Evensong with Piazzolla

"...But “On Wenlock Edge” is a prime example of how Englishness in English music can be illusory. The piece checks all the necessary boxes — Housman, landscape, passing time — and presents it as quintessential English art. But strip away the textual packaging, and you hear music that sounds French. Vaughan Williams had just been to Paris to take composition lessons with Ravel, and the “little French polish” that he said he had brought back was actually a thorough technical enhancement that would pervade his later work.
There are many instances of comparable ethnic camouflage in music of the period. Howells’s High Anglican cathedral music comes charged with rhythms only a shade away from tango. Much of Delius slithers toward the chromaticism of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”"

-From an article by Michael White in the NY Times yesterday about the development of English music in the early 20th century.

Vaughan Williams and Ravel, okay I've heard that before. Delius and Wagner, check. Howells and tango? That's a new one. Although I rank Howells among my favourite Anglican church music composers and find his rhythmic complexity stimulating, I've never felt compelled to strut my stuff in the middle of worship.

Also, has anyone published a musicological paper that argues that there was good English music between Purcell and Stanford?