English Pianism and Harold Bauer (1945)

• Other Authors: Gillies, Malcolm, Ross, Bruce Clunies, Arthur, Bronwen, Pear, David
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 1999
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198166658.003.0040; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52394075/isbn-9780198166658-book-part-40.pdf

Abstract It is not likely that the English-speaking peoples, who have not lost a war since 1066 (except to themselves; for when Britain lost to America in the Revolutionary War they were losing to themselves), & who, of late centuries, have invented or developed all the notions & devices the whole modern world thinks about (flirting, wholesale divorce, machinery, trams, trains, steamships, submarines, flying, teetotalism, antivivisectionism, co-operative societies, League of Nations, vegetarianism, afternoon tea, sport, golf, football, tennis, baseball, cricket, votes for women, Home Rule for Ireland, India, Egypt, Iceland, Faeroe Islands—to which must be added social systems such as socialism & communism worked out by foreigners such as Karl Marx, Lenin & Trotsky while living in exile in Britain or USA), would be found failing to lead in such an important art as the art of music. In other articles I have striven to show how English-speaking composers (such as John Dunstable, the 13th-century Worcester & Winchester church music composers, William Lawes, John Field, myself, Cyril Scott, Arthur Fickenscher, George Gershwin & other American popular composers) have been responsible for all known epoch-making innovations in music since the advent of decipherable musical notation (1260?). In this sketch I will deal merely with the part played by English-speakers in modern pianism.