Review: British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries, by Philip Rupprecht

Abstract

British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries , by Philip Rupprecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xiv, 492 pp. The subfield of British music studies, once considered a sleepy backwater within musicology, has witnessed an explosion of activity over the last two decades. In part, the expanding interest in British music mirrors musicology's ongoing shift in focus away from works and artists originating in continental Europe. Nations whose contributions were once considered peripheral to this “grand tradition”—most notably the United States and Russia—today inspire vital and creative scholarship, and the United Kingdom has now joined them. Thanks also to the efforts of pioneering figures such as Stephen Banfield, Philip Brett, Cyril Ehrlich, Ellen Harris, and Nicholas Temperley—who have carefully and diligently nurtured fields that had long lain fallow—new generations of British music specialists are reaping bumper crops, an intellectual harvest remarkable for both its topical diversity and its scholarly rigor. Perhaps no period has benefitted more from this state of affairs than the early twentieth century. Anchored by research on the triumvirate of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten, dozens of new biographies, cultural surveys, archival studies, scholarly editions, and essay collections have appeared since the 1990s, revolutionizing the ways in which we think about and listen to British music from the first half of the century. Yet with only a few exceptions, such as the aforementioned Britten studies or the work produced by Arnold Whittall, Jonathan Cross, David Beard, and Kenneth Gloag, a great deal of British art music written …