English Pastoral Music by Eric Saylor

Author:Eric Saylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Example 4.7. Ivor Gurney, Ludlow and Teme, I, “When smoke stood up from Ludlow,” mm. 54–63.

To be sure, not every setting of Housman's poetry rises to these levels of musical or expressive sophistication, and there are many in which the musical evocations of pastoralism rarely transcend vaguely atmospheric clichés. Nevertheless, Housman's writing provided English composers with crucibles in which they could forge pastoral music on a small scale, providing important opportunities to hone their craft and discern the mode's expressive potential before applying it to larger and more complex forms.

Green and Pleasant Lands: Vaughan Williams, Forster, and Political Pageantry

Compared to The Pageant of London, discussed in chapter 2, Vaughan Williams's other two contributions to the genre—The Pageant of Abinger (1934) and England's Pleasant Land (1938)—were much smaller affairs. However, they could both boast an unusually illustrious creative pedigree because of Vaughan Williams's participation and that of the distinguished author E. M. Forster, who wrote the scenarios and scripts. The two men, along with the pageant producer, Tom Harrison, lived near each other in rural Surrey. Both pageants were intended as benefits for local charities: the Abinger Pageant raised money for the Abinger Church Preservation Fund, while the proceeds of England's Pleasant Land went to the Dorking and Leith Hill District Preservation Society.94

These two pageants demonstrate that the pastoral landscape of southern England was not just a picturesque subject for artists but also a political one, capable of employing markers of soft pastoralism in a musico-dramatic context to build public support for particular civic goals. But even more important than the works’ potential for social improvement, at least as far as Vaughan Williams was concerned, was the fact that they brought communities together to make art that drew upon local history and culture. His own advocacy for such actions stretched back decades. He had recently codified his thoughts on the subject in National Music (1934), a collection of essays based on his talks for the Mary Flexner Lecture Series, delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. With these two pageants, Vaughan Williams followed the advice that he had offered to those attending his Bryn Mawr talks, which he “addressed not to the professional musician but to the amateur, and especially the listener, and my text is ‘Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.’ A musical nation is not a nation which is content to listen. The best form of musical appreciation is to try and do it for yourself; to really get inside the meaning of music.”95

The Abinger Pageant was, according to Forster, “not planned quite on ordinary pageant lines. It is rural rather than historical and tries to show the continuity of country life.”96 In other words, the pageant is unquestionably a celebration of the area's history, if not an especially faithful or literal re-creation of past events.97 “Events” might be too strong a word for the goings-on in the pageant's various scenes, as very little actually happens. Several reviews noted the absence of spectacular battles or

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