Raymond Williams traces pastoral writing to the ninth century BCE, where Hesiod contemplates the ages of mankind from a mythical Golden Age through to his own ‘Iron Age’. Six centuries later, the pastoral emerges as a literary form in the Idylls of Theocritus, a tradition Virgil built upon in his Eclogues a further two centuries later. According to Williams, in Virgil the pastoral landscape of Theocritus becomes more distant – Arcadia – and the ‘Golden Age’ described by Hesiod ‘is seen as present there’.(3) In Christian mythology, the Garden of Eden provided an equivalent to the Arcadia of Classical poets, and the concept of the Fall established the nostalgic pastoral inclination as a natural human impulse. For the Romantic poets, witnessing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the city easily came to be seen as a consequence of the Fall; at the same time, increased emphasis on nature and a new interest in childhood enabled them to draw a parallel between humankind’s degeneration or Fall from Eden and a child’s loss of innocence as he enters adulthood.

The entwined concepts of pastoral endured into the twentieth century:

Arcadia is perpetually being renewed because the longing for it is rooted in one of the deepest instincts of man; common to all peoples and all times, it will of necessity wear a different look in different times and places. (3)

In music, the pastoral has existed probably as long as in literature – if not longer: Williams suggests that ‘the literary pastoral developed from singing competitions in local peasant communities’. (5) Pastoral themes and settings were particularly prominent in early opera (and the intermedii which preceded it), with the Renaissance predisposition to re-visit Classical myths. Over time, a semiotics of pastoral imagery developed in both vocal and instrumental genres. In opera and song, pastoral’s literary allusions can be made explicit, but in instrumental music, beyond the title, our perception of a work’s pastoral characteristics depends upon the understanding of pre-existing conventions. By the start of the twentieth century, composers could draw upon a wide collection of pastoral signifiers, though it is perhaps Beethoven who had the greatest influence in their preservation. According to David Wyn Jones, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony represented a ‘cumulating point’ to over 300 years of pastoral signification in music.(6) The pastoral style which developed in English music participated in this tradition, appropriating its conventions. Vaughan Williams set the example for many younger composers, such as George Butterworth, Ivor Gurney, Gerald Finzi and Ernest Moeran. Contemporaries like John Ireland and Gustav Holst, despite diverse influences and often divergent styles, played an important role in the development of a recognisably English pastoral style, if less regularly to adopt a pastoral outlook themselves.

The pastoral manifests itself in music in a number of ways, but a distinction can be drawn between the pastoral genre and the pastoral ‘topic’. As a genre, the ‘pastoral(e)’ refers to a single work or movement ‘that depicts the characters and scenes of rural life or is expressive of its atmosphere’.(7) The term is often applied to miniatures. Pastoral as a ‘topic’ may refer to a section of a large-scale work in which pastoral characteristics are apparent. So-called pastoral ‘oases’ are generally characterised by introspection or nostalgia, and stand in contrast with their more rhetorical surroundings.(8) Simplicity is juxtaposed with complexity, constancy with change; this opposition is sometimes present in composers’ cityscapes too. Matthew Riley has argued that the pastoral interlude can be interpreted as a composer’s presentation of nature as an ‘object of desire’, reflecting the aspiration to associate nature with the pastoral and Romantic values of

immediacy, freshness, simplicity, spontaneity, and the imaginative vision of childhood, along with the implicit negation of the everyday world, social mores, mundane adulthood, and even modern civilization itself.(9)

Most of the works we associate with the English pastoral tradition are not, in fact, large-scale works in which a pastoral ‘oasis’ is present. The pastoral oasis is dependent on a framing context for its meaning. Instead, English pastoral works are best considered representative of the pastoral genre, though it is to be recognised that a degree of intersection with other forms and genres (notably the ‘rhapsody’) is a vital characteristic. At a local level, there seems to be no clear ‘framing context’ that allows their subject to function as an object of desire. Yet, at the level of culture, the established view is that these works reflect, in their totality, a retreat from the tedium, complexity, or iniquity of society. There is a risk, of course, that in this respect pastoralism becomes a ‘metanarrative’, a normalising discourse, in discussion of English music.(10) It is important to recognise that although pastoralism was a particularly prominent strain in English culture, to take composers at their words when they claimed to be writing music that was truly ‘English’, is at risk of neglecting those who reside outside of the pastoral canon.

It is primarily in relation to Beethoven that pastoral signifiers have been considered systematically, in studies by David Wyn Jones and Robert Hatten.(11) Since Beethoven’s 6th Symphony provides a useful starting point for the consideration of pastoral signification, given the ‘programme’ implied by its movement titles (‘Awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country’ and ‘Scene by the brook’, for example), it is worth listing the pastoral conventions these writers isolate. Jones understands pedal points, compound time signatures, ‘piping melodies’ and the ‘repetition and measured delivery of material’ to be the principal characteristics of pastoral.(12) Hatten adds to these the predominance of quiet dynamics and the major mode, a simple melodic contour, a ‘pervasive rocking motion’ and movement by parallel thirds.(13)

Such conventions are, in the main, what Carolyn Abbate has called ‘arbitrary’ signifiers, that is, they do not bear an ‘isosonorous’ relation to what they represent.(14) In addition, composers have often made use of ‘iconic’ signifiers, that is, those which imitate the sounds of nature, such as birdsong, the wind, or rushing water. It is these mimetic signifiers on which Matthew Riley concentrates in his investigation of pastoralism in the music of Elgar.(15) Importantly, in pastoral music, iconic signifiers will often depend on arbitrary conventions for their context, for the mere imitation of natural sounds does not necessarily imply a pastoral outlook. Indeed, much of the music to be discussed here is absent of any isosonorous relation with nature, and its pastoral aspect is dependent upon either ‘text’ (that is, its title, lyrics or programme) or its appropriation of pastoral conventions.

Given pastoral’s ubiquity, our difficulty is to define what English pastoralism actually is, and ask why some English composers have come to be seen as forming a pastoral ‘school’. I shall return to the first question in a moment, but the answer to the latter lies both in the ideological background to both composition and reception, and the fact that their music is so closely bound to certain localities: named landscapes to which they regularly returned. The English pastoral style undoubtedly utilises many characteristics of the pastoral topic of European Classical and Romantic music, but is particularly associated with the musical language of folksong. It is for this reason that Elgar, Parry and Stanford, who, despite possessing individual stylistic voices are considered to have developed their style from the continental (that is, German) musical idiom, are generally excluded from the pastoral canon, though their vital standing in the English Musical Renaissance is recognised. The history of the folksong revival has been well documented and it is not my intention to retrace the steps of others.(16) Accordingly, the incorporation of the folksong into the musical language will, generally, be taken for granted, but its importance both to the ideology of the English Musical Renaissance, in its search for a ‘national’ voice in music, and to the cause of cultural nationalism, in its search for the ‘true England’, cannot be underestimated.

I would like to isolate three aspects of English pastoralism as it is manifested in music: setting, language and sensibility. By ‘setting’, I mean the specific location in which the composer has chosen to set a piece, as evinced by its title. By ‘language’, I mean the musical idiom, be it derived from English folksong, French impressionism or the German romantic tradition. ‘Sensibility’ is clearly the hardest to pin-down, but within it resides what I have called the pastoral ‘outlook’, or in other words, the mood invoked by the music; what it sets up to desire or reject. Within each category, there seems to be an ideal, in that one can posit a ‘typical’ English pastoral piece of music as one set in the West of England, derived from the musical language of folksong and with a nostalgic, introspective sensibility. However, these categories allow a degree of flexibility in that a piece need not have a specified setting, or, if it does, its idiom need not be folk-song related. Thus Ireland’s piano miniature, Amberley Wild Brooks and Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony can both occupy the English pastoral tradition. Of course, traditional pastoral conventions can be discerned within each, yet pastoral signification is not sufficient to define ‘English pastoral’. It is also important to recognise the degree to which pastoral imagery has been constructed separately from some English music and associated with it since its composition, via the marketing of recordings, the illustrations on the covers of composers’ biographies, concert programming, and so on.

I shall conclude with some illustrative examples of music that has been associated with the English pastoral tradition. Ireland’s 1918 miniature for piano, The Towing-Path is set in Pangbourne, Berkshire, where the composer was staying at the time of its composition,(17) though its specific location is not indicated by the title. We are aware, however, that the music is likely to be representative of a waterway, although the title distances the listener from direct involvement with the water itself (unlike Amberley Wild Brooks). The suggested mood, therefore, is one of contemplation, lacking narrative momentum, and this is borne out by Ireland’s adoption of many pastoral conventions rather than ‘iconic’ signifiers. Fiona Richards comments on the compound time, major mode, quiet dynamics, consonant harmony, simple melodic contour and ‘rocking’ accompaniment,(18) all of which are present within the opening bars:

Ex. 1 – Ireland, The Towing-Path (bars 1-4).


The result is a feeling of stasis, although the central section (bars 19-48) is more wayward harmonically and slightly less rhythmically predictable. By this method, Ireland encourages us to yearn for a return to tranquillity, which arrives with the recapitulation.

And yet, besides the title, is The Towing-Path ‘English’ pastoral? Ireland was less influenced by the folksong school than French models, though here, at least, the influence of Debussy and Ravel is limited. Even so, the modal colouring which characterises much English pastoral music is not to be found; the harmonic language is closer to Elgar than either Debussy or Vaughan Williams (note especially the 7-6 suspensions, for example in bars 13 and 15; Ex. 2). While Ireland’s idiom may not be as distinctively English as that of Vaughan Williams, it does not undermine its situatedness in the English rural scene.

Ex. 2 – Ireland, The Towing-Path (bars 13-17).

A particularly common English pastoral form is the rhapsody, often based on a particular location and derived from folksongs or constructed from folksong-like melodies. Thus we have Vaughan Williams’s three Norfolk Rhapsodies (1905-07), and In the Fen Country (1904), Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody (1906-7), Butterworth’s Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad (1912), his Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913), and Finzi’s A Severn Rhapsody (1923). The sleeve note to a recording of A Severn Rhapsody reads as follows: ‘The music gently evokes the mood of the English countryside and the meandering river’.(19) Besides the title, on what musical grounds is such a description possible? (And what is the mood of the English countryside?) Ex. 3 and Ex. 4 show respectively the opening bars of A Shropshire Lad and A Severn Rhapsody. Many parallels can be drawn, the most obvious being Finzi’s melodic reference, in the descending thirds which open his piece, to Butterworth’s main theme (bars 17-20 in Ex. 3), itself a quotation from his song, ‘Loveliest of Trees’. But both demonstrate the key characteristics of the English pastoral style. Although in neither case is the metre compound, the slow tempo, drone basses and simple melodic contour – in each case full of folksong-like modal inflections - contribute to the sense of tranquillity. Finzi’s second main melody (bar 12) is pentatonic – another pastoral characteristic, reflective of rural ‘simplicity’. Both have an impressionistic texture in which fragments of melody are passed between instruments, while the woodwind are given prominent solos. Butterworth’s melodies are somewhat less improvisatory than Finzi’s, while Hatten’s ‘rocking motion’ can be perceived in both – in A Severn Rhapsody at the end of the third bar (in the flute) and mirrored in the harmonic oscillation in bars 8-13, and in A Shropshire Lad in the accompaniment between bars 11-14. In terms of form, the ‘Rhapsody’ of their titles connotes freedom from the restraints of traditional structures, surely alluding to a carefree Arcadian lifestyle, transposed to rural England. Thus their setting, language and sensibility place them both firmly in the English pastoral tradition.

Ex. 3 – Butterworth, Rhapsody: A Shropshire Lad (bars 1-20).

Ex. 4 – Finzi, A Severn Rhapsody (bars 1-17).

Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending (1914) is often taken to epitomise the English pastoral tradition. Its pastoralism depends primarily upon the depiction of the Lark itself, its song and flight, in the solo violin passages. The idea that the violin ‘becomes’ the Lark suggests that this is an altogether different conception from Ireland’s descriptive miniatures or either of the rhapsodies discussed above. According to Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, in The Lark Ascending, ‘the listener is meant to find a commingling of the spirits of liberty and community’ (20) in the juxtaposition of the Lark’s music (Ex. 5, for example) with the duple metre folkdance-like second section (Ex. 6).

Ex. 5 – Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending (miniature score, p. 1, 3).