ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com ashgate.com © Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material Chapter 8 Landscape and Distance: Vaughan Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral Daniel M. Grimley Dedicated without permission to Anthony Pople, in memoriam On 5 August 1916 the English composer, country dancer and folklorist George Butterworth was killed in action at Pozières, during the Battle of the Somme. Butterworth’s death can be seen as just another tragic statistic in a particularly brutal episode of British military activity, but it has assumed a much greater V\PEROLF VLJQLｿFDQFH LQ WKH KLVWRU\ RI WZHQWLHWKFHQWXU\ (QJOLVK PXVLF +LV RXWSXW including the Idyll for small orchestra The Banks of Green Willow and the orchestral UKDSVRG\ DIWHU $( +RXVPDQ A Shropshire Lad, has since become emblematic of a particularly English musical sensibility. 1 Butterworth’s preoccupation with folksong, the pastoral, and the creation of a distinctively English musical idiom UHﾀHFWV WKH EURDGHU FRQFHUQV RI DQ DUWLVWLF JHQHUDWLRQ ZKRVH OLYHV ZHUH ORVW LQ RU VHULRXVO\ DIIHFWHG E\ WKH FRQﾀLFW +LV QDPH LV HQJUDYHG DORQJVLGH WKRVH RI IHOORZ members of the Royal College of Music upon the bleak war memorial inside the EXLOGLQJｶV HQWUDQFH KDOO VHWWLQJ LQ VWRQH KLV SODFH ZLWKLQ RQH RI WKH SUHHPLQHQW national institutions of English music. Butterworth’s death is itself a monument, which seemingly marks the premature end of an aesthetic tradition and of the spirit of innocent idealism that supposedly characterized English cultural life before the war. This view of English musical history rests on a set of ideological assumptions regarding notions of national identity, pastoralism and the folk. Strenuous attempts have been made in recent years to challenge and unpack these categories and to 1 Earlier versions of this chapter have been presented in papers at the Universities RI +HLGHOEHUJ /RQGRQ DQG 2[IRUG DQG LQ D VHVVLRQ HQWLWOHG ｵ5HLPDJLQLQJ WKH 3DVWRUDO 'LVFRXUVHV RI /RVV DQG 5HPHPEUDQFH LQ (DUO\ 7ZHQWLHWK&HQWXU\ (QJOLVK 0XVLFｶ DW WKH Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Quebec City, November 2007. For their generous comments and suggestions for improvement, I am deeply grateful to %\URQ $GDPV +XJK &REEH $ODLQ )URJOH\ 2OLYHU 1HLJKERXU 0DWWKHZ 5LOH\ (ULF 6D\ORU and David Wright. )RU D ULFK FRQWH[WXDO DQG PXVLFDO DQDO\VLV VHH 6WHSKHQ %DQｿHOG Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. 144–52.