Vaughan again ... There's more than 'quiet, idealised' Englishness in Vaughan Williams' music. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
New music debate redux over at the Times. And more whitewashing of music history into a pointless, and historically wholly inaccurate, division of tonal vs atonal, this time with a specifically English gloss: Stephen Pollard with his notion that English music died with Vaughan Williams' demise, 50 years ago today.
First, Vaughan Williams is a more interesting composer than Pollard makes out: there's more than "quiet, idealised" Englishness and "dark undercurrents" in his music (tonight's VW anniversary Prom, conducted by Andrew Davis, should be the most eloquent revelation of his music's range and ambition). And second, it's always interesting to me that the apologists for music that communicates with audiences, as opposed to the atonalists who, in Pollard's view, do not (without wanting to reprise our arguments from a few weeks back: but Stockhausen doesn't?... Brian Ferneyhough doesn't?... etc), wind up very close to a socialist realism idea that music ought to put its audience before its integrity. In today's world, that essentially means kowtowing to commercialism. One of the paradoxes of late capitalism, I guess.
Pollard's wrong about subsidy, too ("composers stopped writing for their public and wrote instead for the small clique that was responsible for commissioning pieces"): just look at the examples of Cage and co's experimentalism in postwar New York, or the British experimentalists (Cornelius Cardew and co) a couple of decades later; groups of composers and performers who worked together largely without establishment support but who came together simply to make the music they wanted to - which wasn't VW-style symphonies or even James MacMillan-style grandiosity (MacMillan is one of Pollard's examples of new music that matters). So that's the end of that debate. Or maybe not ...
