English Pastoral School

The English pastoral school is the current of British music, flourishing from about 1900 to the 1950s, that rebuilt a national style from English folk song, Tudor polyphony and the landscape itself: modal melodies, string-rich orchestration and an elegiac, rural calm. Its centre is *Ralph Vaughan Williams*, whose "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" (1910) and "The Lark Ascending" (1914) defined the idiom, and its ranks include *George Butterworth*, *Gerald Finzi*, *Ivor Gurney*, *Herbert Howells* and *E. J. Moeran*. Shaped by folk-song collecting and by two wars, it remains the most recognisable sound of English art music.