Arthur Bliss: Music and Literature.(Michael Tippett: Music and Literature)(Book Review)

Edited by Stewart R. Craggs. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. [xv, 351 p. ISBN 1-85928-319-5. $114.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, indexes.

Michael Tippett: Music and Literature. Edited by Suzanne Robinson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. [xix, 261 p. ISBN 0-7546-0132-3. $79.95.] Music examples, illustrations, indexes.

The comparatively recent surge of interest in British music is evident from publication in the last ten years of books on Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edmund Rubbra, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, and Gerald Finzi, to name just a few. This interest is furthered by two recent publications of Ashgate Publishing in their Music and Literature series.

Stewart Craggs, editor of Arthur Bliss: Music and Literature, is already well known to those interested in British music for his scholarship in the field generally and for his work on Sir Arthur Bliss specifically. His work includes bio-bibliographies of Arthur Bliss (1988), Richard Rodney Bennett (1989), and John McCabe (1991), all published by Greenwood Press; two books on William Walton (William Walton: A Thematic Catalogue, rev. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990] and William Walton: A Source Book [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1993]) and Arthur Bliss: A Source Book (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1996).

In the introduction to the present volume, John Amis explains,

 
   Various composers of the recent past are 
   more played today than Bliss; there are 
   even societies devoted to them; and 
   many of them have more works in the 
   CD catalogue than Bliss, get more performances 
   on the radio and in the concert 
   hall or opera house. This is sad and unjustified. 
   There are great things in Bliss 
   and they should be heard more. (p. 5) 

Amis could have also mentioned in his list the relative paucity of scholarship, despite Craggs's herculean efforts.