 A
Land Without Music?
Presented by Andrew Motion
 Produced by Martin Cotton
BBC Radio 3, 4 x 120’ programmes
First tx: 19/8/95 – 9/9/95, as part of Radio 3’s `Fairest Isle’ season
Andrew Motion, now Poet Laureate, delved into the essence
of British music in the first half of the 20th century. The
programmes constituted a seamless fabric of music and poetry.
Programme 1
The gradual emergence of a recognisably `English’ quality from the Germanic
style of the 19th century, from the certainties of Empire up to the devastating
impact of the First World War.
Poems by Kipling (Ave Imperatrix), Newbolt (The Hundredth Year), Noyes (Distant
Voices), Walter de la Mare (England), Brooke (The Hill), Chesterton (The Rolling
English Road), Mew (The Farmer’s Wife), Hardy (In time of `”The
Breaking of Nations”), Thomas (As the team’s head-brass), Graves
(Defeat of the Rebels), Rosenberg (Louse Hunting); Owen(The Last Laugh), Jones
(In Parenthesis), Sassoon (Afterthoughts on the opening of the British Empire
Exhibition), Betjeman (Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge).
Music by Parry (Elegy for Brahms), Elgar (Pomp and Circumstance March No 1),
Gurney (March from The Western Playland); German (Merrymakers’ Dance);
Butterworth (Is my team ploughing?); Bridge (Piano Sonata); Gurney (Severn
Meadows), Vaughan Williams (A Pastoral Symphony), Parry, arr. Elgar ( Jerusalem);
Howells (Nunc Dimittis, from Collegium Regale),
Contributions from Anthony Payne,Jo Shapcott, Arnold Bax, Michael Finnissy,
Bernard Haitink, Diana Burrell, Leonard Slatkin, Matthew Greenall, John Woolrich,
Ian Partridge, Tom Paulin Julian Anderson, Robin Holloway.
Programme 2
Landscape as metaphor in English music and poetry throughout the 20th century;
the importance of the pastoral; the rediscovery of folksong and Tudor music.
Poems by Hopkins (Pied Beauty), Housman (Loveliest of trees),Young (Mole hills
on the Downs), Blunden (Mole Catcher), Empson (Legal Fiction),MacCaig (Summer
Farm), Hill (The Masque of Blackness), Redgrove (Ephemerid), Beer (Roman Road),
Jennings (Song at the beginning of Autumn), Huges (Pike)
Music by Vaughan Williams ( Linden Lea); Butterworth (A Shropshire Lad Rhapsody),
Finzi (Shortening Days), Vaughan Williams (5 Variants of Dives and Lazarus),
Tippett (Concerto for Double String Orchestra),Warlock (Sleep), Britten (Lachrymae),
Holst (Egdon Heath), Birtwistle (Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum), Finnissy
(English Country-Tunes No.2)
Contributions by Anthony Payne, Ian Partridge, Michael Finnissy, Leonard Slatkin,
Matthew Greenall, John Woolrich, Diana Burrell, Robert Graves, Michael Tippett,
Richard Hickox, Julian Anderson, Jo Shapcott
Programme 3
The spiritual and mystical side of English music and poetry – the way it
has been touched by transcendentalism, the Celtic twilight, the occult, the lure
of the East, and Christian mysticism.
Poems by Barker (I, mute immutable, cry), Walter de la Mare
(The Fairies Dancing), Machen (the Hill of Dreams), Stevie
Smith (The Celts), Crowley (Hymn to Pan), Raine (The World),
Gascoyne (Artist), St John of the Cross, trans. Roy Campbell
(Coplas del mismo hechas sobre un extasis de alta contemplacion),
R.S. Thomas (In Church), Lewis (The Jungle), Yeats (Sailing
to Byzantium).
Music by Vaughan Williams (Toward the Unknown Region), Bax
(The Garden of Fand), Ireland (The Forgotten Rite), Tippett
(Sosostris’ Aria from The Midsummer Marriage), Tavener
(Nomine Jesu), Foulds (Essay III), Holst (The Cloud Messenger),
Delius (Hassan).
Contributions by Diana Burrell, Julian Anderson, Matthew Greenall,
Anthony Payne, Vernon Handley, Robin Holloway, Richard Hickox,
Jo Shapcott, Michael Finnissy, Tom Paulin, Matthew Greenall,
Leonard Slatkin.
Programme 4
Diversity and pluralism. The influence of jazz, the Russian ballet, socialism,
the Second World War, refugees, pop music, and other modernist and post-modernist
thought.
Poems by Coward (To my literary parasites), Auden (As I walked out),Rickword
(To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman), MacDiarmid (At the Cenotaph),
Spender (Who live under the shadow of a war), MacNeice (Autumn Journal, section
9), Reed (The Naming of Parts), Douglas (Vergissmeinicht), Dylan Thomas (A
Refusal to Mourn), Eliot (The Wasteland), Harrison (Cremation), Shapcott (The
Mad Cow talks Back)
Music by Lambert (Elegiac Blues), Walton (Façade), Bliss (Rout), Bridge
(Quartet No.4), Rawsthorne (Left! Left!), Britten (Rats Away! From Our Hunting
Fathers), Britten (The Journey of the Magi), Rawsthorne (Canzonet), Tippett
(Dance, Clarion Air), Ferneyhough (Adagissimo), Seiber/Dankworth (Improvisations),
Maxwell Davies (Purcell Fantasia and Two Pavans), Martland (Principia)
Contributions from John Woolrich, Julian Anderson, Jo Shapcott, Matthew Greenall,
Anthony Payne, Michael Finnissy, Tom Paulin, Diana Burrell, Michael Tippett,
Matthew Greenall.
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