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Artist:

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Born October 12, 1872 in Down Ampney, England
Died August 26, 1958 in London, England
  • Country: England
  • Genres: Choral, Orchestral, Concerto, Vocal, Chamber, Symphonic, Film, Band, Ballet, Opera, Keyboard

Biography

Ralph Vaughan Williams left a varied oeuvre that includes orchestral works, songs, operas, and various choral compositions. While primarily drawing on the rich tradition of English folksong and hymnody, Vaughan Williams produced well-loved works that fit into larger European traditions and gained worldwide popularity.

Vaughan Williams, who lost his father early in life, was cared for by his mother. Related, through his mother, to both Charles Darwin and the Wedgwoods of pottery fame, he grew up without financial worries. He studied history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge, and finished up at the Royal College of Music, where he worked with Parry, Wood, and Stanford. In 1897, the year he married Adeline Fisher, Vaughan Williams traveled to Berlin to study with Max Bruch, also seeking Maurice Ravel as a teacher several years later, despite the fact that the French composer was three years his junior. In 1903, he started collecting English folksongs; certain characteristics of English folk music, particularly its modal tonalities, in many ways informed his approach to composition. Vaughan Williams further developed his style while working as editor of the English Hymnal, which was completed in 1906. His work on the English Hymnal went beyond editing, for he contributed several new hymn tunes, most notably the Sine nomine, the tune for the hymn For All the Saints. The composer's interest in and knowledge of traditional English music is reflected in his song cycle On Wenlock Edge (1909), based on selections from A.E. Housman's immensely popular volume of poetry A Shropshire Lad. In his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, composed in 1910, Vaughan Williams introduced antiphonal effects within the context of modal tonality, juxtaposing consonant, but unrelated, triads. Composed in 1914, his Symphony No. 2, "A London Symphony" brings to life, with great charm, the sounds of London from dawn to dusk. That year, Vaughan Williams also wrote his pastoral The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra. When World War I broke out, the 41-year-old composer enlisted as an orderly in the medical corps, becoming famous for organizing choral singing and other entertainment in the trenches. He was commissioned from the ranks, ending his war service as an artillery officer. The war interrupted the composer's work but did not, it seems, disrupt the inner continuity of his creative development. The Symphony No. 3 ("Pastoral"), composed in 1922, conjures up a familiar world, effectively incorporating folksong motives into sonorities created by sequential chords. While critics detected pessimistic moods and themes in the later symphonies, ascribing a shift to a darker vision to the composer's alleged general pessimism about the world, Vaughan Williams refused to attach any programmatic content to these works. However, the composer created a convincing musical description of a desolate world in his Symphony No. 7 "Sinfonia Antarctica" (1952), which was inspired by the request to write the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic. In addition to his symphonies, Vaughan Williams composed highly acclaimed religious music, as well as works inspired by English spiritual literature, culminating in his 1951 opera The Pilgrim's Progress, based on the spiritual classic by John Bunyan. An artist of extraordinary creative energy, Vaughan Williams continued composing with undiminished powers until his death at 87. ~ AMG, All Music Guide

Discography

Bach: St. Matthew Passion

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Vaughan Williams conducts Vaughan Williams

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Actor:

Ralph Vaughan Williams

  • Active: '40s
  • Major Genres: War, Drama
  • Career Highlights: Scott of the Antarctic, The 49th Parallel, The Loves of Joanna Godden
  • First Major Screen Credit: The 49th Parallel (1941)

Biography

Chronology alone made Ralph Vaughan Williams an unlikely film composer -- born in 1872 in Gloucestershire, he was educated at the Royal College of Music and Cambridge University, and was already an established composer at the outset of the 20th century, as well as a leading figure in the rediscovery of England's rich folk music heritage. By the time of talking pictures' arrival, Vaughan Williams was the most prominent composer in England, with three major symphonies (and a fourth about to be debuted); a brace of major orchestral, operatic, and choral works; and a large body of songs to his credit. It would be another decade before he wrote his first film score, at age 69. Stylistically, Vaughan Williams was a post-romantic; his work was completely tonal in nature and rooted in the forms of the late 19th century. He ultimately wrote nine symphonies, five operas, and dozens of smaller-scale works, many of which were among the most beautiful of their era, often steeped in haunting melody and a level of lyricism that ran completely counter to the prevailing trend toward serialism and atonalism that swept across serious music after the 1920s.

Vaughan Williams was among the very few composers ever to turn toward writing music for movies not out of economic necessity, but purely for the creative challenge and opportunity that the task presented. In Vaughan Williams' case, his initial motivation came out of a feeling of patriotism and a desire to contribute to England's war effort. In 1940, during the early months of World War II, director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger had conceived of a propaganda film, to be financed by the government, that concentrated on Canada's contribution to the British war effort. The resulting movie, which was eventually acquired by The Rank Organization, was the thriller Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), starring Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey, and Eric Portman, with music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composer received a credit in the movie as large as (and immediately adjacent to) the names of the stars. His presence not only elevated the perceived importance of the movie, but his music gave the film a measure of majesty, depth, and richness that, at moments, transcended Powell's visuals and Pressburger's script. The prelude, heard over the credits and aerial views from across Canada, took on a life of its own in the concert hall and another, quieter piece of scoring evolved into the solo piano work The Lake in the Mountains. Even merely as film music, however, the score played an essential role in the unfolding of the movie and its plot -- the jaunty music accompanying the chase through Winnipeg imparted a lustiness to the background shots of the bustling Canadian city that served as a subtle counterpoint to the isolation of the film's fugitive travelers, escaping Nazis off a sunken U-boat. All concerned were delighted with the results of his work, and Vaughan Williams subsequently wrote the music for the wartime drama The Flemish Farm (1943) and the documentary Coastal Command (1942).

Vaughan Williams' film work didn't end with the war, but continued with such dramatic movies as The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947) and Scott of the Antarctic (1948), both made at Ealing Studios and both directed by Charles Frend and produced by Sidney Cole. On both movies, Vaughan Williams felt compelled to begin composing based on the script and the rushes, rather than the final cut of each film, which is the way film soundtracks are normally written. This unorthodox approach by the composer was kept secret by Ealing's music director, conductor Ernest Irving (a good friend of Vaughan Williams'), from the movie's director and the studio, and Irving took responsibility for fitting the music to the movies. In any event, no one ever complained about the final results. The composer later recalled that writing music for The Loves of Joanna Godden did confront him with a problem that no composer before him, to his knowledge, ever faced, and that no training could have addressed -- how to compose music depicting an outbreak of anthrax. And Scott of the Antarctic proved to be a vastly important project, its subject stimulating Vaughan Williams far beyond the boundaries of the film assignment. He ended up using that music as the jumping off point for the seventh of his symphonies, the "Sinfonia Antartica" (using the Latin spelling), which he dedicated to Ernest Irving.

In 1949, Vaughan Williams not only scored but also narrated the ten-minute documentary Dim Little Island, directed by Humphrey Jennings, and the following year contributed some music to Ralph Smart's Australian outback drama Bitter Springs. Vaughan Williams' film work slackened off in the 1950s as he entered his eighties, though he did deliver one last body of soundtrack music, for the documentary The England of Elizabeth, in 1957, the year before his death, a period in which he was also engaged in composing and revising his Symphony No. 9. In the decades since his death in 1958, Vaughan Williams has achieved even greater respect and recognition than he had in his lifetime. During the 1970s, audiences outside of England began discovering such delightful works as The Lark Ascending for solo violin and orchestra, while his symphonies, once embraced almost exclusively by British conductors such as Sir Adrian Boult (who recorded all nine of them twice) and Sir John Barbirolli, have now been recorded in complete cycles by many of the most prominent conductors in the world, including Andre Previn, Bernard Haitink, and Leonard Slatkin. His operas, complete chamber music, and virtually all of his orchestral and choral music have been recorded as well, often many times over.

Vaughan Williams' film scores have been recorded both as suites and, more recently, in their entirety under the auspices of Chandos Records under conductor Ruman Gamba; additionally, one filmmaker, Richard Horian, used Vaughan Williams' music as virtually the entire audio content of his 1998 fantasy feature Williamstowne. His music has also turned up on various television production and in movies. As early as 1936, his masque Job was presented in a British television broadcast. On American television up through the 1960s, Vaughan Williams' music showed up in various uncredited (and also often unauthorized) uses; excerpts of the Symphony No. 6 could be heard in the 1951 Tales of Tomorrow episode "Appointment on Mars," and parts of the "Sinfonia Antartica," were used, unauthorized, in an episode of Land of the Giants, "A Place Called Earth." The latter also was used, fully authorized, in a 1980s television film account of the Royal Air Force's night bombings of Germany during World War II, and his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis -- one of Vaughan Williams' most popular works -- appeared in a popcorn commercial of the early '90s and, more recently, in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). His music was also used in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967) and Clouds of Glory: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1978), among numerous earlier features. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

 
Music Encyclopedia: Ralph Vaughan Williams

(b Down Ampney, 12 Oct 1872; d London, 26 Aug 1958). English composer. He studied with Parry, Wood and Stanford at the RCM and Cambridge, then had further lessons with Bruch in Berlin (1897) and Ravel in Paris (1908). It was only after this that he began to write with sureness in larger forms, even though some songs had had success in the early years of the century. That success, and the ensuing maturity, depended very much on his work with folksong, which he had begun to collect in 1903; this opened the way to the lyrical freshness of the Housman cycle On Wenlock Edge and to the modally inflected tonality of the symphonic cycle that began with A Sea Symphony. But he learnt the same lessons in studying earlier English music in his task as editor of the English Hymnal (1906) - work which bore fruit in his Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis for strings, whose majestic unrelated consonances provided a new sound and a new way into large-scale form. The sound, with its sense of natural objects seen in a transfigured light, placed Vaughan Williams in a powerfully English visionary tradition, and made very plausible his association of his music with Blake (in the ballet Job) and Bunyan (in the opera The Pilgrim's Progress). Meanwhile the new command of form made possible a first orchestral symphony, A London Symphony, where characterful detail is worked into the scheme. A first opera, Hugh the Drover, made direct use of folksongs, which Vaughan Williams normally did not do in orchestral works.

His study of folksong, however, certainly facilitated the pastoral tone of The Lark Ascending, for violin and orchestra, and then of the Pastoral Symphony. At the beginning of the 1920s there followed a group of religious works continuing the visionary manner: the unaccompanied Mass in G minor, the Revelation oratorio Sancta civitas and the ‘pastoral episode’ The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, later incorporated in The Pilgrim's Progress. But if the glowing serenity of pastoral and vision were to remain central during the decades of work on that magnum opus, works of the later 1920s show a widening of scope, towards the comedy of the operas Sir John in Love (after The Merry Wives of Windsor) and The Poisoned Kiss, and towards the angularity of Satan's music in Job and of the Fourth Symphony. The quite different Fifth Symphony has more connection with The Pilgrim's Progress, and was the central work of a period that also included the cantata Dona nobis pacem, the opulent Serenade to Music for 16 singers and orchestra, and the A minor string quartet, the finest of Vaughan Williams's rather few chamber works.

A final period opened with the desolate, pessimistic Sixth Symphony, after which Vaughan Williams found a focus in the natural world for such bleakness when he was asked to write the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic : out of that world came his Seventh Symphony, the Sinfonia antartica, whose pitched percussion colouring he used more ebulliently in the Eighth Symphony, the Ninth returning to the contemplative world of The Pilgrim's Progress.

works:
Operas
  • Hugh the Drover (1914, perf. 1924)
  • The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains (1921)
  • Sir John in Love (1929)
  • The Poisoned Kiss (1929, perf. 1937)
  • Riders to the Sea (1932, perf. 1937)
  • The Pilgrim's Progress (1951)
Ballet
  • Job (1931)
Symphonies
  • A Sea Sym., with vv (no. 1, 1909)
  • A London Sym. (no. 2, 1913, rev. 1920, 1933)
  • Pastoral Sym. (no. 3, 1921)
  • no. 4, f (1934)
  • no. 5 D (1943)
  • no. 6, e (1947)
  • Sinfonia antartica, with vv (no. 7, 1952)
  • no. 8, d (1955)
  • no. 9, e (1956-7)
Other orchestral music
  • The Wasps, ov. (1909)
  • Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, str (1910, rev. 1919)
  • The Lark Ascending, vn, orch (1914)
  • English Folk Song Suite, band (1923)
  • Toccata marziale, band (1924)
  • Conc. accademico, vn (1925)
  • Pf Conc., C (1931)
  • Suite, va, small orch (1934)
  • 5 variants of Dives and Lazarus, str, harps (1939)
  • Ob Conc., a (1944)
  • Tuba Conc., f (1954)
Vocal-orchestral music
  • Flos campi, va, SATB (1925)
  • Sancta civitas (1925)
  • Five Tudor Portraits (1935)
  • Dona nobis pacem (1936)
  • Serenade to Music (1938)
  • An Oxford Elegy (1949)
  • Hodie (1954)
Smaller choral
  • Mass, g (1921)
  • many motets, partsongs, folksong arrs., carols, hymns
Songs
  • On Wenlock Edge (1909)
  • 10 Blake songs (1957)
  • folksong arrs.
Chamber music
  • String Qt, a (1944)
  • Violin sonata (1954)

 
Biography: Ralph Vaughan Williams

The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was a proponent of nationalism in music and was active in reviving the English folk song.

The son of a clergyman, Ralph Vaughan Williams was born at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire on Oct. 12, 1872. He attended the Royal College of Music and then took music degrees at Trinity College, Cambridge University. He studied in Berlin with Max Bruch (1896-1897). On his return to England, Vaughan Williams served as organist and choirmaster in several churches and was a teacher of composition at the Royal College of Music.

In 1904 Vaughan Williams joined the English Folk Song Society, and for several years he was active in collecting and arranging old English melodies. He also became familiar with the music of William Byrd and Henry Purcell, English composers of the 16th and 17th centuries. The modal melodies of the folk songs and the free rhythms and smooth counterpoint of the early composers became important elements of Vaughan Williams's compositions.

The Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis for string quartet and double string orchestra (1908, revised 1913) is one of Vaughan Williams's most important early compositions. With this piece English music shook off 2 centuries of German domination and tapped a rich source of indigenous music. The cool modal harmonies and antiphonal string writing contrast strongly with the lush, feverish music that was being composed in France and Germany at this time. The London Symphony (1914) is another important piece in Vaughan Williams's development. Its sprightly rhythms and street tunes, the impressionist evocation of autumn mist on the Thames in the second movement, the chimes of Big Ben at the end - all this was new in 20th-century English music.

Vaughan Williams continued to write symphonies throughout his life; the last, his Ninth, was written shortly before his death when he was 86. In these works one can follow the composer's steady development. The Fourth (1935) and Sixth (1948) symphonies are perhaps his strongest, and most dissonant, statements.

Vocal music, both solo and choral, also played an important role in Vaughan William's output. Early in his career he edited and contributed to the English Hymnal (1906). His setting of A. E. Housman's poems, On Wenlock Edge, for tenor and string quartet (1909) is frequently performed, as is his Mass in G Minor for double a cappella chorus (1923). His operas include Hugh the Drover (1911-1914), which incorporates folk songs, and Sir John in Love (1929), based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. In the latter work Vaughan Williams used the Elizabethan song "Greensleeves, " which helped to make it one of the most familiar "folk" tunes of the 20th century.

Although he did not follow the newer trends and musical fashions of his day, Vaughan Williams created a thoroughly original style based on English folk music, 16th-and 17th-century polyphony, and informal music of his own times, including jazz. He stated his credo as a composer in his book National Music (1934): "Music is above all things the art of the common man … the art of the humble….What the ordinary man will expect from the composer is not cleverness, or persiflage, or an assumed vulgarity … he will want something that will open to him the 'magic casements.' … The art of music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation … any community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history and common ideals, and, above all, a continuity with the past." He died in London on Aug. 26, 1958.

Further Reading

The fullest account of Vaughan Williams's life is by his widow, Ursula Vaughan Williams, R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1964). Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1964), is a thorough study of the compositions. Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (1950), and Alan E. F. Dickinson, Vaughan Williams (1963), discuss the composer's life and works.

Additional Sources

Day, James, Vaughan Williams, London: Dent, 1975.

Foss, Hubert J. (Hubert James), Ralph Vaughan Williams; a study, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1974.

Mellers, Wilfrid Howard, Vaughan Williams and the vision of Albion, London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

Vaughan Williams, Ursula, R.V.W.: a biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oxford Oxfordshire; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Vaughan Williams in Dorking: a collection of personal reminiscences of the composer Dr. Ralph Vaughan Williams, O.M., Dorking: The Group, 1979.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Ralph Vaughan Williams

(born Oct. 12, 1872, Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, Eng. — died Aug. 26, 1958, London) British composer. He attended the Royal College of Music and Cambridge University, and he also studied in Berlin with the composer Max Bruch. Having collected English folk songs for his academic work, he combined folk melody with modern approaches to harmony and rhythm, forging a musical style at once highly personal and deeply English. His nine symphonies, including Sea Symphony (1909), London Symphony (1913), and Sinfonia Antarctica (1952), were his most exploratory works. Other popular pieces include The Lark Ascending (1914) and Serenade to Music (1938); he also wrote five operas, including Riders to the Sea (1936). He conducted extensively throughout his life, and he edited The English Hymnal (1904 – 06).

For more information on Ralph Vaughan Williams, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: Ralph Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1872-1958). English composer, who believed passionately in the need for direct communication with his audience. Vaughan Williams studied composition with Charles Wood at Cambridge and with Parry and Stanford at London's Royal College of Music, where he established a lifelong friendship with fellow-composer Gustav Holst. He scored a great success with his first published work, the delightful song ‘Linden Lea’ (1902). Vaughan Williams drew heavily on his native heritage: he edited The English Hymnal (1906), and works like the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1909) reflect his great interest in Elizabethan music. He also collected folk-songs, which influenced his modal harmony and melodic style, contributing to an influential ‘Englishness’.

 
English Folklore: Ralph Vaughan Williams

(1872-1958)

One of the most important figures in the British classical musical scene in the 20th century, Vaughan Williams was also the one who made most use of a knowledge of folk-song in his compositions. By 1903, Vaughan Williams was already aware of folk-song, having access to the publications of Frank Kidson, Sabine Baring-Gould, and Lucy Broadwood, and indeed he was already lecturing on the subject. A trip to Essex in December of that year introduced him to Mr Pottipher of Ingrave, who sang him the song ‘Bushes and Briars’, which immediately fired Vaughan Williams's interest and enthusiasm, and opened his eyes to the real thing. On subsequent trips to Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, Hampshire, Herefordshire, and elsewhere in the country, he had amassed the bulk of his collection of 810 songs by 1913. Vaughan Williams was typical of his generation when it came to collecting procedures. He was primarily interested in the tunes and often failed to note more than the first verse of a text. He did not try to note the whole repertoire of a singer, but concentrated on those he found interesting, and neither did he record any details of the singer's life or attitudes to singing beyond the bare name, age, and occupation. Collecting songs at that time was an arduous business, getting to remote villages (often by bicycle), spending hours searching out singers, noting tunes and words by hand in the open air or pub taprooms.

The fact that Vaughan Williams, more than any of his contemporaries, used the tunes he collected in his own works has been labelled as a form of cultural theft, but there is no doubt that he felt this musical heritage was important for the future health of society and the overwhelming importance of returning these tunes to the people, and this was his way of doing so—as a composer and musician. He felt he was on a rescue mission, and, of course, he was right. That Vaughan Williams was deeply affected, as a composer, by the songs he found is well known. Their tunes turn up directly in over 30 of his pieces, made a direct impact on his work on carols, and their more subtle influence can be seen and felt in many others. He constructed a theory of ‘national music’ based largely on his experience of folk-song:

Folk-song is not a cause of national music, it is a manifestation of it. The cultivation of folk-songs is only one aspect of the desire to found an art on the fundamental principles which are essential to its well-being. National music is not necessarily folk-song; on the other hand folk-song is, by nature, necessarily national. (First published in 1934, reprinted in National Music and Other Essays (2nd edn., 1986), 63)


Although his collecting days ended in the 1920s, Vaughan Williams maintained an active interest in traditional music for the rest of his life. He played an important part in both the English Folk Dance Society and the Folk-Song Society and was instrumental in arranging their amalgamation in 1932. The Library at Cecil Sharp House, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, is named after him.

Some of the songs he collected were published in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Folk-Songs from the Eastern Counties (1908), Eight Traditional English Carols (1919), Twelve Traditional Carols from Herefordshire (with E. M. Leather, 1920), and see also, Roy Palmer, Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1983); R. Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd, The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959); Percy Dearmer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw, The Oxford Book of Carols (1928). Articles about Vaughan Williams appear in Folk Music Journal, 2:3 (1972), English Dance & Song, 34:3 (1972), and 45:1 (1983). His own views are presented in National Music and Other Essays (1963; 2nd edn., 1986).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Vaughan Williams, Ralph,
1872–1958, English composer, considered the outstanding composer of his generation in England. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1894 and studied composition with Parry and Stanford at the Royal College of Music, London, as well as organ and piano with several teachers. Although he also studied abroad with Max Bruch (1897–98) and Ravel (1909), his style remained individual and English. Receiving a Doctorate in Music from Cambridge in 1901, he was appointed organist at Lambeth and his interest in English folk music dates from his stay there. He used the folk idiom first in the orchestral piece The Fen Country (1904), continuing the same style in the three orchestral Norfolk Rhapsodies (1905–7). Elements of English music of the Tudor period interested him and are apparent in his Fantasia for Double Stringed Orchestra on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and in his Mass in G Minor (1923). His full orchestral works include A London Symphony (1914; revised 1920), A Pastoral Symphony (1921), and the Sixth Symphony (1947). Among his many vocal compositions are the song cycles On Wenlock Edge (1909, texts by A. E. Housman) and Five Mystical Songs (1911, texts by George Herbert). In his opera Sir John in Love (1929; based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor), he incorporated the traditional song “Greensleeves,” which he also transformed into various instrumental arrangements. Other operas include Hugh the Drover (1924), Riders to the Sea (1937; from the play by J. M. Synge), and The Pilgrim's Progress (1951; libretto after John Bunyan).

Bibliography

See his National Music (1934) and The Making of Music (1955); biographies by J. Day (1961, rev. ed. 1966), U. V. Williams (1964), and pictorial biography by J. E. Lunn and U. V. Williams (1971); studies by E. S. Schwartz (1964), M. Kennedy (1964, repr. 1971), and H. Ottaway (1972).

 
Wikipedia: Ralph Vaughan Williams
A statue of Ralph Vaughan Williams in Dorking.
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A statue of Ralph Vaughan Williams in Dorking.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, OM (October 12, 1872 – August 26, 1958) was an influential English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He was also an important collector of English folk music and song.

Biography

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where his father, the Rev. Arthur Vaughan Williams, was vicar. Following his father's death in 1875 he was taken by his mother, Margaret Susan Wedgwood (1843–1937), the great grand daughter of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, to live with her family at Leith Hill Place, the Wedgwood family home in the North Downs. He was also related to the Darwins, Charles Darwin being a great-uncle. Ralph (pronounced "Rayf"[1]) was therefore born into the privileged intellectual upper middle class, but never took it for granted and worked tirelessly all his life for the democratic and egalitarian ideals he believed in.

The Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family tree, showing Vaughan Williams's relationship to Charles Darwin
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The Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family tree, showing Vaughan Williams's relationship to Charles Darwin

As a student he had studied piano, "which I never could play, and the violin, which was my musical salvation."

After Charterhouse School he attended the Royal College of Music (RCM) under Charles Villiers Stanford. He read history and music at Trinity College, Cambridge where his friends and contemporaries included the philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. He then returned to the RCM and studied composition with Hubert Parry, who became a close friend. His composing developed slowly and it was not until he was 30 that the song "Linden Lea" became his first publication. He mixed composition with conducting, lecturing and editing other music, notably that of Henry Purcell and the English Hymnal. He had further lessons with Max Bruch in Berlin in 1897 and later a big step forward in his orchestral style occurred when he studied in Paris with Maurice Ravel.

In 1904 he discovered English folk songs, which were fast becoming extinct owing to the increase of literacy and printed music in rural areas. He travelled the countryside, transcribing and preserving many himself. Later he incorporated some songs and melodies into his own music, being fascinated by the beauty of the music and its anonymous history in the working lives of ordinary people. His efforts did much to raise appreciation of traditional English folk song and melody. Later in his life he served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) which in recognition of his early and important work in this field, named its Vaughan Williams Memorial Library after him.

In 1905 RVW conducted the first concert of the newly founded Leith Hill Music Festival at Dorking and thereafter held that conductorship until 1953 when he passed the baton to his successor.

In 1909, he composed incidental music for the Cambridge Greek Play, a stage production at Cambridge University of Aristophanes' The Wasps, and the next year, he had his first big public successes conducting the premieres of the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (at The Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral) and A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1), and a greater success with A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2) in 1914, conducted by Geoffrey Toye. Being 40, he could have avoided war service. Having had a public school education he could have tried for a commission. He chose to enlist as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and had a gruelling time as a stretcher bearer before being commissioned in the Royal Garrison Artillery. On one occasion he was too ill to stand but continued to direct his battery lying on the ground. Prolonged exposure to gunfire began a process of loss of hearing which was eventually to cause deafness in old age. In 1918 he was appointed Director of Music, First Army and this helped him adjust back into musical life.

After the war he adopted for a while a profoundly mystical style in the Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3) and Flos Campi, a work for viola solo, small orchestra, and wordless chorus. From 1924 a new phase in his music began, characterised by lively cross-rhythms and clashing harmonies. Key works from this period are Toccata marziale, the ballet Old King Cole, the Piano Concerto, the oratorio Sancta Civitas (his favourite of his choral works) and the ballet Job (described as "A Masque for Dancing") which is drawn not from the Bible but from William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. He also composed a Te deum in G for the enthronement of Cosmo Gordon Lang as Archbishop of Canterbury. This period in his music culminated in the Symphony No. 4 in F minor, first played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1935. This symphony contrasts dramatically with the frequent "pastoral" orchestral works he composed; indeed, its almost unrelieved tension, drama, and dissonance has startled listeners since it was premiered. Acknowledging that the fourth symphony was different, the composer said, "I don't know if I like it, but it's what I mean." Two years later Vaughan Williams made a historic recording of the work with the same orchestra for HMV (His Master's Voice), one of his very rare commercial recordings. During this period he lectured in America and England, and conducted the Bach Choir. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1935, having previously declined a knighthood.

His music now entered a mature lyrical phase, as in the Five Tudor Portraits; the "morality" The Pilgrim's Progress; the Serenade to Music (a setting of a scene from act five of The Merchant of Venice, for orchestra and sixteen vocal soloists and composed as a tribute to the conductor Sir Henry Wood); and the Symphony No. 5 in D, which he conducted at the Proms in 1943. As he was now 70, many people considered it a swan song, but he renewed himself again and entered yet another period of exploratory harmony and instrumentation. Before his death in 1958 he completed four more symphonies, including No. 7 Sinfonia Antartica, based on his 1948 film score for Scott of the Antarctic. He also completed a range of instrumental and choral works, including a tuba concerto, An Oxford Elegy on texts of Matthew Arnold, and the Christmas cantata Hodie. At his death he left an unfinished Cello Concerto, an opera Thomas the Rhymer and music for a Christmas play, The First Nowell, which was completed by his amanuensis Roy Douglas (b. 1907). He also wrote an arrangement of The Old One Hundredth Psalm Tune for the Coronation Service of Queen Elizabeth II.

Despite his substantial involvement in church music, and the religious subject-matter of many of his works, he was described by his second wife as "an atheist … [who] later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism." It's noteworthy that in his opera The Pilgrim's Progress he changed the name of the hero from Bunyan's Christian to Pilgrim. He also set Bunyan's hymn Who would true valour see to music using the traditional Sussex melody "Monk's Gate. For many church-goers, his most familiar composition may be the tune Sine Nomine for the hymn "For All the Saints".

During his life he also worked as a tutor for Birkbeck College. [2]

Vaughan Williams late in life (EMI)
Enlarge
Vaughan Williams late in life (EMI)

In the 1950s, the composer supervised recordings of all but his ninth symphony by Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca.[3] At the end of the sessions for the mysterious sixth symphony, Vaughan Williams gave a short speech, thanking Boult and the orchestra for their performance, "most heartily," and Decca later included this on the LP.[4] He was to supervise the first recording of the ninth symphony (for Everest Records) with Boult; his death the night before the recording sessions were to begin resulted in Boult announcing to the musicians that their performance would be a memorial to the composer.[5]

He died in 1958 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Vaughan Williams is a central figure in British music because of his long career as teacher, lecturer and friend to so many younger composers and conductors. His writings on music remain thought-provoking, particularly his oft-repeated call for everyone to make their own music, however simple, as long as it is truly their own.

He was married twice. His first wife, Adeline Fisher (daughter of the historian Herbert William Fisher), died in 1951 after many years of suffering from crippling arthritis. In 1953 he married the poet Ursula Wood (b. 1911), whom he had known since the late 1930s and with whom he collaborated on a number of vocal works. Ursula later wrote Vaughan Williams's biography RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, which remains the standard work on his life.

Vaughan Williams appears as a character in Robert Holdstock's novel Lavondyss.

Style

Vaughan Williams' music has often been said to be characteristically English, of the same genre as the works of Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, George Butterworth, William Walton, and others.

If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless. Ackroyd quotes Fuller Maitland, who noted that in Vaughan Williams's style "one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new."

There is in Vaughan Williams often a tangible flavour of Ravel (Vaughan Williams's mentor over a 3-month period spent in Paris in 1908), though not imitation. Ravel described Vaughan Williams as "the only one of my pupils who does not write my music."

Vaughan Williams's music expresses a deep regard for and fascination with folk tunes, the variations upon which can convey the listener from the down-to-earth (which he always tried to remain in his daily life) to the ethereal. Simultaneously the music shows patriotism for England in the subtlest form, engendered by a feeling for ancient landscapes and a person's small yet not entirely insignificant place within them.

Works

See also Category:Compositions by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Operas

Ballets

Orchestral

Concertante

Choral

  • Toward the Unknown Region, song for chorus and orchestra, setting of Walt Whitman (1906)
  • Five Mystical Songs for baritone, chorus and orchestra, settings of George Herbert (1911)
  • Fantasia on Christmas Carols for baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1912; arranged also for reduced orchestra of organ, strings, percussion)
  • Mass in G Minor for unaccompanied choir (1922)
  • Sancta Civitas (The Holy City) oratorio, text mainly from the Book of Revelation (1923-25)
  • Te Deum in G (1928)
  • Benedicite for soprano, chorus, and orchestra (1929)
  • In Windsor Forest, adapted from the opera Sir John in Love (1929)
  • Three Choral Hymns (1929)
  • Magnificat for contralto, women's chorus, and orchestra (1932)
  • Five Tudor Portraits for contralto, baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1935)
  • Dona nobis pacem, text by Walt Whitman and other sources (1936)
  • Festival Te Deum for chorus and orchestra or organ (1937)
  • Serenade to Music for sixteen solo voices and orchestra, a setting of Shakespeare (1938)
  • A Song for Thanksgiving (originally Thanksgiving for Victory) for narrator, soprano solo, children's chorus, mixed chorus, and orchestra (1944)
  • An Oxford Elegy for narrator, mixed chorus and small orchestra (1949)
  • Three Shakespeare Songs for SATB unaccompanied composed for The British Federation of Music Festivals National Competitive Festival (1951)
  • Hodie, a Christmas oratorio (1954)
  • Collected Follk songs of the Four Seasons for unaccompanied SSA chorus.
  • Epithalamion for baritone solo, chorus, flute, piano, and strings (1957)
  • Numerous hymns, some of which were first published in the English Hymnal of 1906, of which Vaughan Williams was the musical editor, collaborating with Percy Dearmer.

Vocal

  • Linden Lea, song (1901)
  • The House of Life (1904)
  • Songs of Travel (1904)
  • "The Sky Above The Roof" (1908)
  • On Wenlock Edge, song cycle for tenor, piano and string quartet (1909)
  • Along the Field, for tenor and violin
  • Three Poems by Walt Whitman for baritone and piano (1920)
  • Four Poems by Fredegond Shove: for baritone and piano (1922)
  • Four Hymns for Tenor, Viola and Strings
  • Merciless Beauty for tenor, two violins, and cello
  • Four Last Songs to poems of Ursula Vaughan Williams
  • Ten Blake songs, song cycle for high voice and oboe (1957)

Chamber and Instrumental

  • String Quintet in C minor for violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano (1903)
  • String Quartet No. 1 in G minor (1908)
  • Phantasy Quintet for 2 violins, 2 violas and cello (1912)
  • Six Studies in English Folk-Song, for violoncello and piano (1926)
  • Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes, for organ (1956)
  • String Quartet No. 2 in A minor ("For Jean, on her birthday," 1942-44)
  • Romance for Viola and Piano (undated)

Organ

  • Three Preludes on Welsh Hymntunes (Bryn Calfaria, Rhosymedre, Hyfrydol) (1920)
  • A Wedding Tune for Ann (1943)
  • Two Organ Preludes (The White Rock, St. David's Day) (1956)
  • The Old Hundredth Psalm-Tune (?)

Film, radio, and TV scores

Band

  • English Folk Song Suite for military band (1923)
  • Toccata Marziale for military band (1924)
  • Flourish for Wind Band (1939)
  • Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus, arr.
  • Sea Songs
  • Overture: Henry V

External links

References

  1. ^ Vaughan Williams, Ursula. (1964) R.V.W. A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oxford University Press. The preface, Notes on Names, says "Ralph's name was pronounced Rayf, any other pronunciation used to infuriate him."
  2. ^ (2002) Birkbeck, University of London Continuing Education Courses 2002 Entry. Birkbeck External Relations Department, 5. 
  3. ^ The Gramophone
  4. ^ Decca Records/Eclipse reissue
  5. ^ Everest Records' release of the 1958 recording.

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