Both Cyril Bradley Rootham and Josef Holbrooke worked under handicaps, one of which they shared. Why is most of their music unfamiliar to listeners who did not hear it before the war? The answer incurs knowledge of a historical phenomenon. Vaughan Williams was born in 1872, only six years after Strauss and Sibelius, and eight after Debussy. Within ten years all the following were born:- Holst, Ravel, Ireland, Bax, Bartok, Stravinsky, and the two composers who now concern us. As in the sixteenth century a whole range of musical peaks and foothills rose almost within a decade. To change the metaphor, it must be stimulating for composers to find themselves within a galaxy, but from some of them must perforce be withheld the wider recognition they might have earned if they had shone alone, not among brilliantly distinctive stars.
They were British and contemporary, yet utterly different in expression and style, as different as Elgar and Delius.
