A Dictionary-Catalog of Modern British Composers (review)

A Dictionary-Catalog of Modern British Composers. By Alan Poulton. (Music Reference Collection, 82.) Westport, Conn.; London: Greenwood Press, 2000. [3 vols. (lxxvi, 1,700 p.) ISBN 0-313-31623-6 (set). $250.]

Were I a gratuitously disputatious person, I might feel bound to begin reviewing this new work of reference by questioning all but the first and last words of its title. For while "A" is a harmless sort of verbal anacrusis, and "composers" a perfectly legitimate description of the forty-eight men and six women included, the whole is certainly not a "dictionary catalog" as librarians would generally understand it. And although some of these composers might have been "modern" when Poulton began work in 1982, the majority are now dead: their inclusion rests on the fact that they were born between 1891 and 1923, rather than that they all shared some sort of "modernist" aesthetic or style. Furthermore, some people might not expect to find--for example--Andrzej Panufnik and Priaulx Rainier in a catalog of British composers, even though a perfectly sound case can be made for each (Panufnik was a British citizen from 1961, and Rainier settled in London very early on: New Grove's tortuous description of her as a "South African-English composer of English-Huguenot origin" illustrates the problem (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed. [New York: Grove, 2001], 20:769)). This dictionary catalog consists, in fact, of works lists for each composer, with brief bibliographies and, at the end of each volume, an index of work titles. One can see Greenwood's problem in formulating a sensible title for the whole, of course: Detailed Worklists and Short Bibliographies of Fifty-Four Barely Modern Composers, Most of Whom Are Indisputably British by Origin or Adoption would not have tripped off the tongue, or stayed in the memory, nearly so well.

Readers familiar with the British musical scene will recognize most of the composers covered. Those who are not will still find some familiar friends--Arthur Bliss, Benjamin Britten, Herbert Howells, Constant Lambert, Michael Tippett, William Walton, and Peter Warlock--alongside less familiar figures like Grace Williams, Christian Darnton, and Stanley Bate. I was pleased at Peter Wishart's inclusion, while Ruth Gipps's many fans will doubtless be delighted to find her on the list too. Much of Poulton's data has come either from the composers themselves or from people close to them, and as a result often carries a considerable amount of authority and detail. Brief notes on works' publication are supplied, with commission details, durations, instrumentation, whether recorded on disc or not, and so on. At the beginning of volume one is a series of tables that seek to contextualize some of the information gathered. Probably the most intriguing is table 1, which lists how many minutes of music each composer actually wrote: for what it's worth, Britten comes top, at 6,493 minutes. Our gratuitously disputatious person might ask whether this means that Britten really wrote more music than the others, or whether he simply wrote more slow music: but a record company considering a "complete recordings" project might find the information valuable.

The catalog entries and indexes allow further collation of information on trends in the British musical scene of the time: one of the most striking is the amount of employment provided to British composers by film, television, and radio. The indexes enable the patient user to make comparisons between different composers' output and, for example, to discover that the tune "Sellinger's Round" has inspired in turn Lennox Berkeley, Britten, Tippett, and Walton. They also reveal a great fondness among British composers for writing variations, including Richard Arnell's Variations on an American Theme, Arnold Cooke's set on a theme of Du Fay, Daniel Jones's Meditation on a Theme of Dunstable, Alan Rawsthorne's variations on Yankee Doodle, and Grace Williams's on a Swedish tune. Carl Nielsen inspires a set from both...