Throughout much of his career, Benjamin Britten was acclaimed both as the most significant English composer in centuries and as an artist whose music embodied an innate Englishness.  Notwithstanding the subject matter and sources of many of his works, Britten himself resisted association with what were often vague – and frequently contradictory – assumptions about the very definition of that Englishness. While Britten accepted commissions from major national institutions throughout his career, he was also openly suspicious of prevailing attempts to align contemporary creative expression with a proudly English or British identity. This essay explores the origins of those attempts in the nineteenth century and traces some of their most prominent, influential manifestations in the institutions and artistic practices of the twentieth century.

Britten’s relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was complicated. He found the Royal College of Music parochial and amateurish, and was frustrated by composition lessons there with John Ireland, not least in comparison to his private study with Frank Bridge. He largely rejected the influence of English folk traditions and Tudor music important to the ‘pastoral school’, favoring the more cosmopolitan example of Bridge, and his own exploration of continental European modernism. Britten’s view of composers such as Vaughan Williams as insular and regressive has shaped the historiography of British music in ways that still reverberate today. Scholars have typically taken such attitudes at face value; but this obscures a more complex reality, in which the composer attempted to annex and reimagine, rather than simply reject, core achievements of his predecessors, incurring conceptual if not direct stylistic debts to them. In the case of Holst in particular, whom Britten came to embrace in later life, insufficient attention has been paid to this legacy.

The Introduction provides the background that led to the founding of the RCM. It argues that its vision came out of the musical achievements of August Manns and George Grove at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which hosted London’s first permanent concert orchestra. It suggests that the long-established trope of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ gives a misleadingly composer-centric view of the late Victorian British musical condition, which ignores the vitality of the different participative musical cultures of the time, such as brass and wind bands or choral singing. It demonstrates how different Grove’s conception of the RCM was from the then-failing RAM in providing a complete and systematic musical training. It relates the attraction of the RCM’s education to the fact that examined accreditation for music teachers (the ARCM) was now a worthwhile professional investment. The Introduction presents one of the book’s central arguments, that from a national perspective, the College is as important for its students who worked to raise musical standards locally as for its star performers and composers.