Alan Rawsthorne and the Baroque

Extract

When, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English musical tradition gradually declined, fundamentally for social and economic reasons, one of the symptoms of decay was our failure to absorb the significant trends of contemporary musical evolution. It is for instance pertinent that although Haydn and Mozart were frequently played in London in the first half of the nineteenth century they exerted virtually no influence on our contemporary composers, who were unable to assimilate the implications of their sonata idiom. The great social-dramatic phase of instrumental evolution we simply by-passed, so that it's hardly surprising that when Holst and Vaughan Williams should have come to work towards the renaissance of our musical culture they should have returned to the great days—to Tudor polyphony and, behind that, folk-song and hence to a fundamentally vocal conception of their art. (The unique case of Elgar, whose magnificently ripe symphonics are as it were the culmination of a symphonic tradition that had never happened, we may legitimately regard as a ‘sport’ in our musical history.)