1 Michael White, ‘The Sorrow That Sounds Like Heaven: When Herbert Howells Lost a Son, the Church Gained Some Immortal Music’, The Independent, 10 October 1992, <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music-the-sorrow-that-sounds-like-heaven-when-herbert-howells-lost-a-son-the-church-gained-some-1556718.html> (accessed 11 October 2017).

2 It would go far beyond the scope of this review article to address discussions of the language around this subject in general, such as attempts to distinguish between modern, modernizing and modernist, or indeed the differing historical implications of such terms (even where relatively direct translation is possible) in languages other than English.

3 As Ben Earle has noted, by the early 1990s ‘the term “modernist” acquired the status of an academic put-down’. See Earle, ‘“The Real Thing – At Last”? Historicizing Humphrey Searle’, British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 293–325 (p. 293). See also the editor's introduction (pp. 1–11) to this volume, which reviews the history of the term and its applications, including differences in usage between English and German. For a more recent perspective, which also considers the broader re-evaluation of modernism across the humanities, see Sarah Collins, ‘Nationalisms, Modernisms and Masculinities: Strategies of Displacement in Vaughan Williams's Reading of Walt Whitman’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 14 (2017), 65–91.

4 Also striking in this context was the belated reappraisal of the generation of Vaughan Williams and Holst by some senior arch-modernists of the post-1945 period, most notably Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Maxwell Davies, having taken up Vaughan Williams's music as a conductor, even suggested that the ‘extraordinary polyrhythms’ of Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony were ‘as “advanced” as anything in the Rite of Spring’: see his interview with Aidan J. Thomson in ‘Vaughan Williams and his Successors: Composers’ Forum’, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 299–320 (p. 302).

5 Even Britten's status as a major composer on the international front was seriously questioned during his lifetime: see Christopher Chowrimootoo, ‘Britten Minor: Constructing the Modernist Canon’, Twentieth-Century Music, 13/2 (September 2016), 1–30, which also offers a broader critique of such categorizations and their problematic relationship to modernism. In this case, Chowrimootoo's concept of a minor composer is focused primarily on mid-century international hierarchies in which all British composers, along with Nielsen, Shostakovich and so many others, were liable to be considered minor (and a Bridge or a Howells quite invisible), rather than the intranational ranking to which I refer here.

6 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

7 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), iv: The Early Twentieth Century.

8 Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).

9 Howells himself was not conventionally religious: like Vaughan Williams, he was drawn to the communal traditions, literary heritage and architectural spaces of Anglican worship and their role in shaping English life and thought, rather than to any orthodox belief system.

10 Paul Spicer, Herbert Howells (Bridgend: Seren, 1998); Christopher Palmer, Herbert Howells: A Study (Borough Green: Novello, 1978).

11 Paul Andrews, ‘Herbert Howells: A Documentary and Bibliographical Study’, 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1999).

12 It is worth noting that neither Howells nor Bridge completed a symphony or any large-scale music for the stage (or screen – a good number of their British contemporaries wrote film music, of course), and this has undoubtedly helped cement their status as minor composers. Howells made a few sketches for a symphony in 1919, but apparently never developed these any further. Bridge was working on a symphony for string orchestra at the time of his death; his one-act opera The Christmas Rose, begun just after the First World War but not completed until a decade later, proved unsuccessful.

13 The two concertos were finally revived in 2000 in a fine Chandos recording by Howard Shelley and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox (CHAN 9874).

14 Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).

15 Anthony Payne, Frank Bridge: Radical and Conservative, 2nd edn (London: Thames, 1999); the first edition was published in 1984. Another important landmark in Bridge scholarship from this period was the publication of Paul Hindmarsh's Frank Bridge: A Thematic Catalogue (London: Faber Music in association with Faber & Faber, 1983). Despite the relative paucity of published work, Bridge has been the subject of a number of doctoral dissertations in the analytical field including Christian Kennett, ‘The Harmonic Species of Frank Bridge: An Experimental Assessment of the Applicability of Pitch-Class Generic Theory to Analysis of a Corpus of Works by a Transitional Composer’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Reading, 1995), and Huss's ‘The Chamber Music of Frank Bridge’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bristol, 2010).

16 There are occasional errors, however. In the second bar of Ex. 1.13(a), on p. 34, taken from the Violin Sonata in E♭, the violin surely has F♯s, as in the piano part, rather than F♮s. More extensive confusion is present in the abstract pitch collections on p. 136: in the first box of Ex. 4.3, described as a B♭ major scale with flattened sixth, the flat sign should precede the G not the A; and the melodic minor scale in the third box of this example has a root of E♭, not F, as is erroneously stated in the text.

17 James A. Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Ben Earle has recently proposed a more specifically historicized analysis of Bridge's methods in relation to contemporary concepts of Formenlehre: see his ‘Modernism and Reification in the Music of Frank Bridge’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 141 (2016), 335– 402. Earle's article carries a note that it was completed before the publication of Huss's book and thus could not take that into account (although it seems curious that he does not refer to Huss's 2010 dissertation).

18 See pp. 161–3; similar formulations are encountered on p. 93 and elsewhere.

19 Here Huss draws extensively on Mark Amos, ‘A Modernist in the Making? Frank Bridge and the Cultural Practice of Music in Britain, 1900–1941’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2009).