Herbert Howells and Modernism
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Academy of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- RAM015
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Book Chapter and Edition
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Alain Frogley has highlighted an ongoing need to bring ‘the study of British music into the musicological mainstream’, emphasising the role of Herbert Howells (1892-1983) as a ‘highly significant’ figure, ‘woefully under-represented in the scholarly literature’ and whose reputation has been ‘strongly shaped by overly simplified and value-laden notions of modernism’ (Frogley, A. (2018). ‘Modernism and its Discontents: Reclaiming the Major Minor British Composer’. JRMA, 143(1), 254). This portfolio responds to Frogley’s challenge by exploring Herbert Howells’s engagement with European modernism, both as a composer and a BBC broadcaster. Both outputs here focus on archive materials found and identified by the writer. The chapter ‘The Challenge to Goodwill’ responds to the scripts Howells wrote for the broadcasts he made in the 1930s, contextualising his polemic within a wider theoretical framework of British intellectual and cultural conservatism. The edition ‘Herbert Howells: Piano Works’ comprises 28 pieces, all published for the first time, and spanning 65 years of Howells’ compositional output. This collection demonstrates in practical terms the evolution of Howells’ engagement with modernism: the later pieces, in particular, typify his distinctive fusion of Renaissance idioms with twentieth-century chromaticism and metrical dissonance. Not only does this volume exemplify the sort of English empiricism which Howells highlights in his own broadcasts, but it also represents, in and of itself, an aural narrative of continuing compositional development by a leading British composer over a sustained period, contesting the ‘failure’ narrative of British modernism promulgated by writers such as Arnold Whittall. The first of a series of Naxos recordings using this edition was released in July 2020; online statics revealed that in the month of release it was played in 83 countries with over 300k plays, including multiple broadcasts on Radio 3.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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