Delius, Modernism, and the Sound of Place

Frederick Delius is among the most powerfully evocative and inventive voices in early twentieth-century music. Critical appreciation of his achievement, however, has been stubbornly unforthcoming in the wider academic field: there is still no authoritative scholarly biography of the composer, and analytical accounts of Delius's music remain at a preliminary stage, especially when placed alongside coverage for other comparably significant musical figures. Given recent events following his anniversary year in 2012 (including John Bridcut's acclaimed documentary for BBC4, and a 2-day conference devoted to his work run by the Delius Society), the time is ripe for an urgent re-evaluation of Delius's music, reflecting upon his wider significance as an internationally-oriented creative figure writing at a crucial moment in the emergence of a complex and multivalent musical modernism.

The critical reception of some of Delius's most popular works, such as 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', has often inadvertently perpetuated the idea of rhapsodist whose apparent lack of strong formal structure and rich late romantic harmonic syntax seemingly place him at odds with more supposedly progressive trends in continental European music. Systematic attention to Delius's biography and critical consideration of his major works, however, swiftly suggests a more dynamic and challenging musical idiom, and a keen sense of musical architecture. Contemplating Delius's work furthermore challenges our understanding of the relationship between music and place. Delius spent key parts of his professional career in Florida, Scandinavia, Germany, and France, and thinking more rigorously through the diverse spaces and places of his compositional development through the close reading of selected key works reveals a richly multilayered sense of musical identity. Delius thus destabilises familiar narratives of musical place. By drawing on more theoretically grounded models from recent writing in Cultural Geography, I will argue that Delius's music profoundly re-centres our understanding of place in music, not as a fixed or reductive category, but rather through a process of flux or drift--one that enables us to recontextualise his work within a more genuinely critical framework and to attend to his music's diverse subjectivities in a more sophisticated way.

Engaging in greater detail with Delius's work thus has important implications, both, at a music-technical level, for understanding why he was so influential upon early twentieth-century music, and, more figuratively, for challenging and elevating our sense of the complex relationships between music, place, and identity. Though Delius's musical cosmopolitanism is always inevitably bound up with an experience of absence and loss, critical contemplation of his work can only enrich our appreciation of the ways in which certain kinds of music--particular turns or phrase, gestures, or shapes--can invoke specific states of mind or senses of being-in-place. 'Delius and the Sound of Place' hence becomes, in essence, an analytical exercise in musical phenomenology. It is simultaneously, however, a tightly source-based historical-contextual study in representation and reception that will provide its own interpretative insights into an especially complex moment of musical creativity and expression.

The non-academic beneficiaries of the Fellowship include musicians and performers, journalists, teachers in secondary music education, and members of the general public. Impact will be achieved in a number of ways: by raising Delius's public profile through various media (including radio, public talks, and programme notes, workshops and other public events); by advancing new ways of thinking about his music and its historical context; by prompting fresh, more critically informed ways of thinking about music and place; by promoting the wider knowledge and accessibility of Delius's manuscript sources and archival materials; and by fostering future musical researchers and tertiary study. Significant public interest in issues which will form the basis for the Fellowship's research has already been generated through my appearance in John Bridcut's widely-reviewed BBC 4 film, 'Delius: Composer, Lover, Enigma', commissioned for the composer's 2012 anniversary: it is precisely the momentum which this film has generated, and the resulting opportunities for developing further forms of public impact as a result, that have served as one of the primary points of departure for the Fellowship.

The Fellowship's principal output, a scholarly monograph, can be confidently expected to appeal to a broadly non-specialist musical readership above and beyond its primary audience of advanced undergraduates, research students, and more senior scholars. Previous comparable publications have been widely reveiwed in the general press. The Delius Society, a public group that energetically promotes interest in the composer through a range of activities and publications, will be an important forum for attracting non-specialist readers to the volume. As indicated in the accompanying 'Pathways to Impact' statement, I have already worked sucessfully with the society on previous events, and the proposed project enjoys their keen interest and support.

An equally integral part of the Fellowship's proposed Work Plan will be a series co-ordinated research events, directed toward both academic and non-academic participants. Workshops and Study Days at the Royal Academy of Music and the British Library will be open to members of the general public, with appropriate opportunities for discussion, feedback, and Knowledge Exchange. The Delius Online Catalogue (DOC) will be freely accessible online, and its beneficiaries will be musicians, performers, journalists, and members of the public, alongside music students and academics in a range of disciplines. Impact through the DOC will be achieved by raising the profile of Delius's work, highlighting neglected areas of his corpus, and illuminating problematic aspects of realisation and interpretation, for instance by clarifying the scribal contributions of Eric Fenby and Thomas Beecham in his manuscripts.

Further impact will be achieved through a Study Day for Sixth Form Students, exploring themes of authenticity, cultural transfer and identity in Delius's setting of the folksong 'Brigg Fair'. The aim of the Study Day will be to try to develop a tighter integration between secondary and tertiary musical study. Students and teachers will be encouraged to develop a transferable set of critical skills for analysing music in a comparative context, tools that will enable them to approach musical study at university level with greater confidence and flexibility. Students will hence be inspired to think about musical research (both practical and academic) in the HE sector in new ways, fostering a future generation of scholars, listeners and performers.

Finally, the maintenance of a research blog throughout the year will enable performers, practitioners, students and members of the general public to comment on and feedback into the work-in-progress, as well as serving as a way of monitoring the project's milestones and gauging the success of the Fellowship's impact.