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By his historical position, Gustav Mahler has acquired an aura which threatens to obscure his music. Born into an era which questioned the norms of musical expression, his importance for composers both traditional and progressive has overshadowed his real achievement, the preservation of the symphony in the first decade of the century when many came to regard it as an outworn genre. The significance of this achievement was not fully realised until the 1960's when Adorno's writings created a synthesis from the composer's interest in the folk-like, his position with regards to the Austrian tradition, his literary attitudes, and such concepts as Erwin Stein's <u>Sachlichkeit</u>. His study attempted a comprehensive view; this thesis concentrates on the period of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Mahler's first maturity. Mahler's orchestral technique arises from a fusion of symphony and opera orchestras effected in <u>Das klagende Lied</u>. Procedures related to Bruckner and Schubert co-exist with direct echoes of <u>Lohengrin</u> and <u>Der Ring des Nibelungen</u>. While much of <u>Das klagende Lied</u> is characteristic in its sound sources, these are as yet traditional in their harmonic and thematic deployment; this is only marginally less true of First and Second Symphonies. The extensive use of brass declamation in the Third Symphony's first movement and the density of polyphony in the march sections are indicative of new developments though traditional harmonic patterns are still in control.

This is the first major study of the French flute player and conductor, Paul Taffanel. It draws extensively on previously unavailable material from a private archive in Paris. Taffanel's life, career, and works are described and evaluated, with particular reference to his influence as founder of the modern French School of flute playing, which has since been widely adopted throughout the world; also as leader of a renaissance in playing and composing chamber music for wind instruments, through his Societe de musigue de chambre pour instruments A vent, founded in 1879. A complete set of programmes is reproduced in facsimile and analysed. The principles and effects of Taffanel's teaching at the Paris Conservatoire are discussed, and two unpublished fragments relating to a projected flute method and a history of the flute are transcribed and compared with the published sources completed by Taffanel's pupils, Louis Fleury and Philippe Gaubert. Taffanel's second career as chief conductor at the Paris Opera and Societe des concerts du Conservatoire in the 1890's is also outlined, and his published article on the art of conducting is considered. An Inventory of the private archive, along with much other supporting material, is given in a series of Appendices

This thesis assesses the conducting career of Sir Hamilton Harty, particularly his conductorship with the Halle Orchestra from 1920 to 1933, and places his career in the context of the social, economic and political changes brought about by World War I, the introduction of mass culture, and the effects of the Great Depression. The thesis re-examines Harty's legacy: reviews from numerous newspapers and journals demonstrate the quality of his conducting and the supreme standards he achieved with the Halle Orchestra; and a detailed study of the Halle programmes and the orchestra's finances from 1920 to 1933 shows that, by comparison to other British orchestras, Harty was one of the most catholic conductors in Britain who laboured under particularly difficult financial restrictions. The thesis is structured in eight chapters. Chapters one to three discuss Harty's career prior to his Halle appointment in 1920. They explain how his conservative aesthetic beliefs, catholic tastes, and conducting abilities were shaped by his informal education in Ireland, the artistic limitations of Belfast and Dublin in the late nineteenth century, his career as an accompanist in Dublin and London and his engagements with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Halle Orchestra from 1911 to 1919. Chapters four to six discuss Harty's conductorship with the Halle Orchestra from 1920 and 1933, and include an examination of the orchestra's first BBC broadcasts and gramophone recordings, reviews of Harty's conducting and the structure of his programmes. Chapter seven discusses Harty's artistic beliefs, demonstrating how they represented an outdated reaction to modernism, and his conducting style, including comparisons with other contemporary conductors. Chapter eight discusses Harty's tours in America and Australia from 1931 to 1936 in detail and provides additional accounts of his conducting abilities. Appendices, music examples, figures and a select bibliography are included.

It is now broadly accepted that Vaughan Williams's music betrays a more complex relation to national influences than has traditionally been assumed. It is argued in this thesis that despite the trends towards revisionism that have characterized recent work, Vaughan Williams's interest in and engagement with English folk materials and cultures remains only partially understood. Offering contextual interpretation of materials newly available in the field, my work takes as its point of departure the critical neglect surrounding Vaughan Williams's contradictory compositional debut, in which he denounced the value of folk song in English art music in an article published alongside his song 'Linden Lea', subtitled 'A Dorset Folk Song'. Reconstructing the under-documented years of the composer's early career, it is demonstrated that Vaughan Williams's subsequent 'conversion' and lifelong attachment to folk song emerged as part of a broader concern with the intelligible and participatory quality of song and its performance by the human voice. As such, it is argued that the ways in which this composer theorized an idea of 'song' illuminate a powerful perspective from which to re-consider the propositions of his project for a national music. Locating Vaughan Williams's writings within contemporaneous cultural ideas and practices surrounding 'song', 'voice', and 'Englishness', this work brings such contexts into dialogue with readings of various of the composer's works, composed both before and after the First World War. It is demonstrated in this way that the rehabilitation of Vaughan Williams's music and reputation profitably proceeds by reconstructing a complex dialogue between his writings; between various cultural ideas and practices of English music; between the reception of his works by contemporaneous critics; and crucially, by considering the propositions of his music as explored through analysis. Ultimately, this thesis contends that Vaughan Williams's music often betrays a complex and self-conscious performance of cultural ideas of national identity, negotiating an optimistic or otherwise ambivalent relationship to an English musical tradition that is constructed and referenced through a particular idea of song.