| Abstract |
This study of English song is the first detailed account of an unusually fruitful interrelationship between English music and English poetry. The period covered is known as the English Musical Renaissance and runs from the last years of the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The author traces the late flowering of Romantic impulses in solo song during these years, surveying it from critical, analytical and historical angles. He plots the growth of the English stylistic sensibility in song in the decades leading up to the First World War, discusses in detail the plateau it reached between the wars (particularly in the 1920s), and shows how and why it declined as other musical concerns took the field. Poets whose verse was set to music most frequently, including Housman, Hardy, de la Mare and Yeats, are treated at length, as are pre-eminent song composers such as Butterworth, Finzi, Gurney, Ireland, Quilter, Somervell, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Warlock. In all, more than fifty composers are discussed, and numerous individual songs. In the final section of the book, besides providing an extensive bibliography, the author catalogues over 5,000 songs, giving dates of composition and publication and much other detail, listed by composer. |
| General note | Volume 2 includes song lists of: William Baines, Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax, Lennox Berkeley, Gerald Berners, Arthur Bliss, Rutland Boughton, Havergal Brian, Frank Bridge, Benjamin Britten, William Denis Browne, Benjamin Burrows, Alan Bush, George Butterworth, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Henry Walford Davies, Frederick Delius, Bernard van Dieren, Edward Elgar, Ernest Farrar, Gerald Finzi, John Foulds, Henry Balfour Gardiner, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Eugene Goossens, Percy Grainger, Ivor Gurney, Patrick Hadley, Fritz Hart, Michael Head, Joseph Holbrooke, Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells, William Hurlstone, John Ireland, Frederick Kelly, Constant Lambert, Ernest Moeran, Norman O'Neill, Charles Orr, Hubert Parry, Roger Quilter, Alan Rawsthorne, Edmund Rubbra, Cyril Scott, Francis George Scott, Arthur Somervell, Charles Villiers Stanford, John Sykes, Michael Tippett, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Peter Warlock, and Charles Wood. |
