British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries by Philip Rupprecht (review)

The first concert of the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) on 9 January 1956 serves as Rupprecht’s mise-en-scène for the volume, as it introduces the New Music Manchester Group in their first professional performance in London: Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle (as clarinetist), alongside their younger colleagues Elgar Howarth (trumpet), and John Dow (cellist). The date represents a marker by which Rupprecht records the trajectory of progressive British music, signifying a decidedly new series of artistic and musical achievements in Great Britain that were taken up with the Continental European avant-garde.

The opening two chapters of the book offer a rich historical framework in which to contextualize British musical modernism in the twentieth century, occupying a position between the vast musics concerned with midcentury nationalism and the musical avant-garde of the 1950s, while exposing the reader to themes and trends emerging in the interwar period leading up to the early years of the Cold War. With a keen eye to midcentury programming and critical reception, Rupprecht explores fluctuating trends in concert halls and a mercurial canon of works and composers whose reputations were not the least bit settled in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s.

In defining modernism with relation to perceived traditions of nationalism in the context of a “time-lag” between the Continent and the British Isles, Rupprecht looks to Elisabeth Lutyens’s twelve-tone “Wittgenstein” Motet (1953). In his consideration of national identity (here, “Britishness”), Rupprecht grounds his argument in the rhetorical theories of cultural critic Homi Bhabha, whose writings assert that there is a perpetual conversation between the past (and people’s concept of pastness) and the security of a communal future. Rupprecht reveals the themes central to Bhabha’s notions of the inherent tensions of national identity in Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side (1969).

Rupprecht addresses the internationalist ideals that attracted the Manchester Group—among an array of British composers—to the Darmstadt Summer Course and the artistic creations thus produced. Rupprecht tackles the quandary of the term “abstraction” in the depiction of modernist art and its conscription into contemporaneous portrayals of art music. Rupprecht’s attention to William Glock’s appointment as Controller of Music at the BBC is exceptional, crafting a welcome historico-narrative lens through which to observe the period and its response to “serious” music, offering a wealth of examples that will inspire the reader to start a further study and listening handlist.

Goehr, Davies, and Birtwistle are central to the focus of the third chapter, in which Rupprecht extends his examination beyond the cultural phenomena of the group itself to a close reading of their music and its communicative breadth (not just analyses of its construction). Rupprecht describes the early accomplishments of the Manchester avant-garde in repertoire-centric discussions of technique, international musical responses, and formal structure in Goehr’s Sonata in One Movement, op. 2 (1953–55) and The Deluge (1957–58), Davies’s Five Pieces for Piano, op. 2 (1956), and Birtwistle’s Refrains and Choruses (1957), among other examples.

The fourth chapter looks to the twelve-tone compositions of contemporaries Thea Musgrave, Nicholas Maw, Gordon Crosse, and Richard Rodney Bennett, and renders a closer reading of their works in light of their own unique reactions to European modernism. While this “Manchester generation” adhered to serialism, their aesthetic voices illustrated four entirely disparate approaches. Rupprecht examines Musgrave and Maw through the selection of two orchestral-vocal works: Musgrave’s Triptych (1959), an orchestral cycle for tenor that sets Chaucer, navigating not only text treatment but also the twelve-tone row; and Maw’s Scenes and Arias (1962), which reconsiders German romanticism, and in so doing breaks with a coarse modernity otherwise associated with atonality. Crosse’s keen understanding of medieval music is revelatory in his Elegy...