UC Irvine

This thesis explores a shift in the treatment of musical pastoralism by several English composers in the 1920s. The pastoral, whether literary or musical, carries with it connotations of tranquility, nostalgia, and idealism. In the early twentieth century, many composers in England became interested in their nation’s folksong revival, resulting in a musical idiom that often translated the expected affective connotations of the pastoral into their compositions. On the surface, these connotations seen to suggest a mode of expression antithetical to the goals of musical modernism. However, after the First World War, the composers analyzed in this thesis began to reformulate the techniques associated with musical pastoralism. By using Theodor Adorno’s lateness discourse as an interpretive framework, the writer shows how Frank Bridge, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams fracture the conventions of the pastoral mode after the war, divorcing them from their expected relationships with teleological formal structures. This post-war pastoralism, rather than resting comfortably in the conventional associations of the pastoral, instead expresses the fragmentation and alienation of the subject in modernity. This reveals a striking critical distance, a distrust of the pastoral’s previous meanings, and a robust (yet subtle) manifestation of aesthetic modernism.