In today's Sunday Telegraph:

   The elusive sound of Britishness

   As the BBC launches a television series on home-grown masterworks,
   Daniel Johnson examines what it is that defines our musical nationality

   BRITISH music is only 100 years old. In 1899, Elgar's Enigma Variations
   burst into the world to resurrect the soul of English music that had
   been laid to rest with Purcell two centuries before. In that century,
   a corpus of compositions has accumulated that bears comparison with
   that of any other nation.

   Much of it remains unfamiliar; and what is not is over-familiar.
   It helps to define our identity without our being fully aware of
   it.  Do we hear or play or sing or hum these tunes in a special way,
   because they are British? I don't think we do, and yet we feel a kind
   of recognition even when we hear one of these works for the first
   time.

   What is British about this music? We know, or think we know, when we
   hear it: a favourite hymn, the Last Night of the Proms, a Beatles
   song.  But as soon as we try to define it, the sound of Britain
   becomes elusive.

   Starting today, BBC2 TV will try over the next six weeks to answer
   this question.  "Masterworks: Six Pieces of Britain" is a remarkable
   series of programmes, in each of which a portrait of a composer is
   combined with a performance of one of his most representative works.

   Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis of 1910 is
   played in the numinous surroundings of Gloucester Cathedral; Elgar's
   Cello Concerto (1919) is filmed in the Abbey Road studios, where not
   only the Beatles but also Elgar recorded; Walton's Belshazzar's Feast
   is given, as it was for the first time in 1931, amid the municipal
   magnificence of Leeds Town Hall.  The remaining works are Britten's
   Serenade for tenor, horn and string orchestra Op 31 (1943), Sir
   Harrison Birtwistle's The Triumph of Time (1972) and Mark-Anthony
   Turnage's saxophone concerto, Your Rockaby, which is performed in
   the Brixton Academy.

   British music has been defined since the 1930s by what the BBC
   broadcasts.  Belshazzar's Feast was one of the corporation's first
   commissions, and Birtwistle and Turnage are only two of many composers
   whose awareness of their musical heritage would be impossible without
   Radio 3.  It has formed their aural background, just as the choral
   tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian era did for the young Walton
   and Britten, both of whom came from families of singers.

   Hence it was the BBC, in the person of Sir William Glock, Controller
   of Music from 1959 to the early 1970s, who dragged a reluctant public
   into the atonal era.  If Glock was the prophet of New Music and the
   critic Hans Keller its evangelist, Pierre Boulez was greeted as a
   messiah when he arrived in 1971 to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
   As Birtwistle's generation (including Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and
   Sir Richard Rodney Bennett) took over from Britten's, the distinctively
   British musical idiom was largely subsumed into a European or even
   a global one.

   This musical reformation was both cause and consequence of the eclipse
   of choral music and folksong, and it led to the banishment from the
   airwaves of the older English school.  Such traditionalists as William
   Lloyd Webber, the father of Andrew and Julian, abandoned composition
   during this period, while even those writing advanced tonal music,
   such as Edmund Rubbra or Berthold Goldschmidt, were frozen out.

   Glock broadened British horizons, putting an end to the possessive
   parochialism which pretended that only the British could play British
   music.  But, as music critic Michael Kennedy, who features in the
   series, says: "Like all revolutions this one went too far."

   In the past decade there has undoubtedly been a return to a
   more accessible musical idiom, partly stimulated by the vogue for
   authenticity, which has led to the rediscovery of so much early music.
   Those who never abandoned tonality, such as David Matthews or Robin
   Holloway, are taken more seriously, while younger composers such as
   Turnage and Thomas Ades are unashamedly eclectic.  They are certainly
   gaining popularity.  But what is British about them? What, in fact,
   is British about any British composer?

   The Six Pieces of Britain offers only tentative, oblique answers
   that reflect the political incorrectness of the question.  There is
   no acknowledgement of the fact that all six composers are English.
   If "British" means anything in a musical context, it suggests the
   imperial rather than the national, the transient rather than the
   timeless.  We may call the tradition that begins with Elgar British,
   or even trace it back to Handel.  But it is the Englishness of British
   music that endures, that has already survived the disintegration of
   the Empire and will survive even the disintegration of Britain or
   the absorption of its parts into a European federation.

   If it is anything, Englishness is not "heritage", but the living
   stream of national consciousness to which T S Eliot alluded in Little
   Gidding: "So, while the light fails/On a winter's afternoon, in a
   secluded chapel/ History is now and England."

   No more sublime intimation of that than the Tallis Fantasia in the
   BBC programme.  The vast Gloucester Cathedral is filled by the two
   orchestras and quartet and, as the austere modal melody rises and
   falls, returning in the final violin solo like a divine benediction,
   the camera carries us away with it.

   Strange to think that this quintessence of all that the English dream
   of "in quires and places where they sing" was the work of an atheist
   who had studied under Ravel, without whose nimble Gallic lightness
   of texture he would never have achieved the ethereal quality of this
   score.

   In his lectures on national music given in America in 1932, Vaughan
   Williams defined art as "the evocation of personal experience in
   terms which will be intelligible to and command the sympathy of
   others.  These others must clearly be primarily those who by race,
   tradition, and cultural experience are nearest to him." Yet the
   conditions under which modern English music could emerge at the turn
   of the century were those of unlimited exposure and devotion to
   European - principally German - music.

   That devotion was occasionally reciprocated.  It was a great
   Austro-Hungarian conductor, Hans Richter, who gave the premiere
   of the Enigma Variations, the work with which the English musical
   renaissance announced itself, and Richter had no hesitation in
   mentioning Elgar and Wagner in the same breath, as the two composers
   to whose works he had dedicated himself.

   This Anglo-Germanic musical symbiosis, a casualty of the First World
   War, was hugely beneficial to the new English school: it meant that
   not only those who, like Gustav Holst, had continental roots, but
   even those others - such as Vaughan Williams or Britten, who were
   fascinated by English folksong - could still feel a part of the
   European mainstream.

   Britten returned to Britain from the US in 1942 after reading E M
   Forster's essay on George Crabbe: "To think of Crabbe is to think
   of England." The Serenade, the first important piece he composed
   after returning, is a profoundly English work, with its cornucopia
   of verses from Jonson to Blake and Keats, and it served to relaunch
   the composer in wartime with a public that had been primed to see
   him and his friend W H Auden as draft-dodgers, even traitors.

   Yet Britten could not have rediscovered his Englishness without first
   discovering the world beyond.  As a schoolboy he already appreciated
   the then neglected Mahler, was an early admirer of Shostakovich and
   Bartok, and he also set poetry by Michelangelo, Holderlin, Rimbaud
   and Pushkin.  Britten owed his cosmopolitanism to Auden, just as
   Walton owed his to the Sitwells.

   Even Britten's supreme achievements, such as Peter Grimes and the
   War Requiem, are at once steeped in the English choral and poetic
   traditions, and yet pay homage to very un-English models, Berg's
   Wozzeck and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.  Britten is not merely the
   most English of post-war English composers; he is the most European
   of post-war European composers, too.

   With Birtwistle, and even more with Turnage, Englishness survives
   only in the interstices.  The Triumph of Time is based on a fantastic
   scene by Breughel; Rockaby is reminiscent of the Heiliger Dankgesang
   in Beethoven's quartet Op 132.  And yet when Turnage goes into raptures
   about New York, he echoes Vaughan Williams, who swooned with delight
   at the view from the Empire State Building.  Or when he suggests that
   Miles Davis and Stravinsky are the two great composers of the century,
   he is only echoing Walton, with whose brittle virtuosity he might
   seem to have little in common, but whose debt to jazz was just as
   great and who could never have written his masterpiece, Facade,
   without Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat.  The saxophone was Walton's
   instrument as much as Birtwistle's and Turnage's.

   The Englishness of English music is not only elusive, but also
   inimitable.  That goes for Elgar's grief-stricken coda to the Cello
   Concerto or Vaughan Williams's mystical trysts with the Tudor past,
   but does it go for Birtwistle and Turnage? The seedy unseemliness of
   contemporary Britain may be detectable in their music, but rarely
   the prospect of transcendence.  They are British composers, certainly,
   but do they belong - do they want to belong - to the English tradition
   of Elgar and Walton, Britten and Tippett? Six Pieces of Britain
   asserts that they do, that there is a "melancholy" common to all six
   Englishmen.

   The anatomy of melancholy is not unique to England; indeed, we have
   had less to anatomise than most.  There is, though, a peculiarly
   English mood that colours melancholy or, for that matter, any other
   temperament expressed in music.  What we hear in moments of rapturous
   introspection, heightened by an awareness of belonging, is not a
   distinctive language, but rather a tone of voice.

   For more than half a century, composers found that tone without
   difficulty.  Since the death of Britten, more than 20 years ago, it
   has been less audible.  In recapturing it, our young composers may
   also discover that they are reaching a wider public than they ever
   believed possible.

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom