Pageantry

TY - CHAP

T1 - Pageantry

AU - Readman, Paul

AU - Hutton, Alexander

PY - 2024/4/4

Y1 - 2024/4/4

N2 - Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

AB - Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

U2 - 10.1017/9781108681261.017

DO - 10.1017/9781108681261.017

M3 - Chapter

SN - 1108493327

SN - 978-1108493321

T3 - Composers in Context

SP - 135

EP - 142

BT - Vaughan Williams in Context

A2 - Onderdonk, Julian

A2 - Owen, Ceri

PB - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ER -