3. Festivals.

Music festivals have constituted a flourishing tradition in England since the 18th century, and they are at present almost innumerable. The Three Choirs Festival, begun around 1715 and almost certainly one of the oldest in Europe, represents the traditional type of choral festivals, of which several others also survive. Its site alternates among the homes of its choirs, Hereford, Gloucester, and Worcester. Among older English festivals, that at Haslemere was founded by Dolmetsch in 1925 to feature early music, and the Glyndebourne Festival, founded in 1934, early achieved and maintains an international reputation for its production of operas as integrated dramatic works.

Many British festivals began after World War II. They include the Alderburgh Festival (1948), long dominated by the personality of its founder, Benjamin Britten; the Bath Festival (1948), since 1959 similarly associated with Yehudi Menuhin; the English Bach Festival (1963); and the Tilford Bach Festival (1952) and others.

A festival of sorts and long a central feature of London summers are the Henry Wood* Promenade Concerts ("Proms") (1895), mostly given at the Royal Albert Hall.

4. Education.

Many aspects of musical activity in England were dominated by foreigners in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the idea of conservatories and music schools to train native musicians developed slowly. The leading schools are the Royal Academy of Music (1822), the Royal College of Music (1883), both in London, and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester

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(1792). Other important schools include Trinity College of Music (1872) of the University of London and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (1880), London.

The first degrees in music known to have been conferred by a university were awarded at Cambridge in the 15th century, and a professorship of music was created there in the 17th. Oxford awarded music degrees from the early 16th century and in the 17th instituted a lectureship that grew into a professorship, but the establishment of music in anything like a regular, systematic, and modern way as part of the university curriculum at any university in England was almost entirely a 20th-century development. About a dozen English universities now have full music programs.

History. England was an important musical center in the Middle Ages. The Sarum rite,* a dialect of the Roman rite originating at Salisbury Cathedral and widely influential throughout the country, gave a local favor to the chant. Sacred polyphony was well established by the early 11th century, and by the 13th, English polyphony had taken on traits distinguishing it from Continental styles. In the early 15th century, John Dunstable (ca. 1390-1453) achieved the widest reputation among several important composers. English music of that tune is usually held to have had a decisive influence on the development of Continental musical style and compositional procedures. Thereafter, although works of high quality were written, English music was of mainly local importance, and influences tended to run in the other direction, from Italy and France, producing such English versions of Continental developments as the English madrigal, the lute ayre,* and the semi-opera.*

The Puritan Commonwealth of the mid-17th century greatly disrupted the English musical tradition; however, the late 17th century produced several distinguished figures, including Henry Purcell (1659-95), one of England's greatest composers. The 18th and 19th centuries were in general a low point in the vitality of native English music, unless Handel is considered to have become an English composer, a not untenable assertion, so completely was his music absorbed into the native tradition. Much of English musical life, particularly that of London, was dominated in this period by foreign musicians attracted by the country's wealth and the large public provided by its sizeable middle class. The native tradition survived in church music and in local genres such as the catch,* the glee,* and the ballad opera,* which developed in the late 18th century into the English comic opera and eventually led in the latter part of the 19th century to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which constitute almost the only part of English 19th-century music surviving in the repertory.

With Edward Elgar (1857-1934), England produced its first native composer of international importance since Purcell, and in the early 20th century an English nationalist school flowered with Ralph

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Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), Gustav Holst (1874-1934), and others. William Walton (1902-83), Michael Tippett (b. 1905), and Benjamin Britten (1913-76) dominated their generation. Younger composers of achievement include Richard Rodney Bennett (b. 1936), Harrison Birtwhistle (b. 1934), Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934).

Folk music. Most English folk music is closely related to the songs of the dance. Folk songs are generally syllabic and strophic,* frequently with a refrain. Notable types include the ballad, love songs of various sorts, and songs attached to particular occasions or activities, such as carols,* sea shanties,* children's singing games, and street cries. Two general varieties of folk dance exist: ritual or ceremonial dances, associated with certain seasons of the year and most often performed by costumed groups of men; and country dances, performed at social occasions by both men and women. Ritual dances include sword, morris,* and processional dances. Dance tunes usually come from folk song and are almost always in duple meter. Instruments used in folk music are the pipe and tabor,* the small-pipes (a sort of bagpipe), and, especially today, the fiddle, concertina, or melodeon.*

From: The New Harvard Dictionary of Music