Abstract :
This article makes the case for incorporating music into the history of war commemoration
in 1920s Britain by examining John Foulds’s A World Requiem, performed at the British Legion’s first
Festivals of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall between 1923 and 1926. A simultaneously modernist
and spiritual work, Foulds’s Requiem challenges Jay Winter’s conclusion that modernism was unconcerned
with public grief. The controversy which the Requiem caused also reveals the contested nature of
public memory, particularly where music and religion were concerned. The Requiem’s axing in 1927
points to a hegemonic process which, although it had yet fully to take shape, found no room on Armistice
Night for Foulds’s progressive ideals.
