘The Uses of Existing Music’, 853–4.

42 Richard F. Thomas, ‘Virgil's Georgics and the Art of Reference’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 90 (1986), 171–98 (p. 172, n. 8).

43 Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 1998), 23. Thomas's categories of ‘reference’ in ‘Virgil's Georgics’, 190, does include ‘apparent reference’ where the reference ‘seems clearly to recall a specific model but which on closer investigation frustrates that expectation’. Again, however, Thomas suggests that this is a deliberate authorial ploy, rather than denoting ambiguity. For a musical study which distinguishes between the concepts of ‘quotation’ and ‘allusion’ in terms of their relative clarity, see Nicholas Marston, Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17, Cambridge Music Handbooks (Cambridge, 1992), 34: ‘Both are forms of reference, means of bringing into a work material which exists independently of the work itself. Quotation is usually thought of as stronger than allusion; a quotation is often explicitly identified, and meant to be recognized by its audience. Allusion, on the other hand, is reference of a more covert kind. Although allusions may be made as self-consciously as quotations, they are not always intended to be so clearly recognized: much of their allure lies in the fact that they refer obliquely, and partly obscure their sources.’ Raymond Knapp's exploration of Brahms's allusive practices, in ‘Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion’, Journal of Musicological Research, 18 (1998), 1–30, suggests that Brahms deliberately kept his allusions ‘largely beneath the surface, allowing them to work their effects subliminally’, as a ‘balancing act […] between audience and heritage’ (pp. 9–10); thus in Brahms's First and Third Symphonies ‘an opening allusive passage that connects but distantly with its models prepares us for a more sharply focused allusion later, at which point allusion supports seemingly internal musical processes without preempting them’ (p. 25).

44 Hinds, Allusion and Intertext, 25.

45 See J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995), 20, which refers to ‘exact quotation and close allusion’. See also Burkholder's article on ‘Allusion’ in Grove Music Online (<http://0-www.oxfordmusiconline.com>, accessed 21 June 2009), defined as ‘generally distinguished from quotation in that material is not quoted directly, but a reference is made through some other similarity between the two works, such as gesture, melodic or rhythmic contour, timbre, texture or form […] to evoke associations with the work […] and thus to convey meaning’.

46 Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 86. Marston makes a similar point in Schumann: Fantasie, 34–5: ‘Nor is the “reality” of an allusion necessarily dependent on its being consciously intended: a work may allude or even quote behind its author's back, so to speak.’

47 For recent discussions of theories of intertextuality (including the significant roles of writers such as Roland Barthes, M. M. Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva from a post-structuralist perspective, and concepts such as the ‘death of the author’, ‘dialoguic’ or ‘polyphonic’ discourse, and ‘transposition’), see Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester and New York, 1990); Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York, 1991); Anthony H. Harrison, ‘Introduction: Intertextuality, Ideology, and the New Historicism’, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems (Charlottesville, VA, 1992), 1–15; Renate Lachemann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, Theory and History of Literature, 87 (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 1997), particularly Section II, ‘Intertextuality and Dialogism’, 25–121; Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London and New York, 2000); and Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge, 2003). For a discussion of the potential distinction between the terms allusion and intertextuality, see Hinds, Allusion and Intertext, 47–51.

48 Thomas, ‘Virgil's Georgics’, 174. However, for Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 85, this ambiguity represents a compositional advantage in the case of Ives: ‘It is precisely because of the blurred boundaries between what is borrowed, what is paraphrased, and what is merely common musical property […] that Ives can achieve the transformation of one familiar tune into another or the overlapping of two similar tunes […]. The ambiguity is the key.’

49 Quotation and allusion are, of course, also a significant feature of one of Elgar's works with which Bax may have been familiar: The Music Makers (1913). Aidan J. Thomson, ‘Unmaking The Music Makers’, Elgar Studies, ed. John Paul Edward Harper-Scott and Julian Rushton (Cambridge, 2007), 99–134, in his discussion of Elgar's self-quotations in addition to ‘figures that in some way resemble earlier works by Elgar’ (p. 103), suggests (p. 133) that the ‘narrative voice of the quotations: conscious of itself and of its value’ is contrasted with ‘the subconscious narrative voice of the allusions […] characterised by misremembering and distortions’.

50 ‘London Concerts: The Philharmonic String Quartet’, Musical Times, 59 (1918), 325.

51 See ‘Goossens Chamber Concerts’, 202, and ‘London Contemporary Music Centre’, Musical Mirror, 10 (1930), 340.

52 Edwin Evans, ‘Bax, Arnold’, Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, ed. Walter Willson Cobbett, 3 vols. (2nd edn, London, 1963), i, 67–78 (p. 67).

53 Ibid., 73. However, Evans also noted that Bax's ‘reputation for complexity was so firmly established that [… the quartet] is still sometimes loosely classed with his more exacting compositions’.

54 Evans, ‘Arnold Bax’, 175. See also idem, ‘Modern British Composers. II. – Arnold Bax’, Musical Times, 60 (1919), 154–6 (p. 154), which describes the quartet as ‘a complete contrast’ to previous chamber works, and ‘of lighter calibre’.

55 Scott-Sutherland, Arnold Bax, 56, 72, 95.

56 Foreman, Bax, 176.

57 Foreman, Bax, 176.

58 Scott-Sutherland, Arnold Bax, 95.

59 Herbage, ‘Sir Arnold Bax’, 119.

60 Despite Bax's compositional highlighting of his thematic quotation, these Elgarian references can be communicated effectively only through performance. The 1941 recording by the Griller Quartet is particularly suggestive, reinforcing the stylistic disparity in the approach to the reference with clearly separated crotchets in bar 47 and a sudden pianissimo dynamic in bar 49, and adopting a relatively slow speed (particularly in comparison with the 2001 Maggini Quartet recording) at the Tempo moderato in bar 83.

61 Bax was, of course, noted for his improvisatory skills, as well as his sight-reading. According to York Bowen, Bax's ‘power of extemporization’ was ‘altogether beyond anything I have ever heard since at the piano keyboard’; similarly, Vaughan Williams described how Bax improvised an oboe countermelody for A London Symphony at the piano. See ‘Arnold Bax: 1883–1953’, Music and Letters, 35 (1954), 1–14 (pp. 5, 6).

62 The tenuto mark and slur are retained, although the first tenuto is excised.

63 See, for example, two bars before figure 54 and two bars after figure 55 in Elgar's concerto.

64 One also wonders how well Bax knew the concerto, and whether his references were stimulated by a concert performance of the work, or perhaps the memory of a concert. Bax may have been present at the Festival of British Music at the Queen's Hall in 1915, for example, which included Albert Sammons's performance of the concerto on 13 May, and Bax's In the Faery Hills and selected songs on 15 May.

65 See Charles Wilfred Orr's letter to the Musical Times, 64 (1923), 569.

66 ‘The Strongest Impression’, Musical Herald, 754 (January 1911), 6–8. This article is discussed by Charles Edward McGuire in the context of the Musical Herald 's ‘combative relationship with Elgar’, in ‘Edward Elgar: “Modern” or “Modernist?” Construction of an Aesthetic Identity in the British Music Press, 1895–1934’, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 8–38 (pp. 15–19).

67 ‘The Strongest Impression’, 6. Mrs Curwen characterized the concerto as ‘music […] which walks straight into your heart before your head has time to challenge its credentials’. In addition to other Elgar compositions (a performance of ‘Go, Song of Mine’ was highlighted by Frederick Corder, for example), some of the more striking alternatives chosen by contributors included performances of Strauss's music (Elektra, Salome and Don Quixote, chosen by Edgar Bainton, Josef Holbrooke and Sedley Taylor, among others), the revival of Gluck's Orpheus by Marie Brema (noted by Rutland Boughton), and performances of music by Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Bantock and Debussy, and of Handel's Samson and L'Allegro (the last two highlighted by Vaughan Williams and Eric Coates respectively). More reactionary comments worthy of note included Grattan Flood's decrying of ‘the onward movement of charlatanism and cacophony in musical composition, to the exclusion of legitimate musical expression’, Dr Edward Bairstow's ‘dismay at the decrease of interest in, and support for the greater choral and orchestral concerts in these parts [Leeds], and disgust at the wild rush of the public to hear so-called “star performers”, many of whom have no other claim than an abnormal gift of technical facility’, and Dr Ralph H. Bellairs's suggestion of ‘the incalculable ruin to the music profession produced by (1) Frivolous pleasure-seeking among the well-to-do; (2) Musical “machines”; and (3) the general restlessness of this decadent age’.

68 For a discussion of these extramusical elements, see Michael Kennedy, ‘The Soul Enshrined: Elgar and his Violin Concerto’, and Brian Trowell, ‘Elgar's Use of Literature’, Edward Elgar: Music and Literature, ed. Raymond Monk (Aldershot, 1993), 72–82 and 182–326 (pp. 244–50).

69 Bax, ‘Sir Edward Elgar’, 124.

70 Foreman, Bax, 176.

71 Ibid., 229.

72 Examples include Debussy's ‘Le matin d'un jour de fête’ from Ibéria, and L'isle joyeuse; see Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis (Cambridge, 1983), 48–9; Boyd Pomeroy, ‘Tales of Two Tonics: Directional Tonality in Debussy's Orchestral Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 26 (2004), 87–118 (p. 111); and Dmitri Tymoczko, ‘Scale Networks and Debussy’, Journal of Music Theory, 48 (2004), 219–94, esp. pp. 254–64.

73 See Howat, Debussy in Proportion, 75. La mer was first performed in Britain on 1 February 1908 at Queen's Hall in London, with Debussy conducting; see ‘M. Claude Debussy: His First Appearance in England’, Musical Times, 49 (1908), 172.

74 The opening of Bax's final movement also has parallels with the string pizzicato in the outer parts and the viola arco motif of the opening of Debussy's second movement.

75 Frederick Corder, ‘Some Kinds of Music. I. New Music’, Musical Times, 29 (1888), 84–7.

76 The Times, 27 August 1932, reproduced in Musical Times, 73 (1932), 943.

77 Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 15. Emphasis original.

78 See Parlett, A Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax, 2.

79 ‘Balfour Gardiner Concerts’, Musical Standard, 22 March 1913, 245; see also the Athenaeum, 4454 (8 March 1913), 292, which noted that the work ‘suffers from undue length’. The Musical Standard, 27 September 1913, 303, also described Pensive Twilight and Dance of the Wild Irravel as ‘ultra modern’, although this was in the context of a positive concert review.

80 Evans, ‘Modern British Composers. II. – Arnold Bax’, 154. See also ‘The Younger British Composers’, The Academy, 1946 (1909), 444–6 (p. 446): ‘His [Bax's] capacity is prodigious, but his music is sometimes rendered inaccessible by sheer difficulty of execution.’ While the 2003 recording of the quintet (Dutton CDLX 7131) highlights Bax's striking approach to chromaticism in this work, such difficulties seem overstated; Foreman suggests convincingly (in the liner notes) that the struggles of the Wesserly Quartet and R. W. Tabb in early performances of the quintet may have contributed to such perceptions.

81 ‘Younger British Composers’, Athenaeum, 4611 (November 1916), 560–2 (p. 561).

82 Edward Algernon Baughan, ‘The Younger Generation in Music’, Saturday Review, 5 November 1921, 527–8 (p. 528). Bax's 1902 Andante in A from the first of his two student string quartets was described by the Musical Times, 44 (1903), 808, as ‘somewhat vague in character’, and in assessing the Concert Piece for viola and piano, the same journal, 46 (1905), 40, suggested that ‘vagueness of form marred the composition’.

83 Musical Standard, 6 April 1912, 215. Evans, ‘Modern British Composers. II. – Arnold Bax’, 155, suggests that it is ‘not surprising’ that Bax does not name this overture as one of his own preferred works. As Foreman notes (Bax, 73), Edward Dent dismissed the overture, after a 1914 performance, as being ‘like Hampstead people in a Soho restaurant’; see Hugh Carey, Duet for Two Voices: An Informal Biography of Edward Dent Compiled from his Letters to Clive Carey (Cambridge, 1979), 71. George W. Byng (c.1862–1932) was a prolific composer of ballets for the Alhambra Theatre in London; see Philip L. Scowcroft, British Light Music: A Personal Gallery of 20th-Century Composers (London, 1997), 109.

84 ‘Mr Balfour Gardiner's Concerts’, Musical Times, 53 (1912), 319. The same journal, 60 (1919), 179, described the work as ‘riotous and exhilarating […] though somewhat diffuse’.

85 Musical Standard, 14 December 1912, 374. See also ‘Mr Balfour Gardiner's Concerts’, Musical Times, 53 (1912), 257, which noted that ‘the orchestration irresistibly suggests the word Debussy occasionally’.

86 Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 16. Commenting on this concert, Musical Times, 45 (1904), 808, suggested that except in ‘Eilidh, my Fawn’, ‘the vocalist had not grateful phrases to sing’, and that ‘Closing Doors’ was ‘ambitious, and testified to artistic aims’.

87 Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 16. Although Bax is correct that Debussy did not visit England until 1905, several of Debussy's works had been published by 1904, including the string quartet, and early versions of L'enfant prodigue (vocal score), the Nocturnes (full score) and Pelléas et Mélisande (vocal and full score). The evocation of potential Debussy models has persisted in relation to Bax's Elegiac Trio (1916) for flute, harp and viola, written for the same group of instruments as Debussy's Sonata (1915). See Parlett, A Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax, 121: ‘It seems too coincidental […] that Bax should have chosen to write for such a combination unaware of the existence at least of Debussy's work.’

88 Arnold Bax, ‘Arnold Bax’, Musical Standard, 11 April 1914, 342; transcribed in Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 103–5, with the title ‘A Native British Art’.

89 Cecil Moon, ‘Concerning the British Composer’, Musical Standard, 4 April 1914, 318–19. Suggesting that ‘we, in our music, have lost, or nearly so, all that can be regarded as fundamentally British’, Moon divided British composers into three categories: ‘those who still follow the ideals of Purcell’ (German, Somervell), those ‘who turn out all their music as from their own skilfully invented mould’ (Bantock, Elgar, Holbrooke, Scott), and those ‘whose methods are the most pliable and whose utterance is entirely governed by the nature of the subject to be expressed’ (Mallinson, Grainger, Quilter, Brian, Shapleigh, Gardiner, Harty, Bridge, Bax). He concluded: ‘The hope can be expressed that the British composer of to-day will be more self-critical, and, without in any way doubting his sincerity, be more alive to realise that in what he writes there shall be found only that spirit which is characteristically British, for after all it is entirely a personal affair whether or no a British-born composer shall adopt in his work the characteristics of another nation's music.’

90 Bax, ‘Arnold Bax’, 342.

91 Bax, ‘Arnold Bax’, 342.

92 ‘A National School of British Composers’, Musical Herald, 809 (August 1915), 348–52 (p. 348), an article that adopts the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ interchangeably. For Bax's article, see n. 12 above.

93 ‘A National School of British Composers’, 348. The whole question of national identity in British music was, of course, not a new concern. The pages of the Musical Herald alone had included descriptions of Henry Davey's lecture ‘Is There a Chance for English Composers?’ at the Tonic Sol-fa College on 19 February 1898, Harvey Löhr's lecture on ‘English Composers and their Future’ at an Incorporated Society of Musicians London meeting on 12 November 1898, Elgar's inaugural lecture as Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham on 16 March 1905 and Sir Hubert Parry's toast to ‘British Music’ at the Royal Musical Association dinner in December 1905; they also promoted the Edward Mason choir in June 1913 as ‘an example to follow’ to ‘help forward British music’, and reproduced an article by the Daily Chronicle's music critic, ‘H. C.’, ‘Plea for British Music; The Obsession of Foreign Superiority’ in 1914. See Musical Herald, 600 (March 1898), 87; 609 (December 1898), 377–8; 685 (April 1905), 115; 694 (January 1906), 15; 783 (June 1913), 162–5; and 800 (November 1914), 410–11.

94 ‘A National School of British Composers’, 348, 352. Carse (p. 352) also bemoaned a probable ‘season of Russian influence’, and even suggested that one benefit of wartime was that it had ‘nipped in the bud a tendency to follow the lead of such composers as Schönberg, Ornstein & Co.’ Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) was actually born in Ukraine, and emigrated to America in 1907.

95 ‘A National School of British Composers’., 351.

96 ‘A National School of British Composers’.

97 ‘A National School of British Composers’, 349.

98 ‘A National School of British Composers’, 350.

99 ‘A National School of British Composers’, 351.

100 ‘A National School of British Composers’, 352.

101 nother correspondent, the composer Ade, 348. Another correspondent, the composer Adela Maddison (1866–1929), suggested (ibid., 350) that the English madrigal represented the only significant example of British national identity in musical history; rather than returning to concepts of the pastoral (‘fat sheep grazing on the uplands and downlands of our island home’), a more progressive movement might represent ‘the vibrations of life and death crying aloud through the world to the gates of heaven, from the wind-swept seas beating our shores with their songs of freedom and boundless strength’.

102 ‘A British School of Composers’, 400. Published alongside Bax's response were those of Captain Cyril Jenkins (pp. 400–1), who mirrored Harrison and Carse's suggestion of over-reliance upon foreign compositional models, and Gustav Holst (p. 401), who advocated cosmopolitanism in line with that of the Elizabethan age, although his relatively reticent contribution suggested that ‘the present time is hardly a fit one for discussing this question’.

103 ‘A British School of Composers’, 400. Published alongside Bax's response were those of Captain Cyril Jenkins (pp. 400–1), who mirrored Harrison and Carse's suggestion of over-reliance upon foreign compositional models, and Gustav Holst (p. 401), who advocated cosmopolitanism in line with that of the Elizabethan age, although his relatively reticent contribution suggested that ‘the present time is hardly a fit one for discussing this question’.

104 See Scott-Sutherland, Arnold Bax, 80, n. 1: ‘At the first performance in Cork of the first String Quartet, the audience was convinced he [Bax] had used the tune “Ban Cnuic Eireann Og” and Mrs Tilly Fleischman[n] drew my attention to the close resemblance between the slow movement of the Piano Sonata No. 4 and the tune “Has sorrow thy young days shaded”. Such resemblances are natural enough. But the “folk” melodies in his work are of his own devising.’ Foreman notes in Bax, 176, that the composer was acquainted with Herbert Hughes, who arranged the tune of ‘Bán Cnuic Éireann Óg’ as ‘The Lament of Fanaid Grove’, and the cellist Beatrice Harrison, who performed and recorded this arrangement. The Musical Times, 65 (1924), 75, noting a performance of the quartet by the Philharmonic Quartet in Dublin on 26 November 1923, described the ‘charming treatment of an Irish air in the last movement’.

105 The Dvořák quartet in Example 17 is, of course, also a striking example of the ‘outsider’ attempting to integrate indigenous folk material from outside his own racial origins; for a discussion of Dvořák's attempts to assimilate an ‘American’ idiom in his music which is contemporary with Bax's quartet, see Daniel Gregory Mason, ‘Folk-Song and American Music (A Plea for the Unpopular Point of View)’, Musical Quarterly, 4 (1918), 323–32.

106 For discussions of Stanford's ‘elusive’ Irishness, for example, see Paul Rodmell, Charles Villiers Stanford (Aldershot, 2002), 384–400, and Harry White, The Progress of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2005), 79 and 86, who suggests that Stanford's misguided focus on the ‘literal quotation of folksong’ resulted in a ‘spiritual tourism’ – a ‘cul-de-sac of an exoticism about Ireland’ rather than ‘the creation of a music about Ireland’; in The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork, 1998), 109, White concludes that ‘in simplest terms, Stanford wrote for an English audience indifferent or hostile to the cultural (and ultimately political) implications of a pervasively Irish art’. Although Hilary Bracefield (in ‘The Northern Composer: Irish or European?’, The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995 Selected Proceedings: Part One, ed. Patrick F. Devine and Harry White, Irish Musical Studies, 4 (Dublin, 1996), 255–62 (p. 256)) places Hamilton Harty in a group of composers who were ‘quite happy, on occasion, to harness Irish song, dance or sentiment’, but whose music ‘is firmly in the British tradition of their own time, without any necessary reference to Irishisms’, White (The Keeper's Recital, 116) highlights Harty's With the Wild Geese (1910) and The Children of Lir (1938) as ‘recognisably Irish works released from the imaginative constraint of folksong quotation’; it is striking that Harty promoted several of Bax's works when he was conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, as detailed in Declan Plummer, ‘Hamilton Harty's Legacy with the Hallé Orchestra (1920–30): A Reassessment’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 5 (2009–10), 55–72 (pp. 67–9). For Bax's suggestion that ‘Stanford was not Irish enough’, that as a ‘West Briton’ Stanford's class was ‘abominated’ by the more authentic ‘Irish Ireland’, and that the exploration of German models represented his going ‘a-whoring after foreign gods’, see Farewell, my Youth, ed. Foreman, 22, although White (The Keeper's Recital, 108–9) argues that this suggests a misunderstanding of the Anglo-Irish access to ‘Irish Ireland’ and does not take into account the limits of Irish musical education. White (ibid., 118–24) characterizes Bax's own ‘Irish’ problem as a contrast between the perceived importance of his literary contribution to the Celtic revival, and the relative indifference in Ireland to his early Yeats-influenced tone poems and musical responses to the 1916 Easter Rising – leading to his ‘imaginative withdrawal’ from Ireland after 1916; hence The Garden of Fand, scored in 1916, ‘reintegrates the idea of Ireland into the fabric of British music’ as ‘a more hospitable conception of Ireland as a trope of pastoral remembrance and myth’.

107 There is a parallel here with Percy Young's description of Stanford (in A History of British Music (London, 1967), 517) as ‘a kind of Anglo-Irish Dvořák’. However, White (The Progress of Music in Ireland, 79) suggests that this comparison between Stanford and Dvořák is misleading, given that Stanford authorized ‘the notion that any kind of Irish art music would inevitably entail the literary quotation of folksong, even to the point of interrupting the flow of symphonic and operatic discourse […] something that his Czech contemporaries and forbears strictly avoided’.

108 Musical Times, 70 (1929), 260 (a review of a BBC Chamber Concert, 4 February 1929).

109 The Academy, 2169 (29 November 1913), 693.

110 Peter Evans, ‘Instrumental Music I’, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stephen Banfield, The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 6 (Oxford, 1995), 179–277 (p. 249).