Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

What is National Music? I know I wasn't sure when I picked up this book. As Ralph Vaughan Williams uses the term, it is not the music played at, say, the Olympics or other national competitions. It's the music that the people of a nation hold to themselves. So Finns might indeed consider "Finlandia" national music, but people in a Communist country probably wouldn't have much personal use for their national anthems. National music may be orchestral, or "classical," or pop, but it is also a show more nation's folk music, and the music that defines its history.

This is a book that Vaughan Williams was uniquely qualified to write. It's true that classical composers, from Bartók to Copland, have incorporated folk themes into their compositions -- but, in the process, they often change them utterly. (Aa a folk musician, I'd say Copland, at least, killed them, but others obviously disagree.) I don't enjoy listening to "Appalachian Spring," I find myself thinking, "How could you do that?" For pop fans, perhaps try imagining playing Taylor Swift on a kazoo. It sounds both wrong and disrespectful.

Vaughan Williams was different. He actually collected folk music himself, and steeped himself in it. The "English Folk Song Suite" doesn't sound disordered, like a harpsichord player struggling to play an organ; it sounds like folk music. So what he says deserves respect.

And what Vaughan Williams says is that each nation -- or perhaps we should say "ethnicity" or some such -- has its characteristic style and idiom and formulae -- almost like the "Homeric epithets" that let ancient poets more easily remember the Greek epics.

This book was originally a lecture series, and Vaughan Williams was able to have his musical examples performed for the audience. This must have been an immense help. Even with a folk music background, I couldn't always hear in my head what Vaughan Williams was describing, because it was generally dependent on knowing the exact version of the original piece. But I'll give you an analogy: There's a pretty good chance, if you hear a Yiddish folk song, that it will sound "Jewish" to you. That's because Yiddish music is strongly minor, often natural minor, and uses characteristically minor harmonizations. Even "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem, is in natural minor, a very rare thing for an anthem.

Such modal characteristics won't distinguish English from French from Germany music; all are basically "major." But Vaughan Williams suggests the music of those nations are different anyway. And I think he's probably right. The details are trickier than my Yiddish music example. This is a fairly technical book (a reissue with companion musical recordings would really help). But I think the points it makes are very useful. show less

Author: Andrew Achenbach

David Lloyd-Jones and Naxos once more put us in their debt with this enterprising Vaughan Williams anthology, which not only restores to the catalogue the cantata The Sons of Light but also features the first recording of Willow-Wood. This 13-minute setting of words from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sequence The House of Life was written in 1903 as a scena for baritone and piano. VW overhauled it for baritone, optional female chorus and orchestra but this revision show more wasn’t heard until September 1909, when it was performed at the Music League Festival in Liverpool by Frederic Austin with Harry Evans on the podium.

It would seem the composer retained a soft spot for this unfairly neglected gem – and quite rightly, too, for its attractive ideas and sultry passion cast a strong spell. Nor could anyone fail to be struck by the sophisticated harmonic and orchestral resources, traits it shares with VW’s resuscitated Nocturne for baritone and orchestra from 1908 (Chandos, 11/03). Roderick Williams rises heroically to the challenge of a demanding, wide-ranging vocal part, and Lloyd-Jones draws an alert, enthusiastic response from his RLPO forces.

No grumbles, either, with the performance of The Sons of Light, a 19-minute setting of three poems on the creation story by VW’s wife-to-be Ursula Wood. Composed for a thousand-strong children’s choir assembled by the Schools’ Music Association (who gave the first performance at the Royal Albert Hall with Boult and the LPO in May 1951), the work possesses a celebratory zeal and exuberance of invention that effortlessly transcend its occasional origins. Listen out for the unmistakable echoes of VW’s contemporaneous Sinfonia antartica some five and a half minutes into the opening movement (‘Darkness and Light’).

Written for the Musicians Benevolent Fund’s annual St Cecilia’s Day service in 1947 and orchestrated four years later, the motet The Voice out of the Whirlwind brings a surprise in that it borrows wholesale from VW’s towering ‘Masque for Dancing’ Job, most conspicuously the ‘Galliard for the Sons of the Morning’. The collection opens with a splendidly fervent Toward the Unknown Region and we get a lucid and luminous account of the Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’. Expertly engineered and annotated, this is a self-recommending issue. -- Gramophone music review show less

What we really have here, although it is presented in disguise as two series of lectures and some occasional writings on a variety of subjects, is Vaughan Williams's musical autobiography. It is his Apologia pro vita mea, to vary Cardinal Newman's title, for although he may appear to be writing about folk-song, Beethoven, and hymn-tunes, he is also telling the reader what it was like to be the man who set out deliberately, with his friend Gustav Holst, to turn himself into an English show more composer. He achieved his aim, to a degree that enriched the music of his nation with some of its noblest and finest works, but there was also a penalty to be paid in that those who are not in sympathy with his aesthetic, not 'on his wavelength', as we would say today, regard him as parochial and even chauvinistic. They forget that he was, in the mildest and least aggressive way, a revolutionary and that, like all revolutionaries when they get into print, he often over-stated or over-coloured a point in order to put it across.

These writings are among the most fascinating left us by a twentieth-century composer, for they tell us so much about the composer through his enthusiasms and his prejudices. Some of them may now provoke a wry smile. Dufay and Dunstable merely historical curiosities? That this would change would have astonished musicians in 1932 as much as the thought that Mahler and Bruckner would be in the regular repertoire of British orchestras. His views on playing Bach on the piano seemed only 10 years after his death to be unbelievably antiquated and laughable; already they are finding sympathetic echoes again. The pendulum swings relentlessly. The tributes to his friends, Holst, Butterworth, Gurney, Henry Wood, and others recall to us Vaughan Williams's own generous and intensely human personality. How moving it is, too, to read his lament for the poetry that went out of music when the valveless horn was replaced. One hears the voice of Vaughan Williams himself in his writing as clearly and unmistakably as in his music. show less

This collection is filled with songs that tell of the pleasures and pains of love, the patterns of the countryside and the lives of ordinary people. Here are unfaithful soldiers, ghostly lovers, whalers on stormy seas, cuckolds and tricksters. By turns funny, plain-speaking and melancholic, these songs evoke a lost world and, with their melodies provided, record a vital musical tradition. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us show more too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was one of England's greatest composers, and among the first people to travel the countryside to collect folk songs and preserve them for future generations. A. L. Lloyd (1908-1982), usually known as Bert, was a folk singer and folklorist who grew up listening to his mother singing gypsy songs, and eventually wrote them down. Together with Vaughan Williams, he helped rescue traditional English music from extinction. show less