Delius, Modernism, and the Sound of Place

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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.