The Musical Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on January 24, 2009
The Musical Quarterly 2008 91(1-2):39-59; doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdn030
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"It's Not Lambkins Frisking At All": English Pastoral Music and the Great War
Correspondence: E-mail: eric.saylor{at}drake.edu
There is a longstanding problem associated with English pastoral music of the twentieth century: no one really knows how to describe it. Arnold Whittall suggests that this difficulty exists because pastoral music tends to be "defined more in terms of what it depicts than the way in which that depiction is musically achieved"—an observation that is both accurate and ironic.1 Those who write about English pastoral music often engage in impressionistic generalities about what it allegedly represents or make vague allusions to "the English folksong school" or "national styles" as though doing so tacitly explains the nature of pastoralism. Consider this assessment of the pastoral from Frank Howes in his influential survey The English Musical Renaissance (1966):
These composers, whom I have classified as belonging to the nationalist succession, Butterworth, Moeran, Warlock, Hadley, Rubbra, and Finzi, would admit the designation, since they have escaped the German bondage of the two previous generations: they have drunk at English springs in the shape of madrigals and folk-song; they have been strengthened by the Bach revival, have been sensitive to English poetry and kept clear of foreign influences (some might say to their loss). They are unlike Elgar, Bliss, Walton, and Rawsthorne, whose Englishness is of some other sort that one would not label pastoral.2The "nationalists" to whom Howes alludes are also apparently pastoralists, judging by his juxtaposition of them with composers whose "Englishness" is manifest in some way "that one would not label pastoral." Beyond that, however, it is difficult to say what defines these "nationalists" as pastoralists per se: they avoided foreign models (except for Bach, already co-opted by the nineteenth-century British musical establishment) in favor of the wholly English traditions of folksong and madrigal (conveniently forgetting that the latter derived from Italianate models); and it was the espousal of these native traditions that enabled them to cast off the bonds of Teutonic influence, which (with the notable exception of the good German, Bach) apparently weakened their expressivity.
Thus the irony of Whittall's assertion: English pastoralism is frequently treated as an obvious and clearly defined musical style, even though such quantification is almost entirely absent from the secondary literature.3 This lack of specificity does not derive from writers' unfamiliarity with pastoralism as a general concept. As early as 1903, the Musical Times was casually using the word "pastoral," with no further explanation, to describe elements of both the style and character of new British music (including works that did not allude to Classical pastoral imagery), which suggests that the term was already common currency among enlightened amateur musicians and music lovers.4 Additionally, "pastoral" formed part of the title or description of at least thirty scores written by British composers between 1910 and 1940, thus ensuring the regular appearance of the term on concert programs.5 Yet despite the close association of the pastoral with English music in the early twentieth century, surveys of musical pastoralism rarely accord the same level of detail or attention to the English pastoral—when it is given any notice at all—as they do to pastoral traditions from other nations or eras, and almost all general surveys of twentieth-century music ignore it entirely.6
Even when music critics, musicologists, and analysts do turn their attention to the subject, the results are not always welcome. Regardless of whether their analysis is stylistic or interpretive, the term "pastoral" is often applied pejoratively by unsympathetic writers imply—or sometimes state outright—that such music as falls under its rubric is a reactionary mishmash of escapism, sentimentality, and nostalgia—in short, that it is antimodern.7 Part of this response stems from the competing critical attitudes that arose during the early twentieth century, particularly in regard to the influences that were directing the course of English music. Some of the most prominent British critics of the period (including Ernest Newman, George Bernard Shaw, and later, Constant Lambert) argued passionately against composers evoking conspicuous markers of "Englishness," considering it a "particular form of provinciality that has degraded nationalism to the level of the exotic."8 Such practices, they argued, were inherently reactionary because they did not aim at universal appeal, and any music that did not do so was bound to fail. Moreover, the apocalyptic events of the First World War "eradicated for poets, painters, and writers the right to follow a pastoral muse," for what possible meaning could such Romantically tinged scenes hold for those who had witnessed the excruciating, mechanically aided birth of modernity?9 Such attitudes only hardened after the Second World War, as various High Modernist idioms became the primary focus of academics and influential music critics, thus consigning pastoralism to the ash-heap of history as little more than a refuge for dead-enders and also-rans.
Contrary to such assertions, a strain of thought has arisen over the last decade recognizing that twentieth-century English pastoralism is a much more complex and progressive musical category than the way its past treatment might suggest. Unlike artists in most other Western European nations, English composers often responded to the pressures of modernism (musical and otherwise) in ways that might first appear quite unadventurous when considered alongside contemporaneous artistic developments in Germany, Austria, and France. However, given the pervasive conservatism of English musical culture throughout much of the nineteenth century, coupled with widely promoted exhortations from certain academic, artistic, and journalistic factions regarding the need for British composers to establish a "national" school of music, it is unsurprising that the artistic responses to modernism evinced by these composers would be both highly idiosyncratic and distinct from those of conventionally "modernist" Continental musicians. This essay will consider one particular manifestation of pastoral music that bears characteristically modern connotations: the artistic response of English composers during the first two decades of the twentieth century to the horrors of the Great War. While many aspects of Romantic culture perished in the wake of the conflict, certain ones survived "precisely because it was so urgent to reckon with death on a large scale and to render its ubiquity somehow special, sacred and of nature," a task for which pastoral art was particularly well suited.10 Although not necessarily grounded in a consistent stylistic approach, the myriad evocations of the pastoral that were set against the backdrop of the Great War provided an alternative to High Modernist styles while simultaneously inverting traditional literary and musical tropes of pastoralism in profoundly modern ways.
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The ambiguity of pastoralism is not limited to musical contexts. In his elegant survey of the subject, Terry Gifford argues that "pastoral" carries at least one of three broad connotations in literary circles.11 The first of these categories posits the pastoral as a historical literary form or device, typically poetic, featuring shepherds and some overarching theme of departure and return (usually from an urban to a rural setting). Although most closely associated with Classical Greek and Roman poetry (e.g., the Idylls of Theocritus or Virgil's Eclogues) or the Greek province of Arcadia (which, in literary contexts, was transformed from a drab backwater into a luxuriant and fertile rural retreat), this form of pastoralism is not limited to a single time or place (or, indeed, even to a single approach). Ellen Harris has demonstrated, for example, that literary pastoralism was not consistent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Italian writers generally hewed to Classical models, but English pastoralists (such as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and Ben Jonson) infused the pastoral with humorous or rustic elements, transforming it from allegory to satire; this had the added effect of simplifying and naturalizing the text by avoiding the elevated prose and strict poetic meters of Classical pastoral poetry.12 Additionally, and contrary to most other traditions, representations of death were integral parts of English pastoral art. Images of skulls, tombstones, or the phrase Et in Arcadia ego ("Even in Arcadia, there am I [Death]") had been present in pastoral art since the early seventeenth century, notably in paintings by Giovanni Francesco Guernico and Nicholas Poussin.13 Generally speaking, however, Continental artists tended to present such images as time-displaced subjects for meditations on mortality, while British artists, ranging from Joshua Reynolds to Aubrey Beardsley, often clad the human subjects of such scenes in contemporary dress, thus recasting these images as present-day memento mori that reminded the viewer of Death's omnipotence and constant presence.
Second, pastoralism can refer more broadly to a type of poetic or prose content "that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban," as in the memoirs of James Herriot or the novels of Richard Adams, typically with an underlying aim of affirming the country as the superior locale.14 This pastoral mode gained popularity during the nineteenth century and survived well beyond, as the Romantic affectation of nature worship displaced the human protagonist as the central focus of pastoral poetry.15 Instead, as Raymond Monelle has observed, a vaguely spiritual, pantheistic "interpretation of nature as ‘God-in-landscape’" arose that comprised "an essentially new pastoral semantic,"16 one that began to be applied more broadly to connote an escape from urban life to a tranquil rural haven.17 This "soft pastoralism" parallels the Classical withdrawal from the city to the simplicity of Arcadia and likewise reflects the Romantic ideal of nature as an alternative to unsavory modernity.18 Paul Fussell has shown that a form of this practice also applied to British soldiers on the western front during the Great War, many of whom used pastoral allusion and imagery in their writing as a means of mitigating their apocalyptic surroundings.19 A recollection of trench life recounted by English composer Arthur Bliss is a typical example of the style:
I found in France, as so many others did, that the appreciation of a moment's beauty had been greatly intensified by the sordid contrast around: one's senses were so much more sharply on the alert for sights and sounds that went unnoticed in peacetime because taken so for granted. But a butterfly alighting on a trench parapet, a thrush's songs at "stand to", a sudden rainbow, became infinitely precious phenomena, and indeed the sheer joy of being alive was the more relished for there being the continual possibility of sudden death.20Such an attachment to Arcadian enclaves may seem incongruous today, especially when evoked against a backdrop of mechanized artillery and trench warfare. Nonetheless, the "soft pastoral" signifiers that Bliss evoked—suggesting a civilization free from vice and conflict—had particular resonance for British troops of all classes as they confronted the "hard pastoralism" of war-torn rural France, a site of vice and conflict freed from civilization.
The third application of "pastoral" does not refer specifically to a stylistic category but rather to a derogatory reaction against—or a critical perception of—either of the other two categories. Antagonistic critics deplored the artifice of "soft" pastoralism, which they perceived as an inherently unreal and inauthentic pose from writers who were idealizing of a way of life with which they may not have had any firsthand contact.21 In some cases, this critique may elicit a "hard" or "anti-pastoral" literary response, as found in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, or George Crabbe's The Village; such works present an unsentimental view of nature and the countryside, free from escapist trappings. Regardless of whether the antipastoral response is literary or critical, it is almost always implicitly disdainful of pastoralism generally. Antipastoralist critics indulge such attitudes not just because they hold the unrealistic nostalgia of "soft" pastoralism in contempt, but also to signal that such obviously outdated and hackneyed portrayals, ipso facto, invariably reflect essentially dishonest expressive modes that attempt to deny the effects (or even the existence) of modernity and all of its benefits.
Gifford couches this point in somewhat different terms, noting that some commentators "have taken the view that because nostalgia is an essential element of Arcadia, the pastoral is always a backward-looking form." However, he goes on to state that this is not an inherent aspect of pastoralism itself: "To the extent that the pastoral represents an idealisation, it must also imply a better future conceived in the language of the present."22 As with Arthur Bliss's comment on trench warfare, pastoral language can gain power when Arcadia is positioned, not as an escapist safe haven, but as a brighter, more appealing world that exists parallel to (or interspersed within) the grimmer trappings of modernity. Though it may be possible to imagine such a prelapsarian world, or even catch occasional glimpses of it, external pressures—social, cultural, historical—preclude its sustained existence in the postlapsarian present. The attraction of the pastoral vision lies in part with the tantalizing hope that certain aspects of it, if realized, could offer a reassuring alternative to modernity's less savory elements. Both John Ruskin and William Morris embraced such an ideology, as their shared devotion to socialist principles inspired their advocacy for the arts and crafts of the Folk as a corrective for a society brutalized by the impact of urbanization and industrialization.23 Thus the much-maligned aspect of "retreat" within pastoralism could manifest itself in two possible ways: it may "either simply escape from the complexities of the city, the court, the present, ‘our manners’, or explore them. This is the difference between the pejorative and the primary senses of the pastoral, between Leo Marx's ‘sentimental pastoral’ and his ‘complex pastoral,’" which roughly correspond to the categories of "soft" and "hard" pastoral already introduced here.24
Of course, English pastoral music does not invariably convey a uniformly positive message—far from it. Given that pastoral literature may be divided into "hard" and "soft" categories, it is reasonable to posit that pastoral music reflects a similar taxonomy. Yet the tacit critical assumption—particularly when pastoralism is used in a pejorative context—is that English pastoral music only exists in the "soft" version. Such opinions are particularly vexing when one considers that, from a literary perspective, the English pastoral tradition tends to be much darker, or "harder," than most others. As mentioned above, it highlights elements of satire and death, tends to downplay the formal language and behavior found in Italian models, and allows for the introduction of modern elements or allusions.25 The question of what constitutes modernity, however, is a critical one; and when considering English pastoral music in the context of the Great War, one must ask which aspect of modernity was being introduced. Was this modernity drawn simply from elements of the "new" styles generally considered representative of Continental modernism (e.g., Schoenberg's atonality or serialism, or Stravinsky's neoclassicism, or the presence of Debussy's parallelism and added note chords)? Or could this strain potentially involve the recasting of some old and forgotten material, made novel once more to a new generation of listeners? Many English composers who came of age in the Edwardian and Georgian eras did so after passing through the crucible of the folk music movement. For most of these artists, folksong represented both an entirely new musical tradition and a potential source of novel stylistic practices—some of which were freed from their folk origins and forged anew as the foundation of a new "pastoralist" style—capable of offering a refreshing alternative to Continental idioms and traditions. Raymond Monelle asserts that, by extension, composers like Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Butterworth "were modernists; their turning to folksong was revolutionary, homiletic, challenging. Their music presented an obstacle to their audiences' complacency. It was a statement of music-political conviction, a credo."26
To be sure, pastoralism is not "high" modernism in the generally accepted stylistic sense; most pieces described as "pastoral" feature modal or modally inflected neo-tonal harmonies, rhapsodic thematic material, an often limited dynamic range (tending toward the quiet), prominent string and woodwind textures, and smoothly flowing rhythms, often in triple or compound meters. Compared with Petrushka or Pierrot Lunaire, the musical language and expression of Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony might indeed seem muted or outmoded at first. But Christopher Butler has argued that modernity features "two phases of innovation: that of radical change to the language of an art ... followed by a more pragmatic, audience-orientated adaptation of new techniques, which often demands a highly allusive compromise with the past."27 In other words, the modernity of the pastoral comes from its power to modify its conventional signifiers in ways that were relevant to contemporary culture—and no event was more relevant to British culture in the early twentieth century than the First World War. To demonstrate this connection, three works that engage the ethos of pastoralism vis-à-vis the First World War (thereby exemplifying the pastoral's engagement with modernity) will be discussed: Edward Elgar's "recitation" Une voix dans le désert, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony, and Arthur Bliss's cantata Morning Heroes.
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In 1915, Elgar wrote Une voix dans le desert, op. 77, a short work for narrator, soprano, and orchestra, on a text by Belgian poet Emile Cammaerts. Elgar had set another text by Cammaerts the previous year (Carillon, op. 75, for narrator and orchestra), and a comparison of the two pieces is revealing. Carillon, which Cammaerts wrote as the poem "Chantons, Belges, chantons!" shortly after the war broke out (his wife, Tita Brands Cammaerts, soon translated it into English), unites sentimental elegy and resolute militarism. The narrator calls upon Belgians to "sing of the pride of our defeats," "of the joy of honour," and "of hope and fiercest hate" over "the graves of our children," while dreaming of future battles that will not only repatriate Belgian cities, but culminate in the taking of Berlin. It is bellicose and righteous, patriotic and confident, and was enormously successful in rallying Britons to the cause of "brave little Belgium" in the early months of the war.28
Une voix dans le désert is considerably less sanguine. It begins with the narrator describing a desolate landscape "a hundred yards from the trenches/close to the battle-front" crossed by muddy roads and "the crooked wooden crosses" of a graveyard on "the wide, lonely plain" under "a cold black sky." The text is paired with a plodding accompaniment for the marching soldiers, maintained until they arrive at "a low thatched cottage" with a shell-torn roof; there, they hear the sound of a girl singing of spring's return and a resumption of life as it was before the war.29 The imagery employed throughout this second section is markedly different from the first, alluding to stereotypically pastoral scenes of "willows red and tassels grey," farming in the pastures, village churches with open doors, skylarks soaring over wide rivers, and the flowering of "heart's-ease and goldenrod" on the graves, and so on. The musical language also differs from that of the first section. Much of the second section is organized around a short, tuneful antecedent-consequent phrase that passes through a variety of keys; strikingly, it recalls a passage in "From far, from eve and morning," the second song in Vaughan Williams's pastorally tinged On Wenlock Edge of 1911 (see Exx. 1a and 1b).
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In this music, Elgar has juxtaposed the darkness, mud, and desolation of the front with the hope inspired by the promise of an imaginary Arcadian enclave. The text invites such serene visions, which Cammaerts reinforces by using the future tense: the soprano sings not of previous springs, but of a time "when the spring comes round again"; cows will greet the day; the dead shall hear; every church will open its door; boats will glide; graves will flower.30 One could argue that this scene is less Arcadian than Utopian, given that it is a vision of a possible future rather than a recollection of the past; however, the setting envisioned is a full restoration of the past, not one that points to a new world in which present-day tribulations have successfully been resolved.31 But because this hope is ultimately illusory—positing as it does an end to conflict with no obvious means of doing so—the piece ends pessimistically, returning to the crooked crosses, muddy roads, and desolate music of the opening section, predicting doom ahead: "They will not go away, nothing will make them yield, they will die, they say, sooner than leave their field." The pastoral vision is revealed to be just that: a vision—and one unlikely to be realized.
Because the typical musical signifiers of pastoralism in this work are relatively few, the text is the guiding force behind the form, musical language, and pastoral mode of Une voix dans le désert. Conversely, pieces lacking clear textual frames, like Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony (1922), run the risk of being misinterpreted even if pastoral musical signifiers are pervasive. The deprecating witticisms about this work are well known. Although he admired the Pastoral Symphony, Philip Heseltine is better remembered for describing it as "a little too much like a cow looking over a gate."32 Hugh Allen, the director of the Royal College of Music, said it made him think of "V[aughan] W[illiams] rolling over and over in a newly ploughed field on a wet day,"33 and composer and critic Rupert Erlebach wrote an extended and entirely fanciful program for the work, framing it as an homage to rural Gloucestershire.34 Writing the official program note, Vaughan Williams acknowledged that the symphony's mood was, "as its title suggests, almost entirely quiet and contemplative," but did not publicly disclose that the object of his contemplation was his service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France during the Great War.35
Vaughan Williams disclosed the origins of the symphony in a letter written in 1938 to the poet Ursula Wood, who would later become his second wife. He claimed that it "incubated when I used to go up night after night with the ambulance wagon at Ecoives [sic] and we went up a steep hill and there was a wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset,"36 an image that correlated with many reviews comparing the mood of the symphony with scenes of gentle, rural tranquility. In the same letter, however, he also wrote that the Pastoral Symphony was "really war-time music ... it's not really lambkins frisking at all as most people take for granted."37 Thus the Pastoral Symphony is a modern manifestation of the "Death in Arcadia" trope; as an ambulance orderly charged with finding the wounded after battle, Vaughan Williams's vision of that Corot-like landscape would have been disrupted by the sight of bodies broken by the monstrous anger of the guns. Michael Kennedy has called the work Vaughan Williams's "war requiem"; if so, it is also what Samuel Hynes calls an "anti-monument," an example of modernist art "that rendered the war without the value-bearing abstractions, without the glory, and without the large-scale grandeur."38
To repeat and extend an earlier observation, the modernism of the Pastoral Symphony is not represented in the form of radical change to Vaughan Williams's musical language—though it was more concise and controlled than in much of his prewar output—but rather, as Butler suggests, of allusions to past practices in a contemporary context. Many conventions of musical pastoralism are present, such as the streams of parallel triads that open the first movement, the restricted dynamic level and neo-modal harmonic language throughout, the dancelike triplet rhythms of the third movement, and the stark solos for trumpet and soprano in the second and fourth movements. Given Vaughan Williams's proclivity for similar musical effects in earlier works connected to English literature and landscape (such as The Lark Ascending, the Norfolk Rhapsodies, and On Wenlock Edge), critics could reasonably infer that this new Pastoral Symphony, unlike Beethoven's, was mehr Malerei als Ausdruck, and represented a continuation of its composer's prewar practices.
However, Vaughan Williams's recollection of the French countryside as "Corot-like" in its beauty is notable. French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) was a late enthusiast for the Claude glass (a small, convex mirror, tinted black or made of carbon, obsidian, or jet), which was employed by artists to give a softened, otherworldly tint to the images it reflected.39 According to Leo Marx, "when a viewer used the Claude glass the landscape was transformed into a provisional work of art, framed and suffused by a golden tone," which, in his words, "helped to create a pastoral illusion."40 Vaughan Williams was not viewing the postwar world through rose-colored glasses but rather, in his evocation of Corot, peering through a glass, darkly.
Literary critic Peter Marinelli asserts that pastoral poetry's overriding characteristic "is that it is written when an ideal or at least more innocent world is felt to be lost, but not so wholly as to destroy the memory of it or to make some imaginative intercourse between present reality and past perfection impossible. ... Nostalgia cannot be the emotion of those who are not conscious of having experienced a loss."41 Vaughan Williams suffered such acute losses during the war, and the repercussions of that strife can be heard in this work, the composition of which must have formed a difficult catharsis for him. His readjustment to civilian life was not easy. Many of his friends had died in the war—he noted that "out of the 7 [of his colleagues] who joined up together in August 1914[,] only 3 are left"—and their absences made him "dread coming back to normal life with so many gaps."42 He was also faced with the trials of resuming his professional career, discovering whether his creative powers had withstood the war's effects, and figuring out whether his art was still relevant.43 In fact, his concerns are those of a modernist, driven by the need to make sense of an alienating postwar world while armed only with prewar artistic experience.44 The quietude the Pastoral Symphony expresses so relentlessly may have suggested the Cotswolds or village greens in Shropshire for some, but Vaughan Williams must have hoped that, for certain listeners, it would evoke the unsettling stillness war leaves in its wake—the barren fields, the silent dead, and the emotional voids of the survivors.45
While Vaughan Williams was reluctant to discuss his memories of the war, his colleague Arthur Bliss did not feel so constrained. Bliss wrote that his wartime experiences were "so deeply etched on my mind that I cannot make a logical form of my life without depicting them."46 One of the deepest etchings must have been made by the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Bliss was injured on the first day of the offensive and repatriated to England, but his beloved brother Kennard was killed by shrapnel later in that campaign. Bliss was profoundly affected by his brother's death and wrote the choral-orchestral work Morning Heroes (1930) as a tribute to him and "all my other comrades-in-arms who fell in the Great War."47 The first four movements of Morning Heroes feature texts by Homer, Walt Whitman, and Li-Tai Po addressing the general experiences of war—the separation of husbands and wives, the mobilization of cities, the glorification of heroes—but Bliss intended the two-part final movement ("Now, Trumpeter, for thy Close") to deal "specifically with the Battle of the Somme in which my brother fell."48 In it, he juxtaposes two opposing pastoral perspectives inspired by the writings of two very different war poets: Wilfred Owen and Robert Nichols.
The first part, for orator and solo timpani, sets Owen's final poem, "Spring Offensive." The poem opens by conjuring a tranquil Arcadian scene (replete with long grass, warm fields, insects, flowers, and brambles) in which soldiers rest in anticipation of going over the top. When they do, the verdant surroundings turn hellish; as Dominic Hibberd suggests, "having refused the offered blessing of communion with the natural order, the men have become victims sacrificed to an outraged Nature."49 The final stanza, with its implications of survivor's guilt, clearly had special resonance for Bliss:
But what say such as from existence' brinkIn the pause just before that final line is spoken, the orchestra enters with a rhapsodic melody in nine-eight meter, led by oboe and flute (Ex. 2), a quintessentially pastoral musical marker.50 This passage suggests an answer to the question that Owen poses in his final line: the survivors "speak not" of their lost comrades, because words are insufficient to convey their grief. Instead, they invert the memento mori of Death's claim "Et in Arcadia ego": Death may be in Arcadia, but Arcadia is also in Death. The dead are glorious heroes, forever young and beautiful in their sacrifice—like the shepherd's lambs to the slaughter—occupants of an idyllic paradise free from strife, who are thus remembered with pastoral music appropriate for such a setting. The survivors, by contrast, are left to cope with the damaged world they have inherited, rather than the Utopia they were promised, and perversely envy the dead their paradise of oblivion. Bliss's music does not wallow in nostalgia for an imaginary golden age, but responds to a venerable convention of English pastoralist art in a contemporary context.Ventured but drave too swift to sink,
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames—
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder—
Why speak they not of comrades that went under?
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This passage eventually leads into the second half of the movement, featuring the poem "Dawn on the Somme" by Bliss's friend and fellow veteran, Robert Nichols. This was not the first time that Bliss had used a text by Nichols; in his cantata Pastoral: Lie Strewn the White Flocks (1928), Bliss featured excerpts from the epic poem "A Faun's Holiday," taken from Nichols's first published collection, Ardours and Endurances (1917).51 The most striking of Nichols's passages that Bliss set was "The Naiad's Music," an excerpt in which the demigod Pan rests to the seductive strains of water nymphs offering respite for the tired "sons of Sorrow" who venture forth "only wishing to be numb."52 The naiads' modally tinged music, sung by a female chorus in a lilting three-eight meter, emphasizes parallel streams of consonant first inversion triads and is occasionally interrupted by entries from a solo flute and a chorus of unusually subdued fauns. Bliss claimed to have found his inspiration for this work during a trip to Sicily in 1928, but during that same period, he was also "troubled by frequent nightmares" associated with his military service, a fear he chose "decisively to exorcise" with the composition of Morning Heroes the following year.53 The weariness and mental strain that Bliss had been laboring under for the previous decade had taken its toll, and the tranquil setting in which Nichols's naiads reposed—promising "dreams lovelier than sleep," according to the fauns—offered an attractive alternative to the endless trench combat that still haunted his own dreams.
Much of Nichols's early professional reputation was founded on the popularity of his war poetry. Like Rupert Brooke's verse, it is strongly colored by allusions to classical literature and may seem pretentious (even trite) next to the gritty urgency of Owen's poetry, as Nichols does not flinch from comparing the mortars and bombs to "arrow on fire-plumed arrow ... shot from the bright arc of Apollo's bow" over "the wild and writhen waste below" from which the shades of the eponymous morning heroes rise toward the sun. Still, Nichols's poised classicism obviously appealed to Bliss, perhaps because it provided the necessary rhetorical balance to Owen's dark vision, and it allowed the work to end with a clear tribute rather than an uncomfortable query. The rhapsodic music that closed the first half of the finale continues for most of this section, but is occasionally distorted by sinuous, dissonant chromaticism that emerges from the orchestra (Ex. 3). This may be a response to the artifice of Nichols's words. Since the style of the poem is not itself modern, the Homeric imagery it employs is offset by pastoralist music that is often conspicuously "modern" in its sound, grounding the poem's lofty sentiments within contemporary and unsentimental musical language.
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The two texts juxtaposed in the finale thus set up a doubly elegiac pastoral dichotomy. In the first half, Bliss has selected a modern, "hard" pastoralist text—Owen's "Spring Offensive"—that vividly reveals the true and terrible cost of war, despite concluding with stereotypically "soft" pastoral music that would seem better suited for a more sanitized (if not sentimental) portrayal of a Tommy's sacrifice. The second half, by contrast, finds Bliss employing a classical, "soft" approach to literary pastoralism in his setting of Nichols's lines glorifying the dead, the newest arrivals in an Elysian paradise denied to the war's survivors. However, Bliss's music disrupts the aesthetic harmoniousness of that conceit—literally—by repeatedly introducing dissonances that harden the edges of Nichols's pastoral vision.
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Whether as a concept or a style, English musical pastoralism is a much more complex category than typically assumed. After all, any given pastoral work may possess either Arcadian or Utopian subtexts, evoke associations with either the distant past or the complicated present, function as social affirmation or critique, or, by engaging with its literary counterparts, elicit a multiplicity of subtleties capable of transcending a piece's own time and setting. Such a tradition could not be further from the caricature of pastoralism as clod-hopping, one-dimensional "cowpat music," to use Elisabeth Lutyens's dismissive gibe. Her comment belies her jealousy at the success that pastoral music enjoyed at the expense of her own style: far from being emotionally or expressively limited, the moving evocations of the pastoral in war-related works by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Bliss effectively demonstrate, in Paul Harrington's words, that "a sensitive listener ... will know the ability of the pastoral style to convey genuine pain" just as powerfully as it may communicate feelings of tranquility and peace, or nostalgia and loss.54
It must also be noted that the scores examined in this article are not the only ones that provide a useful musical context for engaging with pastoralism; indeed, they represent only a small fraction of such works created by British composers over the last hundred years. To be clear, not all twentieth-century English pastoral music is inherently elegiac, nor does it invariably reflect a modernist conceit, nor must such works engage with the anguish or experience of war. Such considerations are, however, important aspects of a musical tradition that has either been overlooked or undervalued by generations of critics and scholars, many of whom have minimized the innovative aspects of the works in that repertory and thus marginalized their socio-cultural significance. English pastoral music, like neoclassical music, was widely lauded in its own day and has continued to resonate with later generations of performers and listeners. Many of those who admire this long-standing English tradition are aware, on some level, that pastoral music is at once deeply informed by past practices and keenly engaged with contemporary musical and cultural concerns; surely the time has come for a serious reappraisal of the factors that account for its style, use, and enduring appeal.
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Eric Saylor is an assistant professor of musicology at Drake University. A specialist in the music of early twentieth-century England, he is the author of articles on Delius, Vaughan Williams, and Elgar and is currently coediting and contributing to a collection of essays on representations of blackness in opera, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.
1 Arnold Whittall, "The Signs of Genre: Britten's Version of Pastoral," in Sundry Sorts of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections, eds. Chris Banks, Arthur Searle, and Malcolm Turner (London: The British Library, 1993), 363. 
2 Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 262.
3 For one of the only published examples of a stylistic outline of pastoralism, see Ted Perkins, "British Pastoral Style and the Oboe," The Double Reed 11, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 25; a more general outline may also be found in Walter Clark, "Vaughan Williams and the ‘Night Side of Nature’: Octatonicism in Riders to the Sea," in Vaughan Williams Essays, eds. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 55.
4 For some of the early uses of "pastoral" in this context, see "Music in Staffordshire," Musical Times 44, no. 723 (May 1903): 335 [on A. R. Gaul's cantata The Prince of Peace]; "Three Welsh Composers," Musical Times 45, no. 740 (October 1904): 651 [on Harry Evans's cantata The Victory of St. Garmon]; "Worcester Festival Novelties," Musical Times 46, no. 751 (September 1905): 606 [on Ivor Atkins's cantata Hymn of Faith], "In Springtime: Four English Pastorals," Musical Times 48, no. 777 (November 1907): 725 [review of the eponymous cantata by A. Herbert Brewer], and "Music in Liverpool," Musical Times 49, no. 780 (February 1908): 114–15 [on Frederick Delius's Brigg Fair].
5 The term was used as far back as 1876 by Richard D'Oyly Carte for his "musical pastoral" Happy Hampstead, though it was most commonly encountered in works written between the First and Second World Wars, ranging from pieces by well-known figures (Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Arthur Bliss) to second-tier artists (Roger Quilter, Frank Bridge, Edmund Rubbra, Arthur Benjamin) to composers all but unknown today (John Ansell, Percy Turnbull, Billy Mayerl).
6 To give only a few examples: the name checking of Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony in the "Pastoral" entry of Grove Music Online constitutes their entire coverage of twentieth-century English pastoralism; see Geoffrey Chew and Owen Jander, "Pastoral," in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40091 (accessed 12 August 2008). Raymond Monelle spends not quite three full pages on English pastoralism (out of an eighty-six-page-long section on the pastoral) in his recent The Musical Topic, and most of those three pages comprise a summary of the activities and opinions associated with members of the English Folk Song Society. Monelle concludes that "The English Georgians are clearly part of the story of the musical pastoral, even if they cannot quite be made relevant to a study of the pastoral topic," his judgment apparently stemming from a small group of works by Vaughan Williams noted in a single paragraph; see Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 271. As far as recent histories of twentieth-century music are concerned, even such estimable and widely read texts as Glenn Watkins's Soundings (1988), Robert Morgan's Twentieth-Century Music (1991), Arnold Whittall's Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (1999), Eric Salzman's Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (4th ed., 2002), and Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) lack index entries for pastoralism, much less any significant engagement with the term or the musical literature associated with it.
7 See Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd ed., Music and Society Series, eds. Peter Martin and Tia DeNora (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 99, 191, 208, 265, and 269 for representative examples. It is also present in other surveys of English music, often dovetailing with descriptions of folk-influenced or "nationalist" music; for examples, see Peter Pirie, The English Musical Renaissance: Twentieth Century British Composers and Their Works (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), esp. 46–48, 109–10, 120, 131–32, 164, 183, and 254; Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance, 258–61 and 270; and Michael Trend, The Music Makers: The English Musical Renaissance from Elgar to Britten (New York: Schirmer, 1985), esp. 177–78 and 192.
8 Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline, 2nd ed. (New York: October House Inc., 1967), 162.
9 Douglas Mackaman and Michael Mays, "Introduction: The Quickening of Modernity," in World War I and the Cultures of Modernity, eds. Douglas Mackaman and Michael Hays (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), xviii.
10 Mackaman and Mays, "Introduction: The Quickening of Modernity," xviii.
11 Terry Gifford, Pastoral, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 1999), 1–8. Peter Marinelli outlines similar categories in his Pastoral, The Critical Idiom, gen. ed. John D. Jump (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1971), 8–9.
12 Ellen Harris, Handel and the Pastoral Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), 94–96; see also Whittall, "The Signs of Genre," 363–64.
13 See Erwin Panofsky, "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition," in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History by Erwin Panofsky (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 295–320, for a fascinating demonstration of why the term ego refers to the embodiment of Death itself, though it was frequently (and mistakenly) attributed to the dead person who either left the phrase behind or was entombed behind or beneath its site of manifestation.
15 This is literally true in great works of children's literature from Edwardian and Georgian England, such as Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, the works of Beatrix Potter, and A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh-stories.
16 Monelle, The Musical Topic, 203.
17 See Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, "Indecent Musical Displays: Feminizing the Pastoral in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss," in The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, ed. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 131n5. Peter Marinelli, by contrast, suggests that this displacement of the protagonist follows a slightly different path: in the Classical pastoral, he argues, the protagonist (represented by the shepherd) "remains first and foremost an emblem of humanity, a general rather than a specific type, and his afflictions and joys are universal. The process is reversed in the romantic pastoral, which begins with the individual figure, concentrates upon his hard lot in life, and then magnifies him, almost insensibly, into a figure of titanic proportions, an emblem of general Humanity. In modern pastoral, the figure of the shepherd, whether idealized or real, vanishes entirely, his place being taken by some relatively simple figure, sometimes the worker, more usually the child." (Marinelli, Pastoral, 6.) Both Monelle and Marinelli, however, clearly articulate a process of abstraction intended to diminish the protagonists' roles in Romantic and post-Romantic pastorals in favor of emphasizing the evocation of place, which Clapp-Itnyre cogently observes.
18 Annabel Patterson also uses the term "soft" when examining William Wordsworth's evocation of the pastoral in The Prelude (1805/1850), in which she claims that the poet is "distinguishing a conventional or literary pastoral from a ‘real’ rusticity. In fact, Wordsworth's major distinction here is again between a soft or leisured, and a hard or working pastoral, both of which could exist in the real world, and each of which is articulated through a carefully marshaled series of literary echoes." Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 279; see also Marinelli, Pastoral, 1–9, esp. 3–4.
19 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; repr. 2000), 230–69 passim.
20 Arthur Bliss, As I Remember (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 36.
21 Writers that came in for such criticism included Rupert Brooke, A. E. Housman, and Walter de la Mare, among others, whose pre- and postwar poetry, in Gifford's estimation, "sought refuge in rural images that did not disturb a sense of comfortable reassurance" (Gifford, Pastoral, 71). Interestingly, those composers who came to be accused of adopting such a pose were quite aware of its existence, and presumably wished to avoid its evocation. In a letter written to Percy Scholes in 1922, Ralph Vaughan Williams was describing the plot of his new opera Hugh the Drover when he noted the following: "Aunt Jane sings the joys [sic] of domesticity but Mary seems to prefer a ‘free life under heaven’ (we used to imagine we liked that kind of thing before the war when we had not experienced it)." Quoted in Hugh Cobbe, ed., Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 135.
23 See also Paul Harrington, "Holst and Vaughan Williams: Radical Pastoral," in Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. Christopher Norris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989): 106–27.
24 Gifford, Pastoral, 46; for more on the distinction between the sentimental and complex pastoral, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964; repr. 2000), 3–32 passim.
25 Ellen Harris points to a scene in Samuel Daniel's satirical pastoral drama Queen's Arcadia (1605) in which "a group of modern townspeople attempt to disrupt the idyllic Arcadian atmosphere" by introducing the inhabitants to contemporary fashions and cultural mores (Harris, Pastoral, 99).
26 Monelle, The Musical Topic, 270.
27 Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 258.
28 See Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 37–38; for more details on the work, see also Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 39–41.
29 It is unclear whether the girl is actually singing, or whether the narrator imagines her doing so; the text reads "As a prayer, through the roof a girl's voice rang / and the cottage sang," removing human agency from the sentiments that follow. Moreover, following the soprano's solo, the narrator's first words are "Not a breath, not a sound, not a soul," suggesting that he has just experienced a vision rather than an actual aural sensation.
30 All emphases are the author's.
31 W. H. Auden wrote about this juxtaposition between "the Arcadian, whose favourite daydream is of Eden, and the Utopian whose favourite daydream is of New Jerusalem," claiming that the "characterological gulf" between the two groups was "unbridgeable" because in Eden, conflict had not yet arisen, whereas all conflicts have been endured and resolved in the New Jerusalem. See Auden, "Arcadia and Utopia," [1948] in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 409–11; quoted in Brian Loughrey, ed., The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1984), 90–92.
32 Robert Nichols, "At Oxford," in Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine, ed. Cecil Gray (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), 78–79.
33 Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; Clarendon Press, 1992; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 156.
34 Rupert Erlebach, "Vaughan Williams and His Three Symphonies," Monthly Musical Record 52, no. 619 (July 1922): 151.
35 Michael Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; repr. 1998), 87.
36 Ralph Vaughan Williams, Dorking, to Ursula Wood, London, 4 October 1938; quoted in Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1964; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 121.
37 Ursula Vaughan Williams, RVW, 121.
38 Hynes, A War Imagined, 283.
39 It was named after the seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorraine. See Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 15–17, and Jacqueline Colliss Harvey, "Claude glass [Claude Lorrain glass]," Grove Art Online, http://www.groveart.com/shared/views/article.html?section=art.018003 (accessed 4 June 2007).
40 Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 89.
42 Ralph Vaughan Williams to Gustav Holst, "Autumn 1916 (?)," in Heirs and Rebels, eds. Imogen Holst and Ursula Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1959; repr. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1974), 45.
43 See Ursula Vaughan Williams, RVW, 132.
44 Samuel Hynes notes, "The war is not an event in history but a gap, an annihilation of prewar reality, and that neither art nor life can simply resume the old continuities when the war ends. This is, of course, a primary tenet of postwar Modernism." Hynes, A War Imagined, 129.
45 This work was one of several written in the immediate postwar period that could be characterized as quiet yet intense, a group that included the Mass in G Minor and the one-act opera The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains. Further exploration regarding the relationship among these pieces may be found in Byron Adams, "Scripture, Church, and Culture: Biblical Texts in the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams," in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 99–17.
49 Quoted in Jon Stallworthy, ed., Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1984), 1:194.
50 This section likely inspired the subsequent revision of A Colour Symphony's second movement, which features a near-identical passage; see Robert Meikle, "Metamorphic Variation: The Orchestral Music," in Arthur Bliss: Music and Literature, ed. Stewart Craggs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 27–30.
51 Bliss also used Classically oriented pastoralist texts by Jonson, John Fletcher, Theocritus, and Poliziano in the other movements of Lie Strewn the White Flocks, which he dedicated to Edward Elgar; see Robert Anderson, Elgar, The Master Musicians (New York: Schirmer, 1993), 456.
52 Robert Nichols, "A Faun's Holiday," in Ardours and Endurances (London: Chatto and Windus, 1918), 107.
54 Harrington, "Radical Pastoral," 115.
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