The best cowpat you never stepped in
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Talk a walk any time of year in England’s green and pleasant and, unless you’re very lucky, you will soon sink up to the shinbone in what is known as a cowpat. These things are so prevalent they have even given rise to a genre of ‘cowpat music’ — works that express a quintessential Englishness with an ineradicably odiferous aftertaste. The term is usually credited to the crabby, atonal and determinedly unpopular composer Elizabeth Lutyens.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was the grand master of cowpat music…
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
In Czech here.
In The Critic here.
I do believe Edvard Grieg was the first to refer to cowpat music, but his reference was not to English music but to what he himself had composed to Peer Gynt. Once source quotes (translates I assume) him as writing “… I have done something for the Hall of the Mountain King which I literally can’t bear to hear; it reeks of cow-turds ….”
The VW Tallis Fantasia and the Elgar Introduction and Allegro are acclaimed masterpieces, that’s for sure. They are part of a long tradition of fine English string works spanning the centuries from Purcell’s Chacony in G minor to Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations, Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra and his Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli – and many more works of their kind.
The Elgar and VW works quoted have, as NL would have it, legs – on which they are capable of standing on their own. Why then is it necessary for him to denigrate two other fine works – Howells’ Concerto for String Orchestra and Delius’ Late Swallows – to make his case?
Poor Elisabeth Lutyens….
She did write some exceptionally good, moving and strong music.
https://youtu.be/5DTdUCf1yTo
https://youtu.be/SMPPCueCqsU
https://youtu.be/73kMX1ENUEo
or
https://youtu.be/f4Jh91G3los
Isn’t the reason why in some parts of the Elgar ‘Wilson’s violins sound like a string quartet’, the fact that Elgar specified the use of a string quartet which is set against the massed strings? At times, only the string quartet is playing.