Classical / Opera
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£ 86.00
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English Diatonic Music 1887 until 1955
English Diatonic Music - Book - by Matthew Riley
(2025)
Much English music from the 1890s through the 1950s stands out for its
intensive diatonicism: a studied avoidance of chromaticism and an
elaboration of the expressive possibilities of purely diatonic writing.
This music attempted to convey metaphysical thoughts, elevated feelings,
eternity, and at times mysticism and ecstasy. English Diatonic Music
1887-1955 explores this unique stylistic movement, drawing on recent
approaches in music theory and analysis and illustrating the argument
with key representative musical examples.
Through this analysis,
author Matthew Riley offers a new perspective on the repertory. This
book advances a new conception and undertakes an historical remapping of
early twentieth-century English music. Incorporating both music theory
and music history, Riley evaluates the importance of syntactic and
stylistic conventions in this era, in particular topic and schema.
His position is anti-idealist in an analytical sense and anti-modernist
in an intellectual sense, elevating the importance of convention and
positioning composition as a craft above all. The book develops an
alternative perspective to those in the existing broad surveys of the
repertory and treats English diatonic music as primarily a
post-Victorian modernity with remarkable consistency of vocabulary
across the decades. It was the outcome of a coherent late-Victorian
musical reform movement that worked against perceived sentimentality.
Intensive diatonicism can be heard in many canonical compositions that
are frequently performed and recorded, but its scope is much wider too,
encompassing orchestral and choral-orchestral works, chamber music, solo
song, music for the Anglican liturgy, opera, and commissions for
coronations, festivals, and BBC projects. Many of the book's wider
arguments and approaches are concerned with clearing out the
misconceptions arising from over-emphasis on folksong and the Tudor
revival and the confusion of diatonicism and pastoralism.
