The British reception of the works of Arnold Schoenberg and his associates in the first half of the twentieth-century

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore the British road to musical modernism. I consider four aspects of the British reception of the works of Schoenberg and his associates: critical reception; audience reception; performance; and compositional influence. In each respect, the reception was distinctive, and I aim to articulate the respects in which it was distinctive. Much of the critical perspective from which the works were described and evaluated in the press and in correspondence drew on specifically British modes of thinking, in particular, aspects of the sentimentalist tradition. Something else that was distinctive was that the audience for these works was spread out in Britain. It was surprisingly sympathetic, or at least open-minded, in part, to the new works, and it was not somehow just an echo of the policies of centralised organizations in London, such as the BBC. The audience had some degree of autonomy and in many cases was in advance of more conservative critics. Performances were also spread out in Britain, and the role of émigrés from Austria and also Germany, usually Jewish émigrés, was central in both the organization and performance of these works. Lastly, the influence of Schoenberg’s works on native composition was brought about mostly by Schoenberg’s students, especially Wellesz and Webern. While these composers were still in Vienna, they were a magnet for British aspiring young composers, and these composers, who in their turn, transmitted the Second Viennese School musical ideas to the next generation. Thus, the tradition spread quite early in Britain in the 1930s. I focus on one important but unrecognised link in this chain, the composer Dorothy Gow.

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ORCID for Gintare Stankeviciute: orcid.org/0009-0005-6212-6930

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