It's Brexit Day. Is Britain part of Europe or is Britain its own entity? This question has been asked basically since the beginning. The question is all over Shakespeare, and with no definitive answer. On the one hand, Richard II has the famous 'sceptered isle' speech where Prince John of Gaunt pronounces Britain "This precious stone set in a silver sea/Which serves it in the office of a wall/Or as a moat defensive to a house/Against the envy of less happier lands. On the other hand, Cymbeline ends happily with Britain rejoining the Roman Empire. The whole question of Brexit sets out to define something that cannot be defined. Britain is both Europe and not, it is an island defined by its coasts and the enormity of water surrounding it.
English history is, in so many ways, the history of its relationship to the water surrounding it. So much of British history is tied up with the water: the Norman conquests, the Spanish Armada, the Medway Raid, the Glorious Revolution, Barfleur, the South Sea Company, the African Company of Merchants, Waterloo and Trafalgar, the Battles of the Chesapeake and Fort McHenry, the Imperial British East India Company, Jutland, Dunkirk, the Hood and the Bismarck, the Suez Crisis, the Falkland Islands - all of those are historical episodes of the sea, and water has always been Britain's gateway to the rest of the world. So if I had to take an insufficiently educated guess, the fact that so much of the most consequential English history takes place on the sea rather than in its own land means that Britain much more Europe than its own entity.
Frank Bridge came from the generation of the 'English Pastoral' composers, but he was not one of them and consequently suffered extreme neglect in proportion to his accomplishments. As a general rule, the English pastoral composers idealized the British land and created very peaceful, often beautiful music which is sometimes quite accomplished, but it was fundamentally cut off from the influences of how music was made in the rest of the world, and consequently not a sustainable way of creating art, and by the 1960s, there was no English pastoral left. It's a story rather like the Hudson River school among American artists. The world intrudes on every idyll, and if not prepared for the intrusion, its shock is irrecoverably great. But Bridge's orientation was squarely toward the continent, in his music you hear everything from Mahler to Debussy to Schoenberg to Sibelius, and he therefore wrote much more turbulent music that was much more realistic about the human condition. The nationalist composers of the English pastoral controlled Bridge's present, but it was Bridge who won the future of British music. His star pupil was Benjamin Britten, and Bridge ensured Britten's exposure to all the most 'dangerous' continental influences: Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg.... and consequently Britten became a very different kind of English composer than his predecessors, and a model for a new kind of English artist who lets in the world as equals rather than keeping it at arm's length as inferiors.
The Sea, of course, owes a debt to Debussy's La Mer, but as towering as La Mer is, I honestly wonder if Bridge's piece is better. Debussy paints the sea like a stereotypical Frenchman, who doesn't really go into the water and loves the interplay of light and cloud on the surface of the waves, as though the sea is just a different kind of garden. Debussy doesn't bring in the subterranean undertow until the final few minutes. Bridge's Sea certainly has its peaceful moments, but it devotes quite a bit more time to the sea's dangers, it speaks as though its composer had dealt much more with the reality of what the sea is, and what awesome horrors the sea can unleash upon us in the future.
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