English in this context refers to any music written in the UK and also Ireland, so it is not specifically referring to England, any more than the England cricket team has to be exclusively English, as we know!
I first became interested in English music when I saw an early rerun of the Ken Russell film on Elgar in 1964. I was totally captivated, not even realising at the time that Elgar was English! Despite the UK having a number of fantastic composers such as Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Walton, Britten and many more, they did not seem to have a prominent place in the concert hall. In 1985 I was actually interviewed on radio 4 for ‘the world this weekend’ by Gordon Clough on what I and a colleague Prof Ted Howard considered to be the lack of English music at the Promenade concerts, so called ‘prom bashing’!
The impetus to form the EMF really came from my ex-partner, Em Marshall, who was a pupil at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London where such luminaries as Holst, Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells taught music. At the age of 15, Em was also appalled by the neglect of our own composers, particularly at the expense of performances of the Austro Germanic school. She proclaimed to her teacher at the time, now better known as the excellent conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, her intention of starting the EMF when she grew up. To which he remarked “you’re mad, but if anyone can do it you can”. It was not surprising when I met Em in 2001 that together we should plan to bring her dream to reality.
The Festival was founded to put English music back in the concert hall in live performance. This is important because from the beginning of the 20th century we both considered that these islands have produced more ‘listenable to’ classical music composers than any other part of the world.
