Vaughan Williams’s lifelong association with the English Folk Revival presents an unexpected paradox. Despite his substantial experience as a folk-song collector, holding leading positions in major Revival institutions, composing and arranging music for its performances and producing groundbreaking writings on theory, his contribution – if it is acknowledged at all – is reduced to the view that he was an establishment figure who simply continued the ideas of Cecil Sharp. This caricature of the man and his work – a cypher with nothing original to say and a toff unable to relate to working-class singers – is not only wrong but ignores all available evidence. Benefitting from recent republications of his own writings and new scholarship following the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this chapter positions Vaughan Williams as a tempering influence on the more dubious aspects of the Folk Revival. From his first day as a collector, his methods and approaches were advanced for their time. And while supporting the value of Sharp’s aim of revival, Vaughan Williams’s letters and actions show he directly challenged Sharp’s authoritarian and unsound assumptions. An undogmatic, respectful, and humane observer of the traditional music he encountered, Vaughan Williams still has much to offer to contemporary folk-song researchers.

Vaughan Williams was an eclectic composer and he required a period of twenty years to find his individual voice. Much emphasis has, in the past, been placed on the ‘breakthrough’ of folk song and on the composer’s supposed admittance of technical inferiority during this lengthy period of stylistic discovery. It is argued here, however, that this supposed affliction was due as much to a public-school self-modesty and that, in truth, he was no less advanced than his major peers. Moreover, this chapter attempts to accentuate the importance of his compositional ‘training’, under Parry, Charles Wood, Alan Gray, Stanford, Max Bruch, and Ravel, and, more particularly, the numerous continental and home-grown influences (notably Wagner and Parry), over and above the revelation of folk song in 1903, which played a dominant role in shaping his later style.

This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.

Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

In the 1770s, Herder engaged with early forms of poetry and religion, highlighting the moral and political role of poets and priests in ancient Israel and ancient Germany (Saxony) as well as analysing the political systems of these societies as models of ‘unity in multiplicity’. He simultaneously also explored the historical development of ‘northern’ traditions, maintaining that they initially constituted a ‘wonderful mixture’ between Christianity and national poetry. His key idea was that the revival of Greek and Roman models of poetry in the early modern period had created a wedge between religion and poetry as well as the culture of the elites and the people, which in turn contributed to solidifying mechanical forms of government. However, modern historical consciousness—as exemplified in Shakespeare— had an enormous moral and political potential. Modern cultural leaders could cultivate new reflective forms of art and philosophy that would enhance the human capacity for self-determination as well as genuine sociability. This ethic would be fully in line with Christian morality, whilst also enhancing the status of their particular cultural and political community in international contexts. Herder proposed that a ʻpatriotic institute for Germany’s universal spirit’ could serve as centre of such a reform movement.

This chapter looks at the contribution of a group of remarkable women to the collection and performance of Welsh traditional song in the early part of the twentieth century. Despite the publication of Maria Jane Williams’s Ancient National Airs of Gwent & Morganwg in 1844, the study of indigenous music in Wales did not flourish until the Welsh Folk-Song Society was established in 1906. Under the direction of John Lloyd Williams, Lecturer in Botany at the University College of North Wales (Bangor), the organisation inspired the collection, classification, performance and analysis of traditional songs. His efforts gave rise to the first revival of traditional music in Wales, but none of this would have been possible without the collaboration of a group of women, of whom the most prominent were Mary Davies, Ruth Herbert Lewis, Annie Ellis, Lucie Barbier, Grace Gwyneddon Davies, Jennie Williams and Dora Herbert Jones. They were pioneers in the collection and performance of Welsh traditional song, setting new standards in ethnographic field work and disseminating their discoveries through their publications, lectures and recitals.

Commentators on Britten tend to view him as unreceptive to folk song; or if mildly sympathetic, as treating it in isolation from the mainstream of the English Folk Revival. While he steered clear of the revivalist ‘hard line’ represented by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp, he nonetheless engaged creatively with an ‘alternative’ revival embodied by Percy Grainger and the song collectors Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood. This chapter considers Britten’s folk-song arrangements and essays to demonstrate his debt to this ‘forgotten’ tradition of folk-song research. His editorial handling of folk song is examined in light of its theories, while his personal links to Violet Alford, E. J. Moeran, Francesca Allinson, William Plomer, and W. H. Auden – figures who expressed similarly capacious views of ‘folk process’ – are discussed. The emerging ‘heritage movement’ of the 1930s and 1940s, whereby English cultural ‘insularity’ became a source of national celebration and artistic focus, is also assessed. These influences suggest an unsuspected role for folk song in Britten’s construction of a cosmopolitan ‘Englishness’ rooted in the local and the particular.

Is there such a thing as an English compositional tradition in the twentieth century? And if so, what is Britten’s place in it? Harrison Birtwistle thought not, and one can understand why. There is no obvious point of continuity from one generation to another: Parry and Elgar’s reference points are Austro-German, while Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s music is modally based and considerably affected by English folk music. Delius spent most of his life outside England, and his aesthetic and compositional predilections are the most difficult to relate to a tradition. Britten and Tippett both abjured what they saw as the stultifying nationalism of Holst and Vaughan Williams and embraced aspects of international modernism. Despite the fractures, however, there are aspects in common: it is through themes from English landscape and literature that connections between generations are most clearly seen: in pastoralism, for instance, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’; in the role of melancholy; in the preference for particular genres; and in the reworking of aspects of the English musical past.

This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.

Mahler’s youth in Iglau exposed him to a rich variety of music, much of it originating outside the symphonic and operatic traditions that eventually would occupy him professionally and creatively. The enclave’s provincial location and ethnic diversity gave rise to a singular mixture of folk music traditions. The garrison’s military bands made varied contributions to the city’s everyday sounds and musical life. And as a bastion of German liberalism, Iglau sustained many social, sacred, and municipal organizations that promoted the cultivation and performance of music. This chapter examines these repertories (fiddle music, folk song, rustic dances; military band repertoire, including dances, tunes from operettas, and original works for the ensemble; and music for choral societies and community bands), along with the institutions and performance circumstances that supported them, illuminating sources from which Mahler appropriated materials vitally important to his idiosyncratic compositional voice.