What a dull party this is

How difficult to write about the past of English music and not to create an air of special pleading, as in a family memoir designed for private circulation, in which, although there may be no skeletons in the cupboard, long periods of indolence in the deceased must somehow be glossed over. As for the black sheep of the family (and this includes nearly all of us living and working in music today, uneasily having to come to terms with our past) we are often seized with the itch to know what our ancestors were really like, even to have revealed to us an alternative history of English music, impatient at having once again the old tale retold.

This is not it. A highly conventional sense of academic responsibility and the concision required by the one-volume format make any such excursions impossible. It is enough to marshal and absorb an immense amount of diverse material, and then to become an efficient chronicler of it. This John Caldwell does and is, even up to the gates of the present day. He never set out to write a critical history, never mind an alternative one: and he deals fairly enough with the question of "how to handle the issue of quality" in his preface. At the same time, there is simply only room to be fair, not to be probing, in this well-mannered book.

In this second of Caldwell's two volumes, the glory days now lie in the recent past - the heights of Tudor and Elizabethan polyphony, of madrigal and lute song, the long efflorescence of the viol fantasia, the genius of Henry Purcell. Handel now predominates, and an efficient and sympathetic profile of his impact on our musical life bypasses the old boring question of how English he became (rather, and to our great benefit,we all became a little Handelian: he taught us to go to the opera, to accept music as an important part of public ceremony).

Then the historian has to sail into shallower waters. For some 130 years after Handel's death - until 1875 when Trial by Jury hit the stage - English music passed through its worst period of torpor and indifference. Our other role (perhaps our true destiny) now took centre stage: to be a welcoming host country to visitors great and small, transient or permanent. The list is not to be despised: J. C. Bach (and, briefly, the infant Mozart); Haydn; Viotti, Dussek; Clementi, Mendelssohn, Chopin; Berlioz and Wagner as conductors, Dvorak as oratorio writer, Bruckner as organist; and so on until the arrivals of Wellesz, Gerhard, Seiber. But to recognise and assess such enrichment is to open another can of worms. How far have the English (except on isolated occasions) ever had more than a derivative, essentially provincial music culture, dependent on the bounty of such visitors, which echoes in our paler native accents what has already been achieved elsewhere, but has only reached us after a considerable time lag?

The first 200 pages do not disguise the fact that more exciting things were going on elsewhere: like being at a party where raised voices and louder laughter suggest that more fun is being had in the next room. Stephen Storace and Thomas Attwood at least went to have a look. But now imagine some hypothetical enterprising young Englishman who travels straight from 1812 England and the delights of William Crotch's Palestine (nearly ten pages of music examples are devoted to this far-from-compelling work) to the Vienna of Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. A generation later, older and wiser, he could have experienced Frederick Ouseley's The Martyrdom of St Polycarp of 1854 ("a masterpiece of naive art" - a glint of satire there) and then crossed the Channel to find that Liszt had just finished his Piano Sonata and that Wagner was completing the score of Rheingold . And this had been the era of the painterly careers of Constable, Cotman, Richard Wilson, Blake, Samuel Palmer - and Turner himself: and of the poetic lives of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake (again), John Clare and the young Tennyson.

Caldwell is good on the Savoy Operas, and deals well with their witty debts (Sullivan the Schubert scholar and connoisseur of Offenbach) and wicked parodies. (I have always fancied the March of the Peers in Iolanthe to have been modelled on the Triumphal March at the end of Act II of Aida .) The Sorcerer (1877) in fact casts a spell on the quality of his writing, which immediately begins to perk up after many pages of doing the right thing by Greene, Arne, Hook, Bishop, Balfe, Horn, Loder, etc.

The English Renaissance now looms - another well-fought-over battlefield. Caldwell starts well by comparing the Brahmsian component in both Parry and Stanford to the cult of Mendelssohn that gripped English composers a generation earlier. Perhaps risorgimento would be a better word to describe the search for and discovery of the sources of a more autonomous native music, radically less beholden to the continent. The folk-song collecting undertaken from 1903 onwards by Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams - just before the last genuine folk-singer vanished from our shores for ever - immediately transformed the musical language of Vaughan Williams and Holst.

But an account of this vital preliminary fieldwork is coralled away in a chapter on "Folk music and popular music" at the back of the book, which is a pity. This is, after all, our nationalism: our Bart"k and Kod ly. Cultural chauvinism, however, being the worst kind, one must cast rather a beady eye on all the attendant propaganda. The truth is, English complacency of outlook and lazy indifference is quite endemic: the appearance of good patches follows laws quite as gnomic as those governing economic trade cycles. Great composers (or ones better than the rest) appear quite unpredictably: Elgar being one example, Britten (possibly) another. The only favourable environment for such flourishing is an unfavourable environment - and that we all experience anyway.

After the deaths of Elgar, Holst and Delius in 1934, the sheer bulk of the historian's task becomes ever more onerous. To give an adequate, never mind convincing, picture of the music of the past 65 years is a well-nigh impossible task: and Caldwell was wise to make "born 1960" a cut-off date - ie no composers under 40. It becomes a question of taxonomy; to try to separate the inhabitants of an increasingly crowded sheep pen. Groupings have to be invented, and pairings, not always happy ones, to be made. A single composer can find himself listed both as a Younger Modernist and as an Older Eclectic. Younger Pragmatists is a convenient label for those left over - but this title does say something about the character of English music today. It should be remarked that both authorial choice and treatment, particularly of those alive and working, is marked by an altogether admirable broadmindedness and by frequent generosities.

Criticisms remain. English music is defined too narrowly. It is true that Irish and Welsh composers lead their own cosy lives, benefiting from being big fish in a smaller bowl. But Scotland, of these three regions the most highly developed and autonomous music culture, nevertheless remains largely integrated with the rest of the United Kingdom. It should not be shunted off (like folk-song collecting) to a chapter at the end. Thea Musgrave and Iain Hamilton may have worked in America and lived there but they have also spent much time in London, as did generations of Scots composers before them. And the work of these distinguished senior composers does not deserve to be dismissed with a sentence each.

There is good documentation throughout of the rise and fall of opera houses and concert halls, of the state of health of universities and music colleges. So shame on one deplorable omission. For more than a century now,Morley College has played a vital role in English musical life, linking the name of Holst with those of Tippett and Seiber. In 1911 Holst organised there the first performance in 200 years of Purcell's Fairy Queen ; from 1940 onwards Tippett made the college a centre for the performance of the best of English music old and new. M ty s Seiber deserves a more defined mention both as composer and teacher. A trace of Oxonocentricity betrayed here, and elsewhere, I think?

Anthony Milner also worked at Morley: another neglected composer worth a paragraph: he was born in 1925, not 19. John Gardner's The Moon and Sixpence (1957) merits a place in the story of postwar English opera (Gardner too worked at Morley). Geoffrey Poole (b. 1949) is a composer of startling originality: also worth a mention.

Hugh Wood is a composer and retired fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.