Crossref Citations
This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by Crossref.
Arseneau, Mary
2020.
Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics.
p.
143.
Article contents
Making an English Voice: Performing National Identity during the English Musical Renaissance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2016
Abstract
This article examines constructions of national musical identity in early twentieth-century Britain by exploring and contextualizing hitherto neglected discourses and practices concerning the production of an ‘English’ singing voice. Tracing the origins and development of ideas surrounding native vocal performance and pedagogy, I reconstruct a culture of English singing as a backdrop against which to offer, by way of conclusion, a reading of the ‘English voice’ performed in Ralph Vaughan Williams's song ‘Silent Noon’. By drawing upon perspectives derived from recent studies of song, vocal production, and national and aesthetic identity, I demonstrate that ‘song’ became a place in which the literal and figurative voices of performers and composers were drawn together in the making of a national music. As such, I advance a series of new historical perspectives through which to rethink notions of an English musical renaissance.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016
References
Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Adams, Byron. ‘“No Armpits, Please, We're British”: Whitman and English Music, 1884–1936’, in Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood, ed. Kramer, Lawrence. New York: Garland, 2000. 25–42.Google Scholar
Adams, H. Travers. The ‘Central Point’ in Beautiful Voice Production. London: William Reeves, 1926.Google Scholar
Aikin, William Arthur. The Voice: Its Physiology and Cultivation. London: Macmillan, 1900.Google Scholar
Aikin, William Arthur. The Voice: An Introduction to Practical Phonology. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910.Google Scholar
Aikin, William Arthur. ‘The Society of English Singers’, The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular 57/881 (1916), 319–24.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.Google Scholar
Atlas, Allan W. ‘Vaughan Williams's “Silent Noon”: Structure and Proportions’. Musical Times 150/1907 (2009), 71–82.Google Scholar
Atlas, Allan W. ‘Ralph Vaughan Williams's The House of Life: Four Levels of Cyclic Coherence’. Acta Musicologica LXXXV (2013), 199–226.Google Scholar
Austin, Linda M.Nostalgia in Transition 1780–1917. Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Banfield, Stephen. ‘Vaughan Williams and Gerald Finzi’, in Vaughan Williams in Perspective: Studies of an English Composer, ed. Foreman, Lewis. Somerset: Albion Press, 1998. 202–21.Google Scholar
Banfield, Stephen, ed. Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early Twentieth Century. First paperback edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Banfield, Stephen. The Twentieth Century. The Blackwell History of Music in Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.Google Scholar
Bearman, C. J. ‘Who Were the Folk? The Demography of Cecil Sharp's Somerset Folk Singers’, The Historical Journal 43/3 (2000), 751–75.Google Scholar
Bearman, C. J. ‘Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Reflections on the Work of David Harker’. Folklore 113/1 (2002), 11–34.Google Scholar
Bergeron, Katherine. Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Époque. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Bithell, Caroline. ‘The Past in Music: Introduction’. Ethnomusicology Forum 15/1 (2006), 3–16.Google Scholar
Boyes, Georgina. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Broadwood, Lucy E. ‘Introduction’ to a collection of songs from Sussex and Surrey. Journal of the Folk-Song Society 4 (1902), 139–41.Google Scholar
Brown, Hubert. The Principles of Expression in Song. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928.Google Scholar
Carey, Hugh. Duet for Two Voices: An Informal Biography of Edward Dent, compiled from his Letters to Clive Carey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Cobbe, Hugh, ed. Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Crump, Jeremy. ‘The Identity of English Music: The Reception of Elgar 1898–1935’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. Colls, Robert and Dodd, Philip. London: Croom Helm, 1986. 164–90.Google Scholar
Dent, E. J. ‘On the Composition of English Songs’. Music & Letters 6/3 (1925), 224–35.Google Scholar
de Val, Dorothy. ‘The Transformed Village: Lucy Broadwood and Folksong’, in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, ed. Bashford, Christina and Langley, Leanne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 341–66.Google Scholar
de Val, Dorothy. In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.Google Scholar
Dibble, Jeremy. ‘“Hidden Artifice”: Howells as Song-Writer’, in The Music of Herbert Howells, ed. Cooke, Phillip A. and Maw, David. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013. 62–85.Google Scholar
Dodds, George and Lickley, James Dunlop. The Control of the Breath: An Elementary Manual for Singers and Speakers. London: Humphrey Milford, 1925.Google Scholar
Donington, Robert. The Work and Ideas of Arnold Dolmetsch: The Renaissance of Early Music. Haslemere: Dolmetsch Foundation, 1932.Google Scholar
Dowling, Denis. ‘Obituary for Dawson Freer’. Royal College of Music Magazine 57/2 (1961), 47.Google Scholar
Evans, John, ed. Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten 1928–1938. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.Google Scholar
Featherstone, Simon. Englishness: Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Fellowes, Edmund H.The English Madrigal School: A Guide to its Practical Use. London: Stainer & Bell, 1924.Google Scholar
Freeman, Graham. ‘Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Song’, in Grainger the Modernist, ed. Robinson, Suzanne and Dreyfus, Kay. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. 33–54.Google Scholar
Freer, Dawson. The Teaching of Interpretation in Song: A Guide for Teachers and Students. London: Evans Brothers, 1924.Google Scholar
Frogley, Alain. ‘Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Frogley, Alain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 1–22.Google Scholar
Frogley, Alain. ‘Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music Since 1840’. Music & Letters 84/2 (2003), 241–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuller, Sophie. ‘“The Finest Voice of the Century”: Clara Butt and Other Concert-Hall and Drawing-Room Singers of Fin-de-Siècle Britain’, in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Cowgill, Rachel and Poriss, Hilary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 308–27.Google Scholar
Fuller, Sophie. ‘The Songs and Shorter Secular Choral Works’, in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Frogley, Alain and Thomson, Aidan J.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 106–20.Google Scholar
Gib, Charles. Vocal Success, or Thinking and Feeling in Speech and Song, including a Chapter on Ideal Breathing for Health. London: William Reeves, 1922.Google Scholar
Giles, Judy and Middleton, Tim, eds. Writing Englishness, 1900–1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity. London: Routledge, 1995. 73–109.Google Scholar
Gillies, Michael and Ross, Bruce Clunies, eds. Grainger on Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Gregory, E. David. The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878–1903. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Grimley, Daniel M. ‘Landscape and Distance: Vaughan Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral’, in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Riley, Matthew. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 147–74.Google Scholar
Harker, David. Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Harris, Jason Marc. Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.Google Scholar
Harris, Jose. Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914. London: Penguin Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Hast, Harry Gregory. The Singer's Art: Letters from a Singing Master. London: Methuen & Co., 1925.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Hold, Trevor. Parry To Finzi: Twenty English Song-Composers. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002.Google Scholar
Howes, Frank Stewart. The English Musical Renaissance. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966.Google Scholar
Howkins, Alun. ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. Colls, Robert and Dodd, Philip. London: Croom Helm, 1986. 62–88.Google Scholar
Hughes, Meirion and Stradling, Robert. The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music, 2nd rev. edn.Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Hurstbourne Priors website. www.plunketgreene.hampshire.org.uk (accessed 18 October 2015).Google Scholar
Johnson, Julian. Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel. The Pronunciation of English: Phonetics and Phonetic Transcriptions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909.Google Scholar
Kahane, Claire. Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Michael. A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd edn.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd edn.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; repr. Clarendon Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Mackerness, E. D.A Social History of English Music. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.Google Scholar
Mavson, Christopher. ‘The Dolmetsch Circle’. Royal College of Music Magazine 24/3 (1925), 89–93.Google Scholar
McGuire, Charles Edward. Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
McVeagh, Margaret. ‘Memories of Harry Plunket Greene’. Royal College of Music Magazine 57/2 (1961), 31–5.Google Scholar
Mee, Arthur Henry. ‘The Nation is a Living Body’ (from vol. 9 The Children's Encyclopaedia), in Writing Englishness, 1900–1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity, ed. Giles, Judy and Middleton, Tim. London: Routledge, 1995. 63–5.Google Scholar
Northcote, Sydney. Byrd to Britten: A Survey of English Song. London: John Baker, 1966.Google Scholar
Owen, Ceri. ‘Vaughan Williams, Song, and the Idea of “Englishness”’. DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2014.Google Scholar
Pilkington, Michael. ‘Minutes of the AESS Annual General Meetings, 1937–1940’. Transcribed by Michael Pilkington from archival materials held in his possession. Forwarded to the author on 4 October 2014.Google Scholar
Plunket Greene, Harry. ‘The Future of the English Song: I. The Singer and the Public’. Music & Letters 1/1 (1920), 19–26.Google Scholar
Plunket Greene, Harry. ‘The Future of the English Song: II. The Singer and the Composer’. Music & Letters 1/2 (1920), 123–34.Google Scholar
Plunket Greene, Harry. Three Short Talks on Singing given for the British Broadcasting Company at their London Station. London: Stainer & Bell, 1926.Google Scholar
Pope, Stephen and Wheal, Elizabeth-Anne. The Macmillan Dictionary of the First World War. London: Macmillan, 1995.Google Scholar
Reed, Philip, ed. The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears 1936–1978. Woodbridge: Boydell, in conjunction with the Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh, 1995.Google Scholar
Revill, George. ‘The Lark Ascending: Monument to a Radical Pastoral’. Landscape Research 16/2 (1991), 25–30.Google Scholar
Russell, Dave. Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Saylor, Eric. ‘“It's Not Lambkins Frisking at All”: English Pastoral Music and the Great War’. The Musical Quarterly 91/1–2 (2008), 39–59.Google Scholar
Scholes, Percy, ed. The Mirror of Music 1844–1944: A Century of Musical Life in Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the Musical Times, 2 vols. London: Novello and Oxford University Press, 1947.Google Scholar
Scott, Charles Kennedy. Word and Tone: An English Method of Vocal Technique for Solo Singers and Choralists, etc., 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1933.Google Scholar
Sharp, Cecil James. English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions. London: Simpkin & Co. and Novello & Co., 1907.Google Scholar
Sharp, Cecil James. Folk-Singing in Schools. London: The English Folk Dance Society, 1923.Google Scholar
Stewart, Margaret. English Singer: The Life of Steuart Wilson. London: Duckworth, 1970.Google Scholar
Sykes, Richard. ‘The Evolution of Englishness in the English Folksong Revival, 1890–1914’. Folk Music Journal 6/4 (1993), 448–90.Google Scholar
Tibbetts, George R. ‘Culture and the Sublime: Ralph Vaughan Williams's The House of Life as an Expression of English Experience’, in The Poetry of Life in Literature, ed. Tymieniecka, Anna-Therese. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. London: Kluwer Academic, 2000. 179–85.Google Scholar
Toft, Robert. Heart to Heart: Expressive Singing in England 1780–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Trend, Michael. The Music Makers: The English Musical Renaissance from Elgar to Britten. New York: Shirmer, 1985.Google Scholar
Tunbridge, Laura. ‘Singing Translations: The Politics of Listening Between the Wars’. Representations 123/1 (2013), 53–86.Google Scholar
Twinning, Walter S.The Amateur Vocalist: A Guide to Singing with Useful Hints on Voice Production, Song Interpretation, etc. London: William Reeves, 1931.Google Scholar
Vaughan Williams, Ralph. ‘The Letter and the Spirit’, in National Music and Other Essays, 2nd repr. edn.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 121–8.Google Scholar
Vaughan Williams, Ralph. ‘Gervase Elwes’, in Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, David. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 57–9.Google Scholar
Vaughan Williams, Ralph. ‘Who Wants the English Composer’, in Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, David. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 39–42.Google Scholar
Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis. ‘The “Silent Song” of D. G. Rossetti's The House of Life’, in The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Weliver, Phyllis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 194–212.Google Scholar
Westrup, J. A. ‘Music’, in The Character of England, ed. Barker, Ernest. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. 397–407.Google Scholar
Wiebe, Heather. Britten's Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge and New York: University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
- 1
- Cited by