5 - ‘A vigorous unbroken tradition’: British Composers and the Community since the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Summary

In 1983, The London Sinfonietta appointed Gillian Moore as its first Education Officer and she initiated a series of ground-breaking projects linked to the classical contemporary repertoire. In this chapter Moore offers a substantial review of the music/community world from Britten to the present, including extracts from her own interviews with many senior British composers. She also takes us back to the time before Britten, demonstrating that quite radical notions of the relation of art to community were already well rooted in British culture, and that they also had influential European parallels.

Introduction

In has Aspen speech Britten claimed not to be interested in posterity. The important thing for him was that his music was ‘of use’ in the community in which he worked. He was not the first eminent British composer to hold such a view, and the Aspen speech can still be seen as a rallying call to other composers. One of the questions posed by this book is whether this socially driven impulse on the part of composers is a particularly British phenomenon. Both Carl Orff in Germany and Zoltán Kodály in Hungary are notable composers who made a major commitment to the ideal that music can make ordinary people’s lives better. They both had a sustained involvement in music education and developed innovative, far-reaching and systematic music education theory and practice. The classroom percussion instruments which Orff invented, taking inspiration from Indonesian gamelan and West African xylophones, are still used in schools around the world today, as is Kodály’s method of teaching singing and musical literacy through a system including hand-signs and solfège symbols. Webern and Schoenberg both conducted workers’ choirs, and Hindemith eagerly embraced the idea of Gebrauchsmusik (music for use), composing music for every commonly studied instrument.

But there is undoubtedly a vigorous, unbroken and still-developing tradition of British composers before and after Britten deciding that they want to be more directly ‘of use’; from Vaughan Williams and Holst reviving folk traditions and encouraging amateur music-making in the early years of the century to Michael Tippett carrying on this tradition at Morley College through the Depression and the Blitz, and Imogen Holst travelling through rural England in wartime; from Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle honing their craft in school classrooms in the early 1960s, to composers such as David Bedford, Judith Weir, Mark Anthony Turnage and Nigel Osborne working in schools, prisons and war zones at the end of the twentieth century, and James MacMillan reinventing the role of the eminent composer as church musician in today’s inner-city Glasgow.