Eric Saylor. English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xi + 245 pp. $45.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-252-04109-9.
For many, the phrase “English pastoralism” evokes a very particular sound world. Hushed, muted strings undulate in lightly dissonant, modally inflected pan-diatonicism. An oboe or an English horn solo emerges in something like, but not quite, a folk song. We imagine rolling, verdant hills over which one would happily tramp clad in tweed. It is so unbearably, stereotypically English as to seem a parody of itself. The sound is certainly not stereotypically German but it is more than a little bit French and so much more consonant than contemporaneous European modernism. In a way, English pastoral music is problematically beautiful. It is lush, beautiful music, and perhaps it has been discounted, or at least ignored, because of the ease with which many enjoy it. But, Eric Saylor argues, the reality is much more complicated. Throughout English Pastoral Music, Saylor reads English pastoralism as a varied, deeply relevant aesthetic response to the challenges of urbanization and military conflict. Although its relatively conservative musical idiom does not correspond with traditional definitions of musical modernism, pastoralism served as a means for composers and audiences to grapple with modernity. Thus, the English pastoral music appears as a complex, heterogeneous cultural phenomenon, richly deserving of serious scholarly attention. ...
Chapter three is about war, and it is, in my opinion, the most compelling section of this monograph. In it, Saylor explores the themes of pessimism, trauma, and memory, and the way in which pastoral music served to “memorialize without proselytizing, mourn without romanticizing, and remember without glorifying” (97) the horrors of the Great War. ... Saylor’s nuanced reading of Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony (1922) dispels any notions that the work is escapist, anachronistic, or merely an oversized sonic postcard from the Cotswalds. Quiet, intense, and enigmatic, it served as a means of remembering the brutality of war without reliving it, and as a way of making sense of the personal and collective trauma. ...
This is a darn fine book, well-written and well-researched. It represents a significant contribution to the field of British music studies, as it offers much-needed context for understanding one of the defining features of early twentieth-century English music. Saylor’s prose is clear and incisive, with occasional smirk-inducing turns of phrase that reveal a dry sense of humor. ...
Saylor offers a good model for thinking about beautiful music written in the age of modernism. I appreciate that he was not hell-bent on revealing some dark ulterior motive skulking behind a pretty façade, and that he didn’t feel compelled to assess English pastoralism in the aesthetic terms of European modernism. He does not employ a hermeneutics of suspicion, intent on dismantling. Rather, Saylor takes the aesthetic pleasure at face value and asks what it did, revealing a much richer, much more varied history. Only very occasionally does Saylor lapse into the apologist mode for English music’s apparent lack of modernist credentials. Of course, beauty can be put to insidious ends, but it doesn’t have to be. Nor do I mean to suggest that all English pastoral music is “great.” Some of it is trite and schlocky, but even the greatest composer writes a stinker now and then. But the best of English pastoral music was art created for something, not merely an empty statement positioned against. Throughout the book, Saylor offers a nuanced study of what an aesthetic experience of tranquil, still beauty can do, especially in the face of trauma, war, and loss.
David Rugger. Journal of Musicological Research 38,1 (2019), 111–113.
0 Replies