Lennox Berkeley: A Source Book. (Twentieth-Century British Composers).

Lennox Berkeley: A Source Book. By Stewart R. Craggs. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2000. [xii, 383 p. ISBN 0-85967-933-0. $99.95.]

In one of the more ironic turns of the whirligig of time, the convenient designation "English Musical Renaissance" has lately fallen into disfavor. Arguably patriotic, this moniker has become a slow moving target for self-professed radical scholars bent on stripping twentieth-century British music of both cultural context and historical fact in order to deconstruct it. Granted that problems must attend the hermeneutics implied by such an imprecise appellation, no better term so aptly identifies this historical episode. During the period roughly covered by the loose description "English Musical Renaissance," a body of distinguished and enduring music was created in England in an efflorescence of musical composition that occurred after a long period of relative desuetude. This rich musical epoch lasted roughly from the premiere of Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in 1899 to the death of Michael Tippett in 1998. Aside from Elgar and Britten, major British composers during this period included Ralph Vaughan Will iams, Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, William Walton, and Benjamin Britten.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this period of musical fecundity is not that so many diverse, accomplished, and celebrated composers of the first rank were active at the time. What most recalls the excitement of sixteenth-century English music is that a host of other composers flourished as well, in the way that satellites such as Thomas Morley and John Bull revolved around the planets of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. While these composers did not achieve the eminence of their more famous colleagues, they each made a signal contribution to their nation's musical repertory, and, indeed, to Western music. A partial roster of such distinguished figures might include Arthur Bliss, Elizabeth Maconchy, Constant Lambert, Howard Ferguson, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, and Peter Warlock.

While little known in America, the name of Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) deserves a place on the list of composers who enriched the repertory of twentieth-century English music. Despite a self-effacing temperament, Berkeley was nevertheless an ambitious composer who attempted a wide variety of genres, including symphony and grand opera. The impressive range of Berkeley's accomplishment is amply documented in Lennox Berkeley: A Source Book, a useful volume compiled by the indefatigable Stewart R. Craggs, who has produced a number of such sourcebooks dealing with English composers, and elegantly produced by Ashgate Press. A welcome companion to Peter Dickinson's judicious and insightful study of the composer's life (Peter Dickinson, The Music of Lennox Berkeley [London: Thames Publishing, 1988]), this fine guide to research sheds light upon the composer's achievement while hinting at reasons for its relative neglect.

One reason for this lack of recognition, both in Britain and abroad, stems from Berkeley's cosmopolitan compositional style. Berkeley was one of the relatively few English students of the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Like such distinguished American members of the "Boulangerie" as Walter Piston and Aaron ...