RETHINKING GUSTAV HOLST AND HIS MUSIC
2024 Symposium, Utah State University


Gustav Holst: Perspectives on Symphonic Intertextuality and Pan-European Identity. 
Dr Jonathan Clinch (Royal Academy of Music)


ABSTRACT
This paper offers two related perspectives on Holst: the first looks back to Charles Stanford, and the second, forward to Herbert Howells. 


In the first half, I outline a theory of influence: Stanford (and his pupils) were responsible for a highly sophisticated body of music that prioritied intertextual issues, and the critical reception to this was often negative because it wasn’t heard in those terms. Instead, intertextuality was misunderstood as a form of derivative writing which lacked originality. The reactionary notion of an ‘English Musical Renaissance’ further complicates this as, rather than address the concerns, some critics claimed that British music had successfully ‘freed itself’ from foreign influence. I argue that this narrative of ‘emancipation’ from Europe is untenable and, as an alternative, I outline how ‘cosmopolitan form’ – the use of symphonic intertextuality to express pan-European identity – emerges in Stanford and reaches a peak in the music of Holst. 


In the second half, I consider the influence of Holst on the cathedral music of Herbert Howells. After briefly outlining their friendship, I reflect upon what aspects of this cathedral repertoire, which is often labeled as quintessentially Howellsian (and definitively English), are really based on the intertextuality that Howells heard in Holst’s music. This allows me to realign Howells’ music within a pan-European intertextual network, where Wagner’s mythical secularism later comes to define English twentieth-century cathedral music. This is the ultimate irony: the music of re-enchantment, which Wagner wrote for a world after ‘the death of God’ has, through Holst, and then Howells, come to represent a new form of Anglican mysticism.