An English Pastoral Tradition

Ahead of our Fields of Sorrow and Albion Fields performances, which explore English composers response to landscape and national identity, Britten Sinfonia Chief Executive David Butcher discusses the emergence of an English pastoral tradition;

Throughout much of the 19th century there was no imperative for English composers to champion national identity through music, beyond the celebratory anthems to highlight Queen Victoria’s reign.  But towards the end of the century, with military rivalry from Germany and industrial competition from the USA, composers began to search for new ways of expressing an overtly English identity.  The golden age of Elizabeth and of England’s rural past became an inspiration to composers and artists more generally, and one that had been forgotten in the headlong pursuit of progress which had driven the industrial revolution.

Composers such as Vaughan Williams and Holst and later figures such as Tippett and Britten all had deep affinities with the English landscape. Once a pastoral idiom had been established, it was not long before composers began to see beyond the visual and develop the landscapes of the mind such as with Vaughan William’s Flos Campi and Holst’s Egdon Heath.  Vaughan Williams observed his work has “nothing to do with buttercups and daisies” instead exploring a landscape of physical and spiritual longing, without regret or nostalgia. The warmth, however, of Flos Campi is poles apart from the cold and bleak emotional road that Holst’s mature works displayed, with the changing perspective of time and space as the journey unfolds, as demonstrated in the miniature Fields of Sorrow.

The influence of landscape as part of a wider tradition continues today not least in the music of Sir Harrison Birtwistle. As the critic and writer Andrew Clements wrote recently, “Birtwistle is as profoundly English a composer as Vaughan Williams: it’s just that his vision is not one of green meditative pastoral, but something bloodied and cruel, rooted in pagan Albion.” For Birtwistle, the interaction of the landscape and time has been a compositional preoccupation.  His ideas have been much influenced by the artist Paul Klee’s technique of building imaginary landscapes allowing for a rich blend of rigour and fantasy.  Birtwistle described his Melencholia 1, his lament for clarinet and strings, as his Tallis Fantasia and The Fields of Sorrow illustrates, as does the wider gamut of his musical and dramatic works, a continuation of a pastoral tradition that has its roots in the rediscovery of landscape as a creative force by English composers more than 80 years earlier.

David Butcher
Chief Executive

Britten Sinfonia performs Fields of Sorrow featuring music by Vaughan Williams, Holst and Birtwistle on Friday 24 May at West Road Concert Hall and Friday 30 may at London's Milton Court - more info.

Britten Sinfonia performs Albion Fields featuring music by Vaughan Williams, Britten, Holst and Elgar on Saturday 25 May at Saffron Walden's Saffron Hall - more info.

Birtwistle's interaction with landscape

In May, we celebrate composer Harrison Birtwistle's 80th birthday with performances in Cambridge and as part of the Barbican's Birtwistle at 80 season. In this article composer and programmer, John Woolrich explores Birtwistle's preoccupation with the English landscape in his compositions.

Harrison Birtwistle once described the Lancashire countryside in which he grew up as a kind of Arcady. His continuing interest in the natural world retains the influence of that rural upbringing: one of his most recent pieces, The Moth Requiem, is a setting of the names of extinct English moths.

As a student Birtwistle took his music to show Vaughan Williams, ‘I had a sort of Vaughan Williams forgery under my arm, (which was my music…). Vaughan Williams was modern music to me when I was a student’.  He was ‘very much part of my formative years and my awareness of what creativity was’. Birtwistle has described Melancolia 1, his lament for clarinet and strings, as his ‘Tallis Fantasia’.

Like Birtwistle, Gustav Holst’s approach to landscape, even in a miniature like his canon The Fields of Sorrow, is the impression it gives of traveling, and of time and space changing the perspective as the journey unfolds. For both Holst and Birtwistle the interaction of landscape and time has been a compositional preoccupation.

Birtwistle, like Vaughan Williams and Holst, uses landscape as a metaphor in his music. It may be a real one, like the mysterious prehistoric hill in Wiltshire that lies behind Silbury Air, or imaginary ones (rather like Holst’s Egdon Heath, another piece that has had a place in Birtwistle’s imagination). Birtwistle has a (Paul Klee-inspired) orchestral piece called An Imaginary Landscape. Another Wiltshire landscape has its own music in Yan Tan Tethera. The mythical story of Yan Tan Tethera is an explanation of the groaning sound made by the wind whistling round some sarsen stones in Wiltshire.

John Woolrich

Britten Sinfonia perform a semi-staged concert performance of Yan Tan Tethera on Thursday 29 May at the Barbican as part of Birtwistle at 80. More info

On Friday 23rd May in Cambridge and Friday 30 May at the Barbican the orchestra perform Fields of Sorrow, a programme tracing three English composers (including Birtwistle) response to landscape and national identity. More Info

John Woolrich is a distinguished composer and programmer, and a close friend and collaborator of Britten Sinfonia. In November 2014 Britten Sinfonia celebrate his 60th birthday with a special concert featuring the London premiere of his Violin Concerto. More Info