[2] The group included H. Balfour Gardiner, Norman O'Neill, Cyril Scott and Roger Quilter, who were all English, and Percy Grainger, who was born in Australia and established himself as a composer in England between 1901 and 1914 before moving to the United States.
[2] The Frankfurt group were united more by their friendship and their non-conformity than by any common aim,[4] though they did share a dislike of Beethoven,[5] and a resistance to the musical nationalism of the self-styled English Musical Renaissance of Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, and of the later English Pastoral School of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst.
[7] The group was distinguished by its rebelliousness,[8] and by studying abroad they stood apart from the conservative wider English musical establishment.
[3] Grainger described the group as Pre-Raphaelite composers,[9] arguing that they were musically distinguished from other British composers by "an excessive emotionality ... particularly a tragic or sentimental or wistful or pathetic emotionality", reached through a focus on chords rather than musical architecture or "the truly English qualities of grandeur, hopefulness and glory".
[10] Writing in 1977 Stephen Banfield argued that "today [the Frankfurt Group] is difficult to regard as anything other than a damp squib in the history of English music".