The resolute repudiation of any form of imperialism is a core feature of the volkisch idea. Without reservation it affirms the right of every nation to national independence, to its autonomous control of the forms taken by its political, economic and cultural life.
There is an analogy, according to Rosenblatt, between immunological reactions of the body and the ethnocentric reactions of the individual or of a society. Just as the body is better prepared to avoid destruction by foreign substances as a result of a generalised tendency to resist the impingement of foreign substances, so an individual or a society may be better prepared to avoid destruction by aliens as a result of a generalised tendency to distrust, avoid, or reject foreign-seeming individuals. The disadvantage of severe damage or destruction, whether likely to occur or not, is so much greater than whatever advantages contact with things alien confers on one that a psychological or biochemical paranoia is the preferred strategy for survival. Where one failure to anticipate the malevolence of an alien person or substance may be fatal, organisms that must acquire defensive reactions to each specific harmful person or substance are less likely to survive during a given period of time than organisms prepared to be defensive against all alien persons or substances.
Of course, we have been here before, the last time that our politicians were forced to address the subject of immigration during the months leading up to an election, thirty years ago, in 1979.
Usually, all political parties comply with a secret pact whereby none of them mention the subject of immigration before an election, because they all have the same failed policy, and they do not want it discussed. However, this time, the growing popularity of the BNP, means that they have no option other than to address the subject and start lying through their expensively capped, tax payer funded teeth.
Voters over 50 will have seen this before, in the lead up to the 1979 election, the then opposition leader Margaret Thatcher gave a famous TV interview to the “World in Action” program during which she alluded to the fears in many communities that they could become "rather swamped by people of a different culture".
Thatcher was widely condemned, even then controlled media, for using the word “swamped” but she used it deliberately, and as cynically as Johnson used his words at the Royal Society.
Like Johnson, Thatcher had no intention of changing immigration policy, but she fooled enough people into into believing she would that they voted for her, rather than the National Front, and she won with a majority of 43 and the rest is history.
The BNP is not the National Front, but the issues and the Lib/Lab/Con troika are the same as they were in 1979, just much worse. Do not let history repeat itself, do not be fooled again.
What are likely to be the feelings of 50,000 white would-be tenants in Birmingham, who have waited years for a decent house, when they see newcomers, no matter what their colour, taking over whole streets of properties?
Europe is going mad. Mad with scandals. Mad with egoism. Mad with revolt against Heaven. Mad with blood. […] Corrupt in its morality, debased in its faith, puffed up with individualism, fanaticism, and pride, having lost touch with charity, with the love of God and man, anaemic, modern Europe is waiting for the final blow, the last convulsions, the last corpses. The hour is approaching when all accounts will be settled. The hour is also coming when to save the world it will need a handful of heros and saints who will carry out the Reconquest. […]
A country soon gets back on its feet after financial set-backs. It is not too hard for it to find a new political structure. It just calls for able technicians and a collective will to join forces. […] The real revolution is much more complicated, the one which puts right not the mechanism of the State, but the secret life of each soul. […]
It is only the quality and vibrancy of the soul which matters, the capacity for giving oneself unstintingly, its will to place an ideal above all other considerations in a spirit of total disinterest. Only faith counts, burning confidence, the complete absence of egoism and individualism, the striving of the whole being towards service, however lowly it is, wherever it may be, however it may be fulfilled, for a cause which transcends man, asks everything of man, and promises him nothing.
In a century where people only live for themselves, hundreds, thousands of men must no longer live for themselves, but for a collective ideal, and be prepared in advance to endure for its sake every sacrifice, every humiliation, every heroic act. […] I can hear in the night’s darkest hour crowds of people rising to their feet to protest their will and their faith. I see these thousands of men and women renewing their vow. How can one doubt that this heroism will bear fruit? It is these souls which will change the world.
‘Oiro’ (Gold)
A terrible wave of utilitarianism and baseness is sweeping through the world, and is threatening to subvert and vulgarize everything, plunging it into a quagmire of tragic moral degradation. [ ... ] Where are we going? Day by day more is being chopped away. The clear and holy light of ideas is covered up and lost sight of under a cheap blanket of unfettered commercialism which darkens the soul. Justice, independence, nobility of feeling or thought: empty words. Contemporary man feels increasingly a pawn in a game of material interest, more a slave of gold than ever.
Every so often these acts of extraordinary moral decadence sweep over the world. Man abandons his supreme position in the scale of what is valuable on this earth to surrender to the lure of material objects and the state of supreme wretchedness which goes with them. Only his vanity, his comforts, his material possessions seem to him a worthwhile goal, a path to follow. To achieve this goal, to follow this path, any contradiction of his spirit, any abdication of responsibility, any amount of baseness or shame are justified. Now more than ever all means serve to fulfil this end.
This is the way of the world.
But there are independent spirits, free spirits, those who are prepared to embark on a hard road of sacrifice to preserve their pride and the glory which their independence and freedom give them. They should not despair. Already the signs of reaction are becoming manifest in the noisy protest on every side from those able to resist the temptation to trade their own dignity for material comforts, to swap strength of character for the possibility of making money.
This reaction against the materialist and corrupting utilitarianism of a whole age is the beginning of the great Revolution whose spirit is going to burn and purify the earth. It is a singular aspect of the human condition that the onset of man’s decadence and death always create the conditions of his salvation and deliverance. [ ... ]
The Revolution is under way. It will redeem man, raising him to the height of all the divine greatness that is his. Friends, the glitter of gold, however intense and brilliant, will never obscure the light of the ideal which we carry inside our breast and which is like the pure, redeeming brightness of the dawn in the tragic night of human distress.
When two hundred years ago the rights of man were solemnly declared, anthropology as a natural science was still in its infancy. Human rights are the creation of jurists and philosophers. The premiss of their thinking was an isolating and speculative one: Man was abstractly conceived as an individual; not as a man, or a woman, or a child, or as someone with ties to a family, an ethnic group [Stamm], a people [Volk]. The heterogeneous world which had grown up over centuries, and which even in the age of absolutism had started to become rationally organized, was now radically simplified.
An abstractly conceived being, Man, was recognized to have fundamental freedoms in 1789, but not to be a communal being. In those days nothing was known of genetics and the like. They were building on speculations about a noble savage, who was contrasted with the European who had been corrupted by his society. [ ... ]
Charles Darwin discovered the natural history of man. The history of his development was uncovered step by step. [ ... ] Modern man emerged in the Ice Age, the quaternary. [ ... ] Research into human behaviour, which made leaps and bounds with the work of the Nobel prize-winner Konrad Lorenz, who died recently, has done a lot to establish a realistic and scientific picture of man. However, the resistance of older, better established sciences such as sociology is still strong. The conflict between empirical natural science and speculative human sciences has not yet been fought out to a conclusion. The picture of man founded on the natural sciences should be taken into account in a redrafting of human rights. […]
Man is a territorial being. That was not yet known in 1789. Every man strives to possess space to dispose of as he alone sees fit. These are the roots of the right to a home [Heimat]. But the right to a home can be found in no constitution which incorporates human rights. If human rights are to mean anything, however, then the right to a home should be included in the list!
Man is as much an individual as a collective being. In every human group a hierarchy establishes itself very quickly and instinctively: men are unequal. Every scientist knows that to establish differences he must experimentally create the same conditions. (Before the law all men are equal.)
The development of man is a combination of natural and cultural factors. This has given rise to an abundance of ethnic groups. American ethnographers have counted at least 4,000 cultures on the earth. The wealth of the human species is in its abundance of cultures.
Let us sum up: the human rights of 1789 were incomplete. The right to a home and an identity must now be added to them. The human rights of the Enlightenment are abstract, individual rights. If they are to be complete and to be implemented, they must include collective human rights, namely the human rights to home and identity! In other words, the human rights of the individual and those of the community should complement each other harmoniously. Every people has a right to its own identity. Whoever violates this right is playing with fire.
[‘Menschenrecht auf Heimat und Identität’ [The human right to home and identity], Nation Europa, 39/7 (July 1989), 5-6.]
Nationalism in music was a product of the nineteenth century. Its origins were partly political; in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for instance, native composers revolted against the Germanic culture imported by the occupying Austrians. They wished to create a national music of their own, based on their folk-songs and using their own language. The melodies and rhythms of native folk-songs influenced even the symphonic works of Smetana and Dvorak in Czechoslovakia, and even a cosmopolitan composer like Liszt was very much affected by the music of his native Hungary. In other countries, too, music began to grow more nationalistic in revolt against the cosmopolitan culture which usually flourished at the courts; thus in Russia the nationalist school under Balakirev wrote Russian music based on Russian and even Caucasian folk-songs in order to replace the French and Italian influences in music favoured by the Imperial Court. Similarly, in Norway a nationalist school grew up with Grieg at its head which spoke in a different voice from the German music which was then prevalent. In England where … German influences were dominant throughout the nineteenth century, the nationalist tide did not begin to flow until the beginning of the twentieth century, and the leading figures in this movement were
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two very dissimilar composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, who nevertheless shared common aims.
Both Vaughan Williams and Holst were certain that it was English folk-song which had liberated music in England from the German tradition and given it a voice of its own. Vaughan Williams once wrote: ‘My intercourse with Cecil Sharp (the pioneer collector of British folk-songs) crystallised and confirmed what I already vaguely felt about folksong and its relationship to the composer’s art. With him you had to be either pro-folk-song or anti-folk-song, and I came down heavily on the folk-song side’. This was the basis of his famous article, published in 1912; ‘Who wants the British composer?’ And Imogen Holst declared of her father: ‘The other important event (of 1905) was the revival of folk-song. Folk-songs finally brushed all trace of Wagner from his work. He had the deepest admiration for Cecil Sharp and felt that when the time came for the English musical history of the twentieth century to be written, Cecil Sharp’s name would stand out above all others’. Frank Howes, in his book The English Musical Renaissance, points out that ‘other influences besides folk-song operated in the formation of both men’s respective styles. In the case of Vaughan Williams, one was the hymn tunes he examined for his edition of the English hymnal. In that of Holst it was Weelkes and Purcell, which he made his various choirs sing. Both were touched by the new interest in plainsong, and both found in Bach an antidote to too much Beethoven and Wagner’. Both were interested in writing for amateurs, including choral societies and brass bands, and in musical education - they possessed a social as well as an artistic conscience.
Ralph Vaughan Williams came of mixed Welsh and English blood. His father was born into a legal family from Wales; his grandfather was a judge who settled with his family at Leith Hill, near Dorking. The house next door belonged to the Wedgwood family, descendants of the famous potter, who had also intermarried with the Darwins
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(Charles Darwin was Vaughan Williams’s great uncle). The two households soon developed a close friendship, and in 1868 Arthur Vaughan Williams married Margaret Wedgwood. Arthur was a clergyman, and had the living of Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. He had three children; Ralph, the third, was born at Down Ampney on 12 October 1872. Arthur died only two and a half years later and Margaret brought her family back to her parents’ house in Leith Hill. Here Vaughan Williams was brought up and was given music lessons by his aunt. He learnt first the piano and then the violin. He went to Charterhouse in 1887 where he played the viola in the school orchestra and sang in the school choir. In the summer of 1890 he was able to go to Munich to hear Wagner’s operas for the first time. In the same year he entered the Royal College of Music, where he remained for two years, and in 1892 went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge his official subject was history, but he continued his lessons at the Royal College of Music. During this period he met a number of men with whom he formed lifelong friendships: the philosopher G. E. Moore, the historian G. M. Trevelyan and H. P. Allen, later Sir Hugh Allen, director of the Royal College of Music.
Although an allowance from his family made it unnecessary for him to earn his living, he took an organist’s post at Lambeth in London. He had become engaged to Adeline Fisher; they were married in October 1897 and went to Berlin. Here Vaughan Williams studied with Max Bruch, returning in April of the following year to London and his organist’s position in Lambeth, which left him time to write music of his own, including a setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. Some of his song settings, among them Linden Lea, which was to become well-known, stem from this period. Though he had not yet achieved a really mature style in these, it was clear that he was reacting against German influences, which he found actually repugnant; apart from folk song, the chief influence on his music was
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that of the Elizabethan composers, Purcell and even mediaeval music at times. He also admired Parry for his mastery of choral technique. It was at this period that he began to think about composing a large choral work with the sea as its subject. This was eventually to become the Sea Symphony.
It was a period when great interest was shown in collecting folk music, and Bartók and Kodály were beginning their collections of Hungarian folk-songs. 1903 saw the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s collection of English folksongs, in which he collaborated with Cecil Sharp.
In 1905 he began the first of his mature works, a setting of Walt Whitman’s poem Toward the Unknown Region. He still felt that he was not sufficiently equipped as a composer, and he travelled to Paris to study with Ravel. Ravel helped him to refine his style, concentrating on lessons in orchestration. Vaughan Williams wrote of this experience: ‘As far as I know my own faults he hit them all exactly and is telling me to do exactly what I half felt in my mind I ought to do’. Ravel took a keen interest in the English composer, and the two remained friends for many years.
The time spent with Ravel must have given Vaughan Williams the confidence he needed to complete larger, orchestral works. The Sea Symphony was first performed at the Leeds Festival in October 1910, and made a tremendous impression. It is a setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra of several poems about the sea by Walt Whitman, in four movements resembling those of the classical symphony, though the form of each movement is often dictated by the structure of the words. It is a powerful work which also contains many beautiful lyrical moments, though the finale is perhaps too extended to balance the rest. It was then that Vaughan Williams met Isadora Duncan and began work on a choral ballet based on The Bacchae for her. And always much concerned with the richness of English folk culture, he gave a lecture early in 1912 in which he set forward his ideas on English folk music: ‘The evolution of the English
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folk-song by itself has ceased but its spirit can continue to grow and flourish at the hand of our native composers ... we have made the mistake in England of trying to take over “ready-made” a foreign culture, a culture which is the result of generations of patient development, and of attempting to fit on to it our own incompatible conditions. This is merely to reap where we have not sown and the result must be failure’.
His London Symphony was first performed on 27 March 1914 in a concert of modem orchestral music conducted by Geoffrey Toye at the Queen’s Hall. ‘A better title’, wrote Vaughan Williams, ‘would perhaps be Symphony by a Londoner, that is to say, the life of London (including possibly its various sights and sounds) has suggested to the composer an attempt at musical expression, but it would be no help to the hearer to describe these in words’. And in fact the music does contain various London sounds such as the Westminster chimes, a theme derived from the street-cry ‘sweet lavender’, the sound of a mouth-organ and the jingle of hansom bells; but these are all worked into a true symphonic structure in four movements, and only appear incidentally. Although the piece enjoyed great success, the composer was unable to find an English publisher, so he sent his only score to Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig.
As soon as war broke out, Vaughan Williams enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, although he was over forty. In June 1916 his unit left for France, where they were stationed at Ĕcoives. It was here that the ideas for A Pastoral Symphony had their origin; the long trumpet cadenza in the second movement owed its inspiration to a bugler who used to practise in the evening. In the autumn the unit embarked for Salonika; Vaughan Williams remained with it till early 1917, when someone in authority arranged for him to be sent back to England to train for a commission. He said: ‘My only regret at leaving is that I shall cease to be a man and become an officer’.
Peace brought with it a new period of success. On re-
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turning to London, he was invited to teach at the Royal College of Music. He was made an honorary Doctor of Music at Oxford, and his Sea Symphony was performed on that occasion in celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre. The unaccompanied Mass in G Minor belongs to that period. Of the latter he said: ‘There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good mass’.
During the next six years he completed many works and was working on his opera based on Falstaff, Sir John in Love. In 1929 he wrote a Fantasia for cello and orchestra for Pablo Casals, as well as a concerto for two violins. By now Vaughan Williams’s mature style had been fully developed. One could describe it as a mixture of modal harmonies and melodies derived from folk song with poly tonal counterpoint and a fondness for moving in block chords. This style was characteristic of him for the rest of his life, though certain of his later works show a rather more austere character.
As early as 1927 he had begun work on the ballet Job. The scenario had been provided by Geoffrey Keynes, and the work had originally been intended for Diaghilev who, however, thought the idea ‘too English’, as it was based on Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job. With no immediate prospects of a stage production Vaughan Williams designed the work as an orchestral suite, in somewhat expanded form, for the Norwich Festival. Meanwhile, however, the Camargo Society had become interested in it after Ninette de Valois and Lilian Baylis had seen the model sets and designs, and the ballet was first performed by the Camargo Society in July 1931 at the Cambridge Theatre.
In the winter of 1931-2 Vaughan Williams began a new symphony, his fourth. It was first performed on 10 April 1935 by Adrian Boult and the BBC Orchestra; it was a more powerful and violent work than anything he had written before, and remains one of his most original pieces. It is very much more chromatic and dissonant than his usual pastoral style and has a mood of bitterness which is
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absent from most of his other works. […]
Shortly after the first performance he was offered the Order of Merit; although he had previously refused all honours, he was prepared to accept this. During the summer he was engaged on three major works, the Five Tudor Portraits for chorus and orchestra to texts by John Skelton, the fifteenth-century poet, a comic opera The Poisoned Kiss, and another choral work, Dona Nobis Pacem. The text of this last work was a setting of three poems by Walt Whitman, and this certainly was a clear presentiment of the coming world war. […]
About this time he received some suggestions for ballet scenarios, one based on Spenser’s Epithalamion from Ursula Wood. After a long correspondence they met for the first time in early 1938. They soon became friends, and she was in fact later to become his second wife.
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[…] In 1940 Vaughan Williams undertook composing for a new medium, films. At the suggestion of his former pupil, Muir Mathieson, Director of Music at London Films, he wrote the music for his first film, The Forty-Ninth Parallel. This was shown with great success in 1941, and as a result he was asked to write music for two further films, Coastal Command and The People’s Land.
From this time dates a long and interesting letter to a friend who had sought advice on a possible musical career for his son. This letter, contained in Ursula Vaughan Williams’s biography of her husband, gave the advice that a young composer should take part in as much practical music-making as possible, study the great masters, and work at home, going abroad only when mature. Vaughan Williams, always reacting against any form of pomposity, calmly answered Walford Davies, who said that he had written his Solemn Melody on his knees, ‘I write my music on my bottom’.
The fifth symphony, more pastoral in style than its predecessor, had been completed and Vaughan Williams con-
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ducted its first performance at a Promenade Concert on 24 June 1943.
Advanced age did not diminish the composer’s energies. In 1944 he provided incidental music for Richard II for the BBC, and wrote an oboe concerto for Leon Goossens. After the war ended, he began his sixth symphony. Early in 1948 its first performance was given at a Royal Philharmonic concert; like the fourth symphony, it is a powerful and dramatic work, and many people felt that it was not only inspired by the war, but also that the quiet and sinister last movement represented earth after total destruction by atomic bombs. Vaughan Williams, however, said that the last movement was based on Prospero’s speech from The Tempest: ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself ... shall dissolve and ... leave not a wrack behind’.
In May 1951 Adeline died. After her death, Vaughan Williams asked Ursula Wood to help him with his domestic affairs. In the summer of 1952 they spent a holiday in France together. Early the next year they married.
Though Vaughan Williams was close to eighty, his creative energies did not flag; he wrote a Romance for harmonica and orchestra for Larry Adler, and a seventh symphony, the Sinfonia Antartica, partly based on his music for the film Scott of the Antarctic. In the summer of 1955, after a holiday in Greece, he gave a lecture in Cork, in which he attempted to prove that almost all the good Irish (not Gaelic) folk-songs were really derived from England; his audience was naturally somewhat outraged. The eighth symphony, on which Vaughan Williams had been working for some time, had its first performance at Manchester under Barbirolli in May 1956; the score is notable for its inclusion of a number of tuned gongs. He had already started on a ninth symphony, and continued to work on it while on a summer holiday in Majorca. In 1957, while on holiday in Austria, he heard a Hugel horn for the first time and decided to incorporate it in his new ninth symphony. He lived
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through a major operation, and his eighty-fifth birthday, in October, was celebrated with a concert of his works at the Festival Hall.
After a short holiday in Dorset in 1958 Vaughan Williams returned to London, and here, on 26 August 1958, he died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis.
By basing his melodic and harmonic style on English folksong, Vaughan Williams was able to free English music from German influences; certain traces of a French style appeared instead, however, especially in his more lyrical works such as the Pastoral and fifth symphonies. […]
Vaughan Williams’s principal collaborator in the English folk-song school was Gustav Holst, born at Cheltenham on 21 September 1874. His great-grandfather was a Swedish musician who taught the harp to the Imperial Family at St Petersburg and left Russia with his wife and his small son early in the nineteenth century because of his political views. Later the son settled in Cheltenham. Both Holst’s grandfather and father were musicians. His mother was English, and died when Holst was only eight. He was looked after by his father’s sister, Nina, who was a keen musician.
Holst started early to play both violin and piano, and at the age of thirteen he had set the poem Horatius for chorus and orchestra. Later, when he was seventeen, he was given some counterpoint training at Oxford. Having tried unsuccessfully to win scholarships at various London colleges of music, he returned to Cheltenham, where he obtained an organist’s job at a village in the Cotswolds. He was given the conductorship of a local choral society, and wrote an operetta, Lansdowne Castle, which was produced in 1893 in Cheltenham with great success. As a result, his father borrowed a hundred pounds from one of his relations and sent Holst to the Royal College of Music.
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[…] In the autumn of 1895, just after his twenty-first birthday, he met Vaughan Williams for the first time; they soon became friends and got into the habit of playing each other their works. Holst was writing an opera called The Revoke. He became interested in socialism and ran the Hammersmith Socialist Club, attending Bernard Shaw’s lectures at Kelmscott House.
In 1897 he was asked to conduct the Socialist Choir, and there he met his future wife, Isobel Harrison, who sang in the choir as a soprano. He earned a living as organist in several churches in London, and continued to play the trombone in various theatre orchestras. In the autumn of 1898, however, the Carl Rosa Opera company offered him an appointment as first trombone and repetiteur. […]
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Holst married Isobel Harrison in the summer of 1902, and coming into a small legacy on the death of his father, he and his wife were at last able to afford a honeymoon: in the spring of 1903 they went to Berlin.
On returning to England, Holst decided to give up trombone playing and to devote his life to composition. His first efforts were a good many songs, invariably rejected by publishers. But he was soon able to begin his career as a teacher and in 1905 was appointed Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, a post which he held until his death. He began to be interested in English folk-song and wrote his Country Song and Marching Song for orchestra, as well as sketching his Somerset Rhapsody. The influence of folk-song in these early works is fairly slight though they do contain some modal elements. […]
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[…] In the summer of 1913 the new music wing at St Paul’s was opened, and Holst was given a large sound-proof room to work in. Working mostly on Sundays, he wrote the St Paul’s Suite for the school orchestra as a token of his gratitude. His earlier interest in Hinduism gradually gave way to one in astrology, and this became the point of departure for his new work, The Planets. He had just finished the sketch of Mars, the bringer of war, when war in fact broke out, in 1914; Holst at once tried to enlist, but was turned down because of his neuritis and weak sight.
The Planets is a large-scale suite for full orchestra which contains a great variety of styles, ranging from the savagery of Mars, the delicacy of Venus, the scherzo-like character of Mercury and the mysticism of Uranus to the remoteness of Neptune. This variety however does not mean that the composer’s personality is lost: there is always an astringency and power in his handling of his material. The Planets has remained Holst’s best-known work.
In the summer of 1917 he set the Hymn of Jesus, from the Apocrypha, and for this purpose he taught himself Greek so as to be able to understand the original. Long wanting to take a more active part in war work, he was at last offered the job of musical organizer to the YMCA among the troops in the Near East.
Returning from the Near East and back at St Paul’s, he began setting Walt Whitman’s Ode to Death for chorus and orchestra, struggling at the same time to write the libretto of his opera The Perfect Fool. Meanwhile The Hymn of Jesus had been published in the Carnegie Collection of British Music, and Holst conducted its first public performance at the Queen’s Hall in March 1920. This had an overwhelming reception - Holst was becoming successful at last. But Holst was never very good at public relations and simply did not know how to deal with press photographers or
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journalists, as well as consistently refusing to accept any honours, degrees or titles.
[...]. Now living alone at Thaxted, looked after by a manservant, he wrote his Choral Symphony, settings of poems by Keats. Admittedly it is difficult to make a setting of the Ode on a Grecian Urn which can add much to the poetry of the words, and the last movement, Bards of passion and of
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mirths is rather on the long side, but the first movement’s Bacchanal in 7/8 time and the Scherzo, Fancy and Folly’s Song are both delightful and exciting, and it seems a pity that this work is performed so rarely nowadays.
About the same time he began a new short opera At the Boar’s Head, an interlude based on the Falstaff scenes from Henry V; it was built to a great extent on Morris and country dance tunes which happened to fit Shakespeare’s words.
[…] Holst was a close friend of Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy, and was now inspired by the latter’s Return of the Native to write an orchestral piece, Egdon Heath, one of his most interesting and remarkable works. The music catches the austere and remote quality of Hardy’s description of the scene, and a good deal of it is more experimental harmonically than anything Holst had written before - so much so that listeners to its first performance failed to understand it, and its true stature has only been appreciated in recent years.
During the summer he was unwell and at the end of the year he decided to stop work and have three months’ holiday in Italy. On returning to England he was as active as ever. In 1930 he finished a Concerto for Two Violins for the sisters Jelly d’Aranyi and Adila Fachiri. The concerto was played at a Philharmonic concert at the Queen’s Hall in April, and on the same occasion Holst was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. He was working on his Choral Fantasia, in homage to Robert Bridges, as well as on Hammersmith, a Prelude and Scherzo originally commissioned by the BBC Military Band, and afterwards rewritten for orchestra. His sixth and last opera, The Tale of the Wandering Scholar, with a libretto by
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Clifford Bax, was written in 1930.
[…] In May 1934 he was operated on; the operation was successful but his heart could not stand the strain, and he died on 25 May.
Holst was a composer of a remarkably original turn of mind, and he absorbed many influences. English folk-song was by no means the only one, and to some extent he was an eclectic. He made a notable contribution to English music although this is only just beginning to be appreciated today. In many ways he was in advance of his time, and the austerity of many of his works is more in keeping with modern music than with the somewhat lusher and more romantic style of his contemporaries.
Three other English composers of this generation deserve to be mentioned; although they were not so directly affected by English folk-song as Vaughan Williams and Holst, they definitely represent a nationalist school in that they wished to eradicate German influences from English music, however much they admired the German classics themselves.
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The eldest of these was Frank Bridge (1879-1941), whose contribution was mainly in the field of chamber music, although he also wrote a small number of orchestral works. Beginning as a romantic, his style became increasingly ‘modern’ during the 1930s, especially in such works as his Divertimenti for wind quartet and his later chamber music, which show an experimental use of harmony. He is also remembered for his teaching of Benjamin Britten.
John Ireland (1879-1962) is also chiefly remembered for his chamber music and songs, though he wrote an important piano concerto which still remains in the repertoire. His other works show a genuinely individual gift, and his settings of the poems of Hardy and Housman are extremely subtle. He had an extraordinary ability to reproduce the atmosphere of a poem in music by apparently simple means: he did not aim at bold effects, but his settings show a far more real understanding of his chosen poets than the more superficial ones of his contemporaries like Arthur Somervell, for instance. His music shows some influence of his French contemporaries, particularly Debussy, but he worked out an individual style which combines both English and French elements.
Arnold Bax (1883-1953) was very much a romantic: apart from his music he also attached himself to the ‘Celtic twilight’ school of literature, whose protagonists were Synge and Yeats, and he wrote prose under the name of Dermot O’Byrne. He is chiefly remembered for his seven symphonies, highly romantic and passionate and based partly on folk elements, but characterized by a certain turgid texture which has prevented them from becoming popular. He was a brilliant musician who could read any score at sight, and this possibly tempted him into over-writing. As a person, he was extremely quick-witted and astringent, in complete contrast to the romanticism of his music.
An interesting survivor from this period is Havergal Brian; he was born in 1877 and is still alive at the time of writing. Between the ages of seventy-eight and ninety-
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three he wrote no less than twenty-two symphonies, in addition to the ten which he composed earlier. Though stemming from the romantic style, his music is very much more austere and ‘modern’ than that of his contemporaries; many of his symphonies are one-movement works of fairly short duration, and he has added an entirely original element to English music. His principal virtue in his later works is compression and reduction of the music to its bare essentials; in achieving this he got away both from his romantic background and the folk-song school of his youth. His music is often harsh and violent in a manner which is well attuned to the present day.
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International Anti-Racism is the Negation of National Patriotism
In government, in the Church, in parliament, in political parties, in the media and art, in the judicial system, in the street, the insolence and maliciousness of those who claim to be ‘anti-racist’ seem no longer to have any limit.
Their aim is to ensure the victory of cosmopolitanism through the use of all intellectual and material forms of subversion.
Their plan involves the negation of the Christian essence of our national existence and the denial of the European source of our French identity.
Their tactic consists in systematically accusing French people of good stock, and who are prepared to defend themselves, of ‘fascism’ and ‘nazism’. It is what they call ‘the struggle against racism’, ‘anti-racism’.
Anti-racism is the negation of French France
Self-styled anti-racism is an internationalist ideology which abusively exploits phoney humanitarian sentiments to encourage the invasion of the nation’s inner world, to the detriment of the physical and moral health of France. It is the negation of natural rights - never called into question till now - of the French to live peacefully as masters in their own homes in accordance with the genius of their blood, the nature of their soil, the faith of their heaven.
The pretext invoked is the pseudo-philosophy of the ‘rights of man’, the ideology of the so-called liberation, the frenzy of what was supposed to be the ‘resistance’ … This has culminated in the anomaly of a new state doctrine: anti-racism, which leads to the hatred of every normal society, i.e. one which is hierarchical, traditional, and national.
The result which anti-racism banks on achieving is a France which is under occupation, disfigured, changed beyond recognition: a cosmopolitan ‘Hexagon’ which would no longer be historical France, the France of the French.
Anti-racism is the enemy of our freedoms, our jobs, the future of our children, the enemy of civil peace at home and a fruitful co-operation between states abroad.
L’Œuvre Française wants to safeguard national identity
A strictly nationalist movement, L’Œuvre Française, was founded and directed by Pierre Sidos. Its symbol is the Celtic cross, its slogan ‘France for the French’, and its action is based on a political creed which affirms the existence of a single France, historically constituted as a sovereign state, whose unity and continuity is assured by a principle of authority allied to personal responsibility. It is composed of a people of European extraction, generally of French language, of a Christian tradition, of a classical education, and of a millennial nationality, living in Western Europe within fixed boundaries. The power of integral nationalist thought on all acts of public life must form the basis of the preservation of its spiritual and intellectual identity, its physical and moral integrity, its political and cultural independence, for the common good of the French and the healthy balance of the international community.
This profession of nationalist faith rejects the division of France into ‘left’ and ‘right’ by asserting a national sentiment which transcends the various cleavages within society, and exists over and above elections and parties. It obviously rejects anti-social theories, anti-national machinations, anti-natural practices, all engendered by cosmopolitanism and its modern successor, anti-racism.
The precondition for safeguarding French national identity is first and foremost not to confuse but to differentiate, to make selections between people, to make choices between ideas, by opting for definite preferences and establishing hierarchies. In this respect, L’Œuvre Française … is superbly well placed to make a valuable contribution to the re-establishment of France in every sphere.
Arthur Koestler once remarked that it is not an excess of aggression but of loyalty that could ruin us. And indeed it was and is up to the present the identification with values of a community, be they religious, party-political or ethnonationalistic, that have led to the most atrocious bloodshed of our history.
In particular, ethnic nationalism seems to resist attempts at suppression. Our indoctrinability, our group loyalty, and our proneness to collective aggression are phenomena deserving attention. Why this loyalty and feeling of belongingness to a group characterized by shared language, cultural practices, beliefs and other symbols of identity? And why the diversity of cultures -- why so many different ethnicities at all?
From an evolutionary point of view, the why-question aims at an understanding of the selection pressures responsible for a trait, whether a cultural practice or an innate motor pattern or disposition. We thus try to understand the function of a behavior in promoting survival or reproduction. More generally, we want to learn the ways in which phylogeny prepared us to act so as to enhance our fitness on the individual, kin, and even group level. Preparation can take the form of preadaptation, the fortuitous matching of a trait with some new environmental challenge. A case in point is natural selection at the level of groups, a concept now back in vogue after being banished from the realm of the plausible where it had been introduced by Darwin, Keith, and others. Humans’ culturally enhanced ability to discipline group members and detect free-riders can be seen as a preadaptation for group selection, in the manner formalized by Richerson and Boyd (this volume).
Since evolution is a continuing process in a constantly changing world, adaptations lag behind the changes they have to cope with. This is particularly true for the human species, which for most of its history lived in small communities where individuals knew each other personally and in which each community set itself apart from similar others, usually by occupying and defending discrete territories. There could be no sharper contrast between this primordial environment and the technologically advanced civilizations of anonymous millions organized around megacities that we have created for ourselves. This is an environment for which we are less phylogenetically adapted than the intimate hunter-gatherer band. Our attempts to culturally adapt to this new situation include experiments with a diversity of social strategies of leadership, ideologies, and economic systems. Emotionally we are well prepared for a life in small face-to-face communities. The large anonymous society and the impersonality of technical civilization creates problems.
The trial-and-error ‘learning’ by selection acting on variation, which has characterized our biological and much of our cultural evolution, is a painful process. Were we to rely on this process of ‘self organization’ as recommended by nineteenth-century Social Darwinists and the economic liberal van Hayek, the pain would continue for some considerable time. And time is running short. Due to the success of our species we have probably outbred the long-term carrying capacity of our planet, and our descendants will be caught between the anvil of limited resources and the hammer of global pollution. Oil resources appear to have comprised the booty of two recent wars, and there is a disturbingly great potential for destructive international competition over strategic minerals and living space as the developing world flexes its newfound industrial muscles.
Is it possible to imagine societal life without institutionalized dominance? Small face-to-face communities do exist without institutions, but for anonymous mass societies institutionalized dominance seems to be inevitable. In a democratic society the conditions for the application of repressive dominance must be well defined and accepted by the population. One condition is a degree of popular trust in those wielding power, combined with institutional checks and balances, including elections. Citizens expect those to whom they delegate power to use it to maintain the public goods of law and order and the regulation of the profit motive when it would lead to environmental degradation or exploitation. The trend in democratic states is towards a balance of administrative nurturance and authoritarian dominance. The demand for both is due to phylogenetically evolved dispositions, but in the anonymous society nurturance tends to have a lower priority to considerations of personal security and status competition. For those who would construct a nurturant society, special attention must be devoted to preventing the escalation of authoritarian dominance. The history of human social forms can be seen as attempts to strike a tolerable balance between authority and nurturance, a process that continues up to the present time.
Certainly we should not rely on the self-organizing tendency of institutions. Natural selection shows no mercy. If prey is abundant, predators multiply until they overshoot the carrying capacity of their resource, and a joint population collapse ensues, acting as a corrective. This allows for recovery of the prey animals and, with a little delay, of the predators, and so forth in endless tides of suffering. Booms and recessions follow this principle, and it seems as if democracy could finally endanger its existence should laissez faire be allowed to take its course. This risks an escalation of repressive dominance leading to rebellion. Do we want selection to act as a corrective in this way? Certainly not. It would hardly be appropriate for a species capable of reasoning. Surely, we are always under the scrutiny of natural selection. But we can actively seek and select the conditions under which to live, exposing ourselves to a variety of selective forces. We can learn much from nature, but its laws allow great freedom of manoeuvre over long spans of time. Wresting our destiny from the sorrows of natural selection does not avoid a degree of trial and error, but as already said above, we can combine this ability to strive for set goals with the readiness to correct mistakes in time. And this should become our second nature. We also noted that face-saving often blocks our readiness to admit error. But once we recognize this stumbling block of our heritage, we can cope with the situation.
All organisms are in search of a better world, as Karl Popper used to say. That is, all life pushes ahead, exposing itself to new selective conditions as they arise. Our species is no exception, but we have one advantage not enjoyed by any other species: we can deliberate, debate, and plan ahead and thus can set ourselves goals toward which to strive. As long as we avoid dogmatic fixations and are prepared to learn from mistakes and correct our course in time, new paths are opened up to us. We could free our future course from being too erratic and painful, while speeding the process of cultural adaptation. We are not only intellectually but emotionally prepared for such an enterprise; our nurturant dispositions are the basis of our humanitarian concerns.
Humans’ genetic outfit in many ways facilitates cultural adaptation to mass societies, but there are also innate dispositions that in particular situations hamper further development. Pitfalls may reveal themselves in certain situations if we are not aware of them. What were adaptive dispositions in the hunter-gatherer milieu can be destructive in the artificial environment of the modern state. Our striving for repressive dominance is one example. Another is our short-term thinking. All organisms throughout their history, dating back at least 2.5 billion years, have been bred for instant competition. Who won the race right now made it -- or retained options for the future. This has also bred in us a basically opportunistic, exploitative disposition that seriously hampers the development of a long-term survival ethos predicated on the fate of future generations.
In evolutionary terms, individual survival means nothing if it does not contribute to the survival and reproduction of genetically related kin. The resulting patterns of loyalty and competition have traumatized our history. Yet as far back as the historical record allows us to infer, ever since humans first reflected upon the uniqueness of life they became concerned about the sufferings imposed by war, including the sufferings of those not belonging to their own communities. Is there a chance for peace in an overcrowded world? And can a sustainable peace be compatible with the preservation of ethnic diversity? It must if we are to avoid a global repressive regime, since the human tendency to experiment with new ways of group living is pronounced. Life has always tended to diversify -- a tendency that has served as pacemaker of evolution. And after all, only through diversification has life continued and grown in richness on this planet.
Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot. And among the ruins something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a subculture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed by a European culture. This then becomes the province of a few men, the elite, who find themselves placed in the most artificial conditions, deprived of any revivifying contact with the masses of the people.
Some of the worker emigrants to Britain were active participants in the People’s Progressive Party and the People’s National Congress in Guyana, the Gairy Party, the Grenada Manual and Metal Workers Union, the Butler Party, the People’s National Movement, the People’s National Party, the Jamaican Labour Party, the St Kitts Labour Party, the Antigua Labour Party, the Barbados Labour Party, the West Indian Independence Party and in trade unions and other more radical sections of the nationalist movement which were Marxist and stood for revolutionary social change . They were also active in trade unions and peasant organisations.
All these groupings have also been the leavening here for the early cultural, social and political activity of blacks in Britain. The encounter with white racism and the manoeuvres of the British capitalist power did not begin in England but in the Caribbean.
Imagine yourself an impartial visitor from an isolated civilization studying the United States.
The popular press and politicians recite that majority European-Americans exploit and oppress people of color. Yet people of color, by the boatloads and by the hundreds of thousands, are clamoring to get into the U.S. If the word ‘oppression’ has any meaning, you would expect that people of color would be moving in the opposite direction.
The popular press claims that European-Americans exploit and oppress people of color. Yet tax dollars, on balance, flow disproportionately in the other direction - from European-Americans to people of color.
U.S. history texts and Supreme Court opinions state that majorities always oppress and exploit minorities. And yet, if the proverbial visitor from an isolated civilization were to pick a group to exploit based on economic motives, the visitor would choose the group that is the most productive and the most numerous. After all, that is where the money is.
The popular press constantly excoriates rich ‘WASPs’ (or European-American Protestants) as the prime movers in this exploitation of people of color. Yet when you measure actual income and education levels, you find out that Jews are the most prosperous ethnic group, followed by Japanese and Chinese Americans. European-American Protestants rank below European-Americans of Italian, Polish and Irish descent, and are only marginally above African-Americans.
Many civilizations have their myths. Ancient Greeks and Romans were taught, and perhaps believed, that their secular rulers were descended from gods.
But the myths which America recites every day are contrary to easily observable fact. Any myth that is contrary to clearly observable fact must be very important to the elites it serves. For such a myth takes a great deal of energy to sustain, and can serve as grounds for dangerous rebellion when overthrown.
