Professor transforms passion into print

Italian opera, German lieder, French folk songs. When it comes to serious singing, England is not necessarily the first country that comes to mind for classical music fans.

But that's a perception one Maryville scholar has sought to rectify in a new book, "An Imperishable Heritage" British Choral Music from Parry to Dyson."

The 300-page treatise offers detailed studies of late 19th and early 20th century composers associated with what has come to be known as the English Musical Renaissance.

Stephen Town, professor of music at Northwest Missouri State University, is best known locally as the director of Northwest's Tower Choir. But, like many academicians, he leads something of a double life.

Since 1993, when he received the prestigious Ralph Vaughan Williams Research Fellowship from the Carthusian Trust of England, the elegant and affable Town has spent as many summers as possible shuttling between Maryville and London following his bliss.

For Town, that bliss revolves around his fascination with a large body of English choral music most closely associated with Vaughan Williams and developed by a group of composers whose works breathed life into a moribund Victorian tradition.

Collectively, their work propelled British composition into the first rank of an art form that had been dominated by such Germanic figures as Arnold Schoenberg an Gustav Mahler.

Town's own musical education centered on just such Austrian and German traditions, which were prevalent in American colleges during the decades that followed World War II, a conflict that forced many European scholars to flee Hitler's Third Reich and escape to the United States.

These intellectual immigrants came to dominate American departments of music, and the resulting teaching and scholarship was largely based on theories revolving around "atonality," a musical system in which the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another without a "key" or tonal center.

By way of contrast, British composers during the first half of the last century began focusing on the ballads and Elizabethan polyphony deeply embedded in their island nation's history and culture.

When Town first went to England as a Carthusian Fellow, living in Charterhouse in Surrey — the school Vaughan Williams attended as a boy — he discovered a fountain of melody that continues to fascinate him 20 years later.

"I wanted something tonal," he said. "These are melodies you can hum."

Also, being a student of song, Town realized that the composers of the English Musical Renaissance were writing in his native tongue, often basing their lyrics on the work of such poets as Matthew Arnold and William Wordsworth. That opened up entire new fields of scholarship embracing not only music but religion, philosophy, literature and even sociology.

Town had discovered, in his own phrase, "a subject that is broad and deep," and so he began doing what scholars do: immersing himself in the manuscripts, scores, notes, diaries, jottings and "artifacts" of a half-dozen English composers who a century and more ago transformed their country's musical heritage.  

After years of teaching, reading, researching and writing, Town said it dawned on him that "Maybe I have a book here."

And so he did. After more than a decade, the result is now between hard covers, the work of a man who believes that art is important — a pursuit that is worth a lifetime of devotion and study.