I wrote a follow-up post after Alistair's last contribution but the telephone rang and I deleted my post by mistake ::) :(
The point I was trying to make was in relation to a number of Scottish, Welsh and (possibly) North of England-based composers who, far from the Metropolitan south of London and the Home Counties, have often found the need to balance their output of (let me call it) "mainstream music" with the composition of explicitly regional/national music, written to commission for the BBC or Music Festivals.
One need only reflect on the output of composers like Grace Williams, Daniel Jones, Alun Hoddinott or William Mathias in Wales to count up the number of works they wrote to such commission. I am not attempting to infer that these composers compromised their artistic integrity in such compositions or that, invariably, the works they produced for such purposes were necessarily overtly "Welsh" but it is in at least some of these compositions that one can sometimes more readily identify the sort of "musical nationalism" which we have been skirting around in our discussion.
If I am not mistaken there is no such tradition of serious Musical Festival in Scotland (with the obvious exception of the Edinburgh Festival-which is, of course, an explicitly "International Festival"). The one 20th century Scottish composer who does seem to have made a positive profession of "Scottishness" is probably Cedric Thorpe Davie ;D ;D
Arthur Butterworth who, unlike his fellow Lancastrians Walton, Rawsthorne, Maxwell Davies etc etc, has remained based in the North of England, has written a considerable amount of music which reflects his knowledge of and profound love for not only the Dales and moors of Northern England but also the Scottish Highlands. Yet, in doing so, he has often ended-up sounding like Sibelius ;D ;D
However...one again I am writing this in the middle of the night....but I do think there is a point here worth considering ???
Indeed there is. The four Welsh composers you mention are all dead, of course and, of them, only Hoddinott died in the present century (you might have added the less prolific Gareth Walters, who died only earlier this year and who seemed not necessarily to need specific commissions to get his Welsh juices going). I'm less familiar with Jones's work than I am with that of the others, so I cannot say much about that. Do you suppose that Butterworth's decision to remain in his native north of England has affected the way in which he's worked and, if so, do you imagine that remaining rooted to the spot of his origins might in any sense have been a conscious and deliberate decision for such a reason?
It is also noticeable that Williams's and Jones's music are very rarely performed these days, Mathias likewise has a limited exposure and even Hoddinott's work is hardly a staple of concert programmes, even in their native Wales, let alone elsewhere; similarly, Thorpe Davie is now almost forgotten altogether. Even Stevenson is woefully underperformed; the fact of there having been but a single (and, sadly, woefully inadequate) performance of his magnificent Violin Concerto in some three decades is as deplorable as it is inexcusable - and this is a work that explores, among other things, not merely one but a number of nationalist musics with the solo violin as not only centre stage but also the very reason for such exploration!
All that said, my earlier point about the fallout from the "Manchester School", Glock, Lutyens, Searle et al is that this rebalanced the British musical landscape forever (and at one time went too far in threatening to replace rather than enrich); one inevitable consequence of it having done so is a permanent attitudes to nationalist persuasions in music as it had previously been understood and, together with the fact that Britain has now a greater proportion of urban population and that population is a more multifarious one than once it was, that change in the landscape is hardly surprising. Furthermore, your use of the term "mainstream" in this context suggests (to me, at least) that you are implying that the majority of listeners would probably associate (even if only subconsciously in many cases) music of nationalist persuasion with music that is of necessity broadly tonal, at least in part because of the folkloristic input into some of it (and, after all, it's not only in Britain that there is a notable absence of indigenous microtonal or 12-note folk melody!).
Another quite different aspect of this, however, is the extent to which any kind of representation in music of non-musical things can realistically expect to communicate as such to so widespread and diverse an audience as the composers would like and need to attract; this point is a twofold one, in that it not only raises the spectre of the allegation that once surrounded Richard Strauss that he could represent a fork or a spoon in music but also brings into focus the fact that music that might seek to reflect some aspects of the location of its origins might encounter problems in effectively communicating its message to those of different cultural background in Britain, still less travel well elsewhere. In the first (and perhaps also to some extent the second) of these, I'm thinking about Sibelius, since you mention him in what might otherwise seem the improbable context of Butterworth! Perhaps two of the most overtly "nationalist" of his works are the Fourth Symphony (in many ways his finest, I think) and
Tapiola, yet to what extent are these works really "Finnish"? Sorabji's remark that no stream ever sounded like a passage thought of by some as representing one in Ravel's
Daphnis et Chloé is a case in point here; the brooding intensity of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony is surely reflective, rather than literally representative, not so much of the Finnish landscapes that may have inspired it but of a certain landscape of the mind - a landscape that's arguably as much of Nordic origin in general terms rather than specifically Finnish - and this is perhaps one reason why it has travelled at least reasonably well outside northern Europe. Sorabji's conclusion about the passage in the Ravel is that the sound of a stream might well have sparked off an idea in the composer's mind but that the result would not be readily identifiable as such to listeners who weren't told bout it beforehand ("stream of subconsciousness", peut-être?!). To return to Butterworth, then; to what extent can one be certain that a French or Polish listener, even if born and bred in Lancashire, might immediately recognise in some of his work that it seeks to reflect something of his origins, background, etc. without reading something about that in advance?
I think also that we need now to take on board the possibility that continued creation of "nationalist" music might be widely received as overtly and overly dependent upon the nostalgic, the antediluvian and the sense of being rooted to its own spot rather than cross-culturally communicative; one could as well claim at least the last of these for any Western music, I suppose, although in today's world in which so very much greater quantities of musics of all kinds are so much more easily accessible to the listener, the entire phenomenon of "music that doesn't travel so well" might also be up for question.
Lastly, considering this question from the composer's side of the fence (as it would be as difficult as it would be pointless for me to omit to do), I can only conclude that, in my own work, the origin of any "Scottishness" is likely to be subconsciously psychological rather than a conscious attempt to nail my musical colours to a Scottish mast (except in my short piano works
Scottish Ballad and
Fantasiettina Crittogrammatica, each commissioned by and for Ronald Stevenson, the
fons et origo of each of which was overtly, intentionally and indeed necessarily Scottish).
Anyway, that's enough about Scotland for now! - the thread topic is, after all, about English composers!...
