The Music Of George Butterworth And The Reception Of The English Pastoral, 1910-1939

Abstract (full 12,000 word thesis can be emailed on request):

There is extremely limited existing scholarship on George Butterworth, and what exists is either biographical in focus or reproduces Butterworth's collected folk song manuscri pts, exploring how these were turned into pieces of pastoral classical music. What is missing is an account of how people reacted to Butterworth's music when it was first heard, as well as how these reactions changed over time, and what this can tell us about contemporary society.

In order to gauge reception, the main majority of sources I used were newspaper articles. Eighty-two per cent of the population read a national Sunday newspaper by 1939, and journals such as the Musical Times were influential despite their limited circulation. Newspapers helped form and express opinions on the most important issues of the day, and are in this respect a gateway through which we may take a glimpse at past society.

These sources show that Butterworth's music was part of an intense cultural rivalry before the Great War, which developed into a fictional nation in mourning during the latter stages of the war, as the population gathered around cultural symbols like Butterworth as much as physical symbols such as monuments. Reception in the 1920s and 1930s did not express a dominant yearning for the pre-war years like in the painted arts, however, and in this way the study of Butterworth's reception adds definition to general cultural changes in the period, as well as revealing the social and political concerns of the wider population in the early twentieth century.

Key words: Butterworth; pastoral; folk; war; reception