The Twentieth Century

We are too close to the music written in the first half of the twentieth century to be able to judge it, and to decide which of it will live or will have an influence on the future.  Its diversity is the chief thing that strikes us, for it takes many forms, and experiments of all kinds have been or are in the process of being made.  But it all appears to have three things in common, particularly to those who take the music of the nineteenth century as a standard.  It seems to be less tuneful, largely because the melody is in short figures instead of in the long regular-phrased tunes to which we are accustomed; it is not usually in easy-to-follow, clear-cut forms such as the sonata form of the Viennese composers, and this makes it harder to grasp; and it makes so much use of dissonance that many people find it unpleasantly harsh.  But it must be remembered that the dissonances of one period tend to become the consonances of the next.  Monteverdi's discords, which seemed so exciting to his contemporaries, seem quite mild to us today.

Although the following paragraphs attempt to classify the different trends, they are necessarily over-simplified and tentative.  Also it is impossible, in a book of this size and type, to mention every composer who has been active in this century.

It will be noticed that British composers are mentioned more than they have been in the preceding chapters.  After the great Tudor period, English music suffered a decline, and the one great composer between 1600 and 1900, Henry Purcell, died too young to have much effect on our musical history.  But at the end of the nineteenth century Parry (1848-19I8) and Stanford (1852-1924) headed a renaissance of British music.  Parry was the professor of music at Oxford, and later became Principal of the Royal College of Music, London, to which institution he appointed the Irishman, Stanford, as a teacher of composition' Hoist (1874-1934), Vaughan Williams and John Ireland (1879-) were all pupils of Stanford at the College, and their influence spread down to the next generation, for all three became professors at the College.  Rubbra (1901-) was a pupil of Holst, and Britten of John Ireland.

Amold Bax (i883-1933) studied at the Royal Academy of Music, but although an Englishman, he was affected by Celtic influences.  Elgar, Delius (1862-1934) and Walton were largely self-taught as far as composition was concerned.

Parry and Stanford were steeped in the nineteenth century Germanic traditions.  Their pupils Holst and Vaughan Williams explored the music of England's past: folk music, Tudor music, and the music of Purcell.  It looked as if they might found an English Nationalist school, but their recognition by the greater musical world made such nationalistic assertion unnecessary, and our younger composers have been accepted on their own merits.  We can be as proud of the music produced by British composers today as of that written in the days of the first Queen Elizabeth.