Modernism and Reification in the Music of Frank Bridge

Drawing on the tradition of Formenlehre, this article puts forward a methodological historicism as a means to mediate between the disciplinary expectations of musical analysis, on the one hand, and philosophical aesthetics, on the other. Stylistic developments in the later music of Frank Bridge, perhaps British music’s best claim to a high modernist of the generation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are illuminated by means of Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of musical ‘reification’. A comparative analysis of the complementary modernism of Bridge’s contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams is also put forward, and a critical light shone on recent writing on British musical modernism in general.