English music had two very strong native traditions: choral singing (linked to the services and hymns of the Anglican state Church) and vaudeville plays. Of these latter, two 18th-century specimens have maintained lasting fame, Gay’s Beggar’s opera (thanks in part to the Brecht/Weill reworking, Dreigroschenoper) and Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred (1740; commemorating the 1715 accession of George I and including the widely popular anthem Rule Britannia). The tradition continued into the 19th century, the theatrical side slowly fissioning between light-hearted popular entertainments (music-hall vaudevilles and variety shows, pantomimes) and “classical” opera, mostly productions of foreign work. An English national opera only materialized late in the century, and was initially linked to the Royal Academy of Music (founded in 1822), with musicians under the influence of Mendelssohn (who became an honorary fellow in 1843). George Alexander Macfarren (1813–1887) was among the first generation of its alumni. Trained at the Academy and appointed professor there in 1837, he founded the Handel Society, dedicated to commemorating that composer and editing his works. His overture Chevy Chace premiered in Leipzig (conducted by Mendelssohn) in 1843. Most nationally-themed compositions by Macfarren were Shakespeare-inspired overtures and/or unperformed operatic outlines. His King Charles II premiered in 1849, his Robin Hood in 1860. It was not until the 1880s that national opera established itself properly, and by then it was carried by musicians linked not to the Academy, but to its rival institution, the Royal College of Music (est. 1883; see below): Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Canterbury pilgrims (1884) and his Irish-regionalist Shamus O’Brien (1896); Joseph Parry’s Guinevere (1885) and King Arthur (1897); and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hugh the drover (1914). A cross-over between light-hearted entertainment and opera was the very successful format of the English operetta as produced by the librettist W.S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan (an Academy-linked composer, whose 1891 serious opera Ivanhoe was generally considered a failure). The “Gilbert and Sullivan” operettas, from Trial by jury (1875) to The gondoliers (1889), have consistently maintained themselves in the repertoire as national classics, and are cherished for a sense of humour which its aficionados ethnotypically consider characteristically English.

Church singing had meanwhile spawned a tradition of choral festivals; the oldest being that of the three cathedral choirs of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford; their joint concerts go back to the 18th century and gathered strength after 1830. In 1778 a secular music festival for charitable purposes was organized in Birmingham, which also became a recurring fixture. Between 1784 and 1912, the Birmingham Musical Festival developed a triennial cycle and grew to a galvanizing mass event in British musical life, especially, again, after 1830. In 1837, the year Queen Victoria mounted the throne, Felix Mendelssohn conducted his oratorio St Paul in Birmingham, and premiered his second piano concerto.

This event marked the rise of Mendelssohn as Britain’s “national” composer. His German origin (which he shared with that other national composer, Händel) posed no objection, and the approval of the royal couple (German-born Prince Albert being his main patron) was decisive. Mendelssohn’s next oratorio, Elijah, came close to being a nationally English classic (alongside Händel’s Messiah). It premiered at the Birmingham festival in 1846 (the year before the composer’s death), was also performed at the Three Choirs Festival in 1847, and thereafter became a regular fixture on the programme of both festivals. The Bristol Festival moved from 18th-century ecclesiastical beginnings to a more secular mode in the early 19th century. One at Leeds had taken place in 1858, then in 1874, going triennial from 1880 on. This festival culture, often featuring choral performances with, if not orchestral, then organ accompaniment, explains the enduring popularity of the oratorio genre, often on biblical themes (e.g. Macfarren’s St John the Baptist, prem. Bristol Festival 1873); and that in turn may help to explain the arrested development of English opera.

Meanwhile, the need was felt to professionalize instrumental music: after Mendelssohn’s death, the Academy of Music had gone into a period of decline, especially in the 1860s. A  National Training School for Music was set up in 1876 on the initiative of Prince Albert, under the direction of Arthur Sullivan. It proved less than successful and in 1883 was merged into a new establishment, the Royal College of Music, founded (again on royal initiative) with the express aim of matching the professional standards of the Continent (“a School which shall take rank with the Conservatories of Milan, Paris, Vienna, Leipsic, Brussels, and Berlin, – a School which shall do for the musical youth of Great Britain what those Schools are doing for the talented youth of Italy, Austria, France, Germany, and Belgium”). Besides this quality-raising aim, there was also the realization that a national school of musical composition was needed for ideological-political purposes: “The object is inspiring in every part of the Empire those emotions of patriotism which national music is calculated so powerfully to evoke.”

The absence of a characteristically national musical idiom had become irksome following the decline of mid-century Saxonism: there was neither a successor to Mendelssohn, nor, as yet (barring the incidental works of Macfarren), a nationally-themed opera tradition. Already in 1838, Chappell’s publication of folk-song melodies (National English airs) aimed “to give refutation to the popular fallacy that England has no National Music”. The 1865 publication of An introduction to the study of national music, by Carl Engel, a German musicologist living in London, added to the anxiety of not having  a national style. These anxieties were addressed when an incipient folk-song revival meshed with the emergence of a new generation of composers at the Royal College of Music. Here, Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry, and Alexander Mackenzie were among the leading instructors (representing, symbolically, the Irish, English, and Scottish components of the UK). The College positioned itself as a rival to the older Academy by becoming a “hub” for the composers who would determine the profile of what came to be known as an “English Musical Renaissance” – something proclaimed by the music critics of The times in the early 1880s.

With the exception of the independently-trained Edward Elgar (whose fame as a composer was established at the Birmingham and Three Choirs Festivals), all major composers of the self-proclaimed “English Music” school were connected to the College, notably Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and the  recorder-, lute-, and harpsichord-builder Arnold Dolmetsch. They took a national-historicist inspiration from the madrigalists and choral composers of the late 16th and early 17th century (Tallis, Byrd, and Dowland), which inspired modal melodies and harmonizations rather than the established diatonic (major/minor) keys. Since many of those earlier melodies had served for hymns in the Anglican hymnal, or for choral works sung during Anglican services, the compositions of, notably, Vaughan Williams had a strong osmosis with England’s religious music; Vaughan Williams himself was involved in the preparation of The English hymnal (1904-06), and many of his compositions lent themselves to choral or (para-)religious performance, with a stately progressing melody over a strongly marked bass line. Thus Elgar’s Pomp and circumstance march (1901) became the tune for the anthem Land of hope and glory, and Holst’s Thaxted-theme (from The planets) was adapted to fit Cecil Spring-Rice’s verse I vow to thee, my country. Indeed, many composers reached their audience through the existing festivals. Vaughan Williams’s sister Margaret set up another one of these in 1905 in Leith Hill near Dorking, intended for choral societies, with the composer as its regular conductor. Accordingly, cantatas and oratorios are heavily represented in the compositions of Vaughan Williams and Elgar.

In addition to this choral orientation, English music was deeply influenced by another revival taking place in those years: the collecting of English folk song. Stanford, Parry, and Mackenzie were all three also vice-presidents of the English Folk Song Society, established in 1898, with Parry delivering an inaugural lecture stressing the need for folk song appreciation to counter modern vulgarity and to establish a truly national inspiration for English classical music. (Stanford, for his part, had been active in Irish folk-song research.) Vaughan Williams collected folk songs himself (as did the Australian Percy Grainger while in England, between 1905 and 1908, giving the theme of Brigg fair to Frederick Delius). Lucy Broadwood and Cecil Sharp were inspiring influences on all of them, Vaughan Williams delivered Sharp-style lectures on “The history of the folk song” and “The characteristics of national song” in 1902. Folk-song influences strengthened the predilection for modal registers. The insistent sense of place that was a central part of the working method of folk-song collecting aided the exploration of new orchestral genres like the locally-themed symphonic poem and rhapsody (Vaughan Williams: In the Fen country, 1904; A Norfolk rhapsody, 1906; Mackenzie: Tam O’Shanter/Scottish rhapsody, 1911; Delius, In the North Country, 1915). Regionalism is, accordingly, strongly marked in such rhapsodic works, with even the Isle of Man represented in the work of College alumnus Haydn Wood (Mannin Veen, 1933), as well as the Channel Islands.

Conversely, the cultivation of popular/traditional culture ran counter to old-school historicism, which above all affected the genre of opera. Sullivan’s Ivanhoe of 1891 failed to catch on; that this was not only due to anti-Academy animus among the critics is proved by the similar lack of impact of Elgar’s cantata Caractacus (prem. Leeds Festival 1898) and of a projected trilogy of Arthurian operas by the College alumnus Rutland Boughton (The birth of Arthur, 1909; The Round Table, 1915-16; Galahad/Avalon, unperformed).

The cultivation of a vaguely landscape- and tradition-anchored Englishness was also internalized by the alumni of the Academy, like Edward German, a Sullivan associate and composer of Merrie England (1902) and Tom Jones (1907; after Fielding’s novel), and Arnold Bax, who, however, was strongly marked by Celticism (e.g. the Cornwall-set symphonic poem Tintagel, 1919) and later developed strong Irish connections. The development of the English School towards a modern idiom while taking inspiration from English traditions continued unabated during and after the Great War, which provoked a nostalgia for the lost idylls of the English countryside. The combination of Englishness and musical modernization was passed on to the 20th-century succession, from Benjamin Britten to Peter Maxwell Davies.

The 20th-century floruit of English music was made possible by a venture in the well-established mode of popular entertainment: it was felt that the general public should also profit from the new achievements of English musicianship, and to that end a series of informal concerts was established in 1895 in the newly constructed Albert Hall, the so-called “Promenade concerts” or “Proms”. The direction was entrusted to the Academy-trained organist/composer Henry Wood, who had previously produced Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His patriotic Fantasia on British sea songs (1905; a medley of traditional shanties arranged orchestrally to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar) became an early fixture of the especially popular “Last Night”, which gradually also incorporated other national classics, from Arne’s old Rule Britannia to Elgar’s Pomp and circumstance march (Land of hope and glory).