The Oxford History of English Music. Vol. 2, From c. 1715 to the Present Day.(Review)

The Oxford History of English Music. Vol. 2, From c. 1715 to the Present Day. By John Caldwell. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [xxii, 612 p. ISBN 0-19-816288-X. $135.]

The period of the second volume of John Caldwell's history of English music, ca. 1715 to the present day, has already been covered by volumes 4--6 of The Blackwell History of Music in Britain ([Oxford: Black-well, 1988--]; vol. 5 originally published as The Athlone History of Music in Britain [London: Athlone Press, 1981]), but a study of this kind has not been attempted by a single author since Ernest Walker's A History of Music in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907: 2d ed., 1924; 3d ed., 1952) first appeared almost a century ago. Caldwell freely admits in his preface that the completion of the three Blackwell volumes "has been a particular convenience," and a general indebtedness is acknowledged (p. vii), but he has also had the benefit of a number of other studies, particularly studies of the "English Musical Renaissance," from which to develop his own perspective. Frank Howes's now somewhat dated The English Musical Renaissance (New York: Stein and Day, 1966) and Peter J. Pine's generally poor and bad ly planned book by the same title (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979) are two that spring to mind, while Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes's more controversial The English Musical Renaissance, 1860-1940: Construction and Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1993) appeared relatively recently. Moreover, in the last twenty years there have been a considerable number of other, more detailed works of scholarship on English music of the last three centuries that Caldwell has been able to draw upon, and these he has attempted to bring together to form a larger purview of music's role in England -- a thesis confirmed by the presence of the last chapter, "England and its Music" (pp. 537-53).

There can be no doubt that the task of synthesizing a vast array of factual material has been an immense undertaking, and Caldwell has digested a great deal of research and used his acquaintance with a highly varied repertory in the creation of this volume. To a nonspecialist, his chronological plan, his subdivision of chapters, the fulsome bibliography, and the extensive music examples (often of little-known works) will be hugely advantageous. The reasons for organizing the subdivisions of his chapters into genres for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are logical, and it is, for the most part, easy to gain a clear sense of historical development in, for example, opera, orchestral music, chamber music, and song. The rationale for the twentieth century, where, in Caldwell's view, "the importance of genre is beginning to recede" (p. v), is to provide commentaries (or "thumbnail sketches," to use Caldwell's words) on individual composers (e.g., "Elgar," "Delius," "Bax") or groups of composers (e.g., "Brid ge, Ireland," "Walton, Lambert," "Older Modernists: Lutyens, Frankel, Searle," "Younger Modernists (2): Davies, Birtwistle," "Younger Pragmatists (2)"). Although Caldwell states that he has no intention of being encyclopedic (p. vi), he has managed to create a coherent chronology of the most significant areas of creativity, though at times the rapidity of composers' names and works does seem to degenerate into a "whistle-stop tour." This mode of delivery can irritate the reader who might wish to dwell a little more on the substance of individual pieces and compositional processes (a desire often encouraged by the lengthy music examples). This is, of course, hard to manage with a subject of such colossal proportions, but often the description of works and their value -- and this is a central criterion of Caldwell's study that I often find too subjective to be beneficial -- is so general, cursory, or oversimplified that students will not gain a great deal from the brief critical summaries provided. The symphoni c thinking of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and especially Alan Rawsthorne suffers in this regard, and it is a shame that important landmarks such as Peter Warlock's The Curlew (1920--22) and Constant Lambert's Piano Concerto (1930-31), albeit problematic in their style and language, are not given more analytical consideration, since the processes in both works are far from simple. Caldwell makes a special case for Gustav Holst's originality in The Planets (1914-16) and the First Choral Symphony (1923-21) and does not dispute Holst's striking ideas (which clearly influenced Vaughan Williams), but he offers no criticism of the major difficulties Holst experienced with extended structures, whether in larger symphonic movements or in opera (for example, the obvious two "styles" of Savitri). It is the lack of this kind of detail and inquiry, involving a ...