Past and Present

 Last night I caught a TV documentary (BBC4) on the 1951 Festival of Britain. It made poignant viewing – and deeply saddening too, if one, for example, compared the joyful, imaginative and brilliantly conceived celebration on the South Bank with the dismal, aborted  'Millennium Experience' at Greenwich half a century later.  While the former was packed with content and meaning and driven by an optimistic spirit, the latter was devoid of content or meaning and driven by nothing but a felt necessity to spend a great deal of money on some kind of spectacle. Greenwich ended up as an all too vivid demonstration of the sheer vacuity of the time, whereas the South Bank – and Battersea Park, and the Lansbury Estate in Poplar with its 'living architecture' – were bursting with vitality, and projected a strong message about the state of the nation, surging back from the privations (and authoritarianism) of wartime and looking forward to a bright and happy future. Some of the most striking footage was of couples – hundreds of them – dancing (in basic ballroom style) in the open air at the Festival site: everybody danced then. And a huge crowd lustily singing 'Jerusalem': everybody sang too – 'community singing' was still very much a thing in those days. And here's another index of how much, and how much for the worse, things have changed since those Festival days: the documentary was enlivened by West Indian voices and calypso songs, all celebrating the wonders of London and the mother country and the great Festival. Oh dear, oh dear, how long ago it seems... Today we have 'drill' music and sullen, angry rap. It is hard not to conclude that in the seventy-odd years since the Festival of Britain, we have been trundling rapidly towards hell in a handcart.
  Apart from the Royal Festival Hall, almost nothing remains of the built legacy of the South Bank festival – and still less, alas, of its spirit. But at least the musical legacy survives: by chance I heard this morning on Radio 3 Vaughan Williams's  beautiful choral setting of 'The Cloud-Capp'd Towers', one of three Shakespeare songs commissioned for the Festival. What was the musical legacy of Greenwich? Was there one?