Matthew Riley

This book offers a comparative analysis of the relationships between western art music, nations and nationalism, bringing together insights from nationalism studies, cultural history and musicology. It explores the influence of emergent nations and nationalism on the development of classical music in Europe and North America, along with the distinctive themes, sounds and resonances to be found in the repertory of each of the nations. Its scope is broad, extending well beyond the period 1848–1914, when national music flourished most conspicuously. The interplay of music and nation encompasses the oratorios of Handel, the open-air music of the French Revolution, and the orchestral works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and it stretches on in art music to the mid twentieth century in Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Copland. The book addresses the representation of the national community, the incorporation of ethnic vernacular idioms into art music, the national homeland in music, musical adaptations of national myths and legends, the music of national commemoration, and the canonization of national music.

Co-authored with Anthony D. Smith, Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics

A very small proportion of eighteenth-century symphonies are in minor keys, yet they include some of the most dramatic and best-known works of the symphonic repertoire, such as Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, K. 550. In Vienna and the Habsburg territories over fifty minor-key symphonies by at least eleven composers were written in the late eighteenth century. Their distinctive stormy character, nervous energy, and intense pathos make them a unique phenomenon of eighteenth-century instrumental music. This book combines historical perspectives with recent developments in music analysis to shed new light on the Viennese minor-key symphony, placing the works of the two great masters alongside lesser-known works by composers such as Georg Christoph Wagenseil, Florian Leopold Gassmann, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Karl von Ordonez, Johann Baptist Vanhal, Franz Anton Hoffmeister, Leopold Koželuch, and Paul Wranitzky. The repertory is treated as a subgenre, and its conventions and characteristic vocabulary are reconstructed. There is special focus on the contrapuntal minuet; the “stormy finale"; the lyrical and tragic symphonies of Vanhal; the somber Lenten associations of Haydn’s early minor-key symphonies and the comedy of his later works; the “characteristic” minor-key symphonies of Wranitzky; the surprising versatility of Mozart in the minor-key subgenre; and the extraordinary qualities of Mozart K. 550.

During his lifetime, and in the course of the twentieth century, Edward Elgar and his music became sites for a remarkable variety of nostalgic impulses. These are manifested in his personal life, in the content of his works, in his critical and biographical reception, and in numerous artistic ventures based on his character and music. Today Elgar enjoys renewed popularity in Britain, and nostalgia of various forms continues to shape our responses to his music. From one viewpoint, Elgarian nostalgia might be dismissed as escapist, regressive and reactionary, and the revival in Elgar's fortunes regarded as the symptom of a pernicious 'heritage industry' in post-colonial, post-industrial Britain. While there is undeniably a grain of truth to that view, Matthew Riley's careful treatment of the topic reveals a more complex picture of nostalgia, and sheds light on Elgar and his cultural significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The silent attentiveness expected of concert audiences is one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern Western musical culture. This is the first book to examine the concept of attention in the history of musical thought and its foundations in the writings of German musical commentators of the late eighteenth century. Those critics explained numerous technical features of the music of their time as devices for arousing, sustaining or otherwise influencing the attention of a listener, citing in illustration works by Gluck, C. P. E. Bach, Georg Benda and others. Two types of attention were identified: the uninterrupted experience of a single emotional state conveyed by a piece of music as a whole, and the fleeting sense of 'wonder' or 'astonishment' induced by a local event in a piece. The relative validity of these two modes was a topic of heated debate in the German Enlightenment, encompassing issues of musical communication, compositional integrity and listener competence. Matthew Riley examines the significant writers on the topic (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Rousseau, Meier, Sulzer and Forkel) and provides analytical case studies to illustrate how these perceived modes of attention shaped interpretations of music of the period.

Imaginative analytical and critical work on British music of the early twentieth century has been hindered by perceptions of the repertory as insular in its references and backward in its style and syntax, escaping the modernity that surrounded its composers. Recent research has begun to break down these perceptions and has found intriguing links between British music and modernism. This book brings together contributions from scholars working in analysis, hermeneutics, reception history, critical theory and the history of ideas. Three overall themes emerge from its chapters: accounts of British reactions to Continental modernism and the forms they took; links between music and the visual arts; and analysis and interpretation of compositions in the light of recent theoretical work on form, tonality and pitch organization.

The most interesting recent developments in formal function theory have tested its application on nineteenth-century repertory. Hitherto, however, functional analysis has touched only lightly on the post-Wagnerian symphonic repertory of the decades around 1900. When music analysis addresses this repertory today, it is usually by means of the approaches that have become ‘Sonata Theory’. Functional analysis brings different insights, switching the focus to syntax and local formal process. The third-movement ‘Rondo’ from Elgar’s Second Symphony (1911) exemplifies the progressive Romantic repertory in its challenges to analysis. While functional analysis can illuminate the syntax and formal processes of this music, it must be applied with an ear to shifting and overlapping functional meanings. The Rondo manifests parallel ambiguities at the levels of paratext and genre. The syntactic continuity and instability foregrounded by functional analysis resonate directly with the movement’s thematisation of the demonic and the uncanny through paratext, topic, cyclic reminiscence and generic ambiguity. This article uses the concepts of functional theory to open and discuss questions of genre and compositional process and to reframe the Rondo’s programmatic themes from an analytically informed perspective.

Haydn’s ‘recomposition’ of the recapitulation is well known, but this article proposes, against received wisdom, that Haydn composed as though following a rule in the recapitulations of fast sonata-form movements from the 1770s onwards. The article extends William E. Caplin’s functional theory to the Haydn recapitulation in order to revive the ‘sonata principle’, restated and limited to fast movements in Haydn’s instrumental cycles. It then lays out a typology of Haydn’s recapitulatory strategies that unfold within the constraints of the sonata principle.

Elgar’s tenure as a University Professor between 1905 and 1908 is mainly remembered for its brevity and public controversy, especially as regards his uncompromising verdicts on various aspects of musical culture in Britain. By contrast, the analyses he offered of specific pieces of music have not been well digested. This is partly because records of the two lectures in which he took the latter approach are sparse: Elgar did not use a full script for either (and as a lecturer was much the better for it, according to some observers). For the lecture on Brahms’s Third Symphony the absence of sources is a severe impediment to reconstructing exactly what Elgar said, but the one on Mozart’s Fortieth can be pieced together. A miniature score of the symphony survives on which Elgar made many pencilled comments and markings as aides-mémoire for the lecture. Furthermore, the conceptual background to the analysis can be uncovered. It was in part an illustration of points made in the previous week’s lecture (‘Orchestration’), and in part a demonstration of the aesthetic doctrine of the Victorian artist and critic Charles Eastlake (‘consistency of convention’). This paper picks a way through the apparently disorganised and miscellaneous notes for the lecture by means of a mixture of analysis, inference and speculation. It argues that some kind of order lies behind them, and that the lecture provides a number of insights into Elgar’s musical attitudes and aesthetics.

In the inter-war period, landscape became strongly coded as commemorative in British art music, both in compositions of the time and in the reception of pre-war compositions. This phenomenon was a continuation and transformation of the ruralism of Victorian and Edwardian society, literature and music and of commemorative responses to Victorian colonial wars. The commemorative dimension of the post-war repertory was usually covert, the first layer of musical signification being pastoral. It was registered through oblique allusions to commemorative themes, significant choices of texts and paratexts, dedications to fallen comrades, and intertextual allusions to earlier commemorative/pastoral compositions. A ramified network of literary, musical and personal references of this kind spanned several generations, from the 1890s to the 1950s, encompassing the literature of Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman and the Georgians, and the music of Edward Elgar (Cello Concerto), Ralph Vaughan Williams (A Pastoral Symphony), George Butterworth (A Shropshire Lad), Ivor Gurney (Gloucestershire Rhapsody, ‘In Flanders’, ‘Severn Meadows’) and Gerald Finzi (A Severn Rhapsody, Requiem da Camera) among others. Music of this type reveals little of the bitterness and irony that are readily associated with ‘war poetry’ and are supposedly the authentic, truthful responses to the harsh reality of modern mechanized warfare. Cultural continuity is more in evidence, as is unity of the generations, as the young, the middle-aged and the senior adopted parallel approaches and influenced one another. There is also some unity between those who served at the front, including those who saw action, and those who remained at home.

This chapter places the repertory of covert commemoration within the wider repertory of ‘national music’ that emerged in England in the late nineteenth century, especially in the years just before World War I, which differs from other European national art musics in its distinctive merging of two basic themes of cultural nationalism: homeland landscape and national commemoration (to use the terminology of Anthony D. Smith.) It also examines the ‘troping’ of musical topics (in the language of Robert O. Hatten) in the musical vocabularies associated with those themes.

How can we best understand the resistance to modern music in a large part of the British musical establishment in the early twentieth century? It would be easy to point to conservative attacks on new music in Britain. But it would be easy to point to such attacks in almost any country. A more rewarding approach is to study the response to modern music by cultural 'liberals', those who viewed themselves as open-minded and sympathetic to 'progress' in art just as in society. The liberal outlook on music flourished in the post-Victorian period—the years before the Great War and immediately after—and was developed in essays and treatises by some of Britain's most influential musicians. Liberal critics were acutely aware of the mistakes of their predecessors who had condemned composers later to be acclaimed as masters. They accepted that there were no timeless rules for musical composition, and that style and technique would always change. So they tried to do justice to modern music. But there were limits to their tolerance, stemming from their commitment to 'beauty', their insistence on incremental change in music history, and their idealist aesthetics. Although they did not appeal to religion to ground their criticism, metaphysical modes of thought lingered in their belief in eternal values to which all great art, whatever its historical situation and technique, should aspire.

The idea of the ‘total work of art’ appealed to modernists of the early twentieth century as a opportunity to refresh aesthetic experience and overcome its compartmentalization by nineteenth-century institutions of culture. H.G. Wells hoped to realize a version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he called ‘spectacle-music-drama’, in the film Things to Come (1936), directed, under his supervision, by William Cameron Menzies and produced by Alexander Korda. Wells aimed to challenge commercial movies with something higher: a grand vision to awaken human beings from complacency, warn them of the dangers of impending war, and urge them to place their trust in modern science. Music usually played a subsidiary function in film production at the time, the images being cut and finalized before music was added. Wells insisted that a composer should play a formative role in his project. He wanted images to be matched to sounds rather than vice versa, and engaged Arthur Bliss to compose a score on these terms. Bliss wrote and recorded most of his music before shooting began.

One of the more serious charges that can be brought against Elgar is that his art was escapist. Today, in our post-Freudian age, it is common to associate the notion of escape with regression. In this view, to be an escapist means not just to evade adult responsibilities, but to suffer from a psychological disorder in which libido is arrested at an infantile stage of development (the “oral” phase). Furthermore, on a cultural level it could be alleged that escapist impulses are easily manipulated (and perhaps originally induced) by commercial or political forces that seek to cement their power and to dilute popular resistance. But there is another possible perspective. A long tradition of English radicalism links dream, escape and protest. In this light, a re-examination of Elgar’s escapist impulses seems feasible.