Read on Twitter
For me Ralph Vaughan Williams captures the true heart of the English musical soul and his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is the purest version of his musical vision. It is, if you like, England as music. A beauty to hear and, believe me, to play.
Not far behind, of course, is Gustav Holst's 'A Somerset Rhapsody', written seven years before the First World War and using several of the folk songs gathered from th countryside by men like Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp, and Holst himself.
Holst, a good socialist himself, and conductor of the socialist choir in Hammersmith, would probably approve of the next tune. Another form of Englishness, but one that persists all the same. The Chartist Anthem. A beautiful, stirring version:
Finally, before I get into the point of this mini-thread, everyone's favourite take on more recent anxieties about the new England!
So yes, the point. As a kid I had a terrible identity crisis. Being born in England, but growing up in Wales, I was of neither place - I learned this quite sharply at Oxford. For a long time that alienation was okay, because it didn't mean anything. Who cares about nations. But>
there's an ever louder hostility between Englishness and Welshness that it's sometimes hard to sit in the middle. I saw it today on Facebook with folks pointing (with a sneer) to St George being "a Turk who never visited England", rather than wondering why we do saints at all.
Ironically, there are all sorts of traditions within the English cultural dimension, that the songs I've pointed to above are not at all incompatible with the self-ascribed socialist traditions of Wales or Scotland. That's why we are able to build a labour movement across the UK.
I do miss the atmosphere which prevailed when I was a kid, though, and it didn't seem to matter so much where you came from, and saints days passed by without much comment. Because y'know saints are a religious thing and most of us really aren't religious enough for it to matter.
