William Weber (1999: 336–341) has made a useful distinction between performance canons in music, driven by the taste of patrons and audiences, and scholarly canons, driven by instructors and scholars. In its attempt in the London Season of the Arts to mount a comprehensive display of English musical creativity covering seven centuries, the Arts Council of Great Britain deliberately and with great specificity proposed a canon of national music. Indeed, as a rare attempt both to define and perform an entire canon, or as much of it as practical considerations would allow, the London Season of the Arts falls between Weber’s two types. The contributors to the planning process were musical professionals, musically educated civil servants, and academics, with none of these categories strongly outweighing any other. These different constituencies used every mechanism at their disposal, and developed new means when necessary, to direct repertory selection and balance. The concert promoters and ensembles proposed works that particularly interested them or that would be popular with audiences; the musicologists advocated little-heard works of scholarly interest; the bureaucrats individually and in committees balanced these suggestions and further supplemented them with their own lists of unjustly neglected works that audiences may had heard of, but which were neither studied or performed on a regular basis. The result was the largest festival of English music in history, encompassing hundreds of works.
Like all canons, the repertory of the London Season of the Arts had its ideological boundaries. This chapter investigates those boundaries and the aesthetic commitments of the institutions and individuals who policed them. A comparison of the London Season of the Arts with the BBC’s smaller but still impressive series of Promenade Concerts (Proms) at the Royal Albert Hall later in the official Festival period illuminates the two institutions’ differing approaches to choosing native repertory, stemming in part from their contrasting goals and management styles.
Careful analysis of this extensive concert repertory reveals tensions between traditional and progressive musical values, and between impulses toward exclusivity and inclusivity, both at mid-century and in later historiography. In an era more cynical or politicized about the concept of national music, an institution with the cultural authority of the Arts Council might have established far more rigid aesthetic boundaries. In fact, with some exceptions, the ideologies at work in the London Season of the Arts were internalized and unconsidered; genuine good will and at least an effort at broad-mindedness motivated the chief planners of the London Season, moderated more often by a sense of prudence than by overt disapproval. The process of selection offered countless opportunities to rehabilitate unfamiliar or neglected composers and works, and to limit the excessive exposure of others. Still, in retrospect, and even to an extent at the time, the results reinscribed or only modestly expanded the existing canon of British music, rather than forging a challenging counter-narrative. This tendency raises questions about whether such omissions, deliberate or not, resulted from bureaucratic processes, individual narrow-mindedness, or other causes, and how they represent broader cultural and musical trends of the time.

British music in the Twentieth Century

To the extent that the recent and newly prominent music performed in the London Season of the Arts appears stylistically unadventurous, with few incursions from composers identified with alternate high-modern or culturally marginal traditions, the culture of committees and planning reports that generated the Festival must bear some responsibility. Even admitting the broadness of their goals and the influence of enthusiastic individuals in institutions such as the Arts Council and the BBC, British bureaucratic culture took a cautious approach to aesthetic risk-taking. Indeed, although the conservatism of the Festival’s contemporary music seems to contrast with the progressive tendencies of its architecture, most of the forms of Festival design, while novel in the blitzed environment of 1951 Britain, were in fact based on established pre-war Scandinavian models (see Banham and Hillier 1976; Harwood and Powers 2001).
But bureaucratic restraint alone is not sufficient explanation for the staid profile of the Festival musical repertory. Any analysis of the Festival repertory must first contend with the undue emphasis on atonality in the historiography of twentieth century music, and the question of how modernism functions as a useful category in discussions of English music. In the period leading up to the Festival of Britain, the avant-garde exerted increasing authority in Western Europe, where the end of the Second World War led in many spheres to calls for a fresh start: In music, this rebirth was marked by a rejection of the legacy of tonal harmony and classical genres, and was promoted at contemporaneous European festivals. But one can easily exaggerate the importance of avant-garde repertory to the general classical music audience. Works in tonal styles exhibiting forms and gestures derived from common-practice and early modern composers still dominated mainstream concert music on both sides of the English Channel.
Even if we correct for the overemphasis on avant-garde music, British music of the period still may appear stylistically conservative. European modernist trends—whether Viennese, Stravinskian, or other—were received and disseminated warily in Britain.1 In 1951, most British composers had an ambivalent relationship with continental varieties of stylistic modernism in this period, and were characterized, in Arnold Whittall’s terms (1995: 17), by “the suspicion of the extravagant, the expressionistic, the experimental” The historiography of British music has amply demonstrated that when we judge British composers’ output by outmoded standards of progressive style, the entire nation unfairly appears to come up short.
There are several reasons why adherents of the musical avant-garde in Britain were relatively few and obscure compared to their continental brethren at this time. One reason was the curriculum of British conservatories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which hewed to traditional lines in technique, style, and genre (this state of affairs created an environment which inspired hopes in some young British composers of crossing the Channel to broaden their horizons). The historiography of music in Britain supplies another source for postwar aesthetic caution. Unlike continental countries with centuries of musical history both to celebrate and then to reject during postwar reconstruction, Britain in 1951 had very recently forged its narrative of national musical history. The history of British music current after the Second World War saw the period starting around 1880 as an English Musical Renaissance, when the art of composition in England, languishing in the depths of foreign domination and amateurism since the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, sprang to new life. England’s return to the musical stage was thus far too recent to warrant wholesale rejection by impresarios or composers; her romantic art-music tradition represented twentieth century strength, not nineteenth century decadence.
Furthermore, as Matthew Riley (2010: 6–9) points out, quoting Stefan Collini, the British experience of the transition to the twentieth century differed from that of continental countries in other ways. Britain escaped most of the social and cultural shock that rocked Europe in the nineteenth century: Britain suffered no military invasion; political reform kept up with social change, dampening revolutionary political movements; and more advanced industrialization held off economic upheaval. As a result, there was less fodder for the development of a violently oppositional avant-garde. The transition to modernist ideas and styles proceeded more as a continuity than as a rupture with the past. Riley (2010: 28–30) also credits the survival of nineteenth century liberal British critical attitudes, including a longstanding mistrust of professionalism in music, with the muted approach to modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.
The ideology of Musical Renaissance was not merely a mode of music-historical awareness; it also affected the reception of musical style. Although the maturation of teaching and performing institutions, rather than specific stylistic developments, arguably generated the “English Musical Renaissance,” a loose set of nationally marked stylistic and compositional categories did coalesce between the wars into what seemed to many an English national or pastoral school. The stylistic elements that characterized this repertory were neither uniform nor ubiquitous, and no composer exemplifies all of them throughout his or her works, but among them were harmonic and melodic markers based on the revivals of folksong and Tudor polyphony before the First World War and programmatic focus on symbols central to British national identity, such as the sea and the rural countryside.2 Ralph Vaughan Williams was most closely identified with this trend, along with composers such as Gerald Finzi and Herbert Howells. This pastoral trend, such as it was, had its heyday in the twenties and thirties. In Arnold Whittall’s analysis (1995: 13–14), the proponents of the trend defended it as an alternative, British form of modernism based on cultural rather than structural principles; no doubt, the “sane and socially responsible” values Whittall identifies with the modernism of Vaughan Williams would have surprised many artists on the Continent who valued rupture and individualism.
Audiences take longer to adapt to change than do composers. Even after the Second World War, audiences and critics both in Britain and abroad continued to recognize the stylistic characteristics of the pastoral repertory as historically, even essentially English. To their minds, for music to claim status as national, it had to sound English, which meant to refer to this style. The historical understanding and stylistic prejudices of English-Musical-Renaissance thinking inform the institutional decision-making of the Festival, as well as the journalistic responses to the performances.
There were also dissenting voices between the wars, of which the dominant group drew on Stravinsky, Jazz, and French music, rather than the more extreme innovations coming from German-speaking lands. These include the early William Walton as well as composers associated with the ballet: Arthur Bliss, Lord Berners, and Constant Lambert. By 1951, however, the mainstream had integrated their music, and Walton’s style had lost some of its acerbic wit. Alan Bush was unusual among Englishmen for having received German training, and he experimented between the wars with a severe contrapuntal style unlike most of his compatriots, but, by the forties he too had mellowed into a far more nationally-marked style. In her magisterial study Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris (2010: 10–11) descries a “turn towards home” among English literary and visual artists at mid-century, just when cultural trends in Western Europe were heading ever farther afield. It is scarcely surprising to find a parallel impulse among composers.
To be sure, by the time of the Festival of Britain, a new and more diverse and cosmopolitan generation of British composers was making inroads into the repertory, but in the assessment of Peter Evans (1995: 207) the composers who dominated the landscape remained a restrained, competent crew uninterested in radical change:
In Britain, insulation from the European radicals, the celebrated “time lag”, allowed the 1900s generation some sense of creative adventure, but in essence they were as cautious as their colleagues abroad; there was no explorer among them to match Holst, and until Tippett’s full maturity, no visionary prepared, like Vaughan Williams, to risk charges of monumental bungling rather than lower his aim. A respectable level of technical skill was common, though its source might be diverse; the standard orchestra served their needs well, symphony and concerto being preferred to the freer, programmatic forms. … Several of them showed a capacity for self-renewal which prevented their merely pandering to the expectations of the growing, but essentially wary, audience for orchestral concerts in Britain.
Stephen Ba...