Home > Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music > Vaughan Williams, Ralph

English composer; b. Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, Oct. 12, 1872; d. London, Aug. 26, 1958. His father, a clergyman, died when Vaughan Williams was a child, after which the family moved to the residence of his maternal grandfather at Leith Hill Place, Surrey. There he began to study piano and violin. In 1887 he entered Charterhouse School in London and played violin and viola in the school orchestra.

From 1890 to 1892 Vaughan Williams studied harmony, composition, and organ at the Royal College of Music in London. He then enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took courses in composition and in organ, earning his music degree in 1895. He returned to the Royal College of Music for further study the following year. In 1897 he went to Berlin for further instruction with Max Bruch, and in 1901 he received his doctoral degree in music from Cambridge. Dissatisfied with his academic studies, Vaughan Williams decided, in 1908, to seek advice in Paris from MAURICE RAVEL in order to acquire the technique of modern orchestration that emphasized color.

In the meantime, Vaughan Williams became active as a collector of English FOLK SONGS. In 1904 he joined the Folk Song Society. In 1905 he became the conductor of the Leith Hill Festival in Dorking, a position that he held, off and on, until his old age.

In 1906 Vaughan Williams composed three Norfolk Rhapsodies, introducing the essential elements of his national style. He discarded the second and third of the set as not satisfactory in reflecting the subject. In 1903 he began work on a choral symphony inspired by Walt Whitman's poetry entitled A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1). He completed it in 1909. There followed in 1910 Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, scored for string quartet and double string orchestra. In it Vaughan Williams evoked the POLYPHONIC style of the 16th-century English composer.

After composing this brief but popular work, he engaged in a much grander SCORE, A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2), intended as a musical glorification of the city. Despite the inclusion of immediately recognizable quotations of the street song Sweet Lavender and of the Westminster chimes in the score, Vaughan Williams emphatically denied that the score was a representation of London life. He even suggested that it might be more aptly entitled "Symphony by a Londoner," finally declaring that the work must be judged as a piece of ABSOLUTE or abstract music. Yet prosaically minded commentators insisted that A London Symphony realistically depicted in its four movements the scenes of London at twilight, the hubbub of Bloomsbury, a Saturday evening reverie, and, in conclusion, the serene flow of the Thames River. Concurrently with A London Symphony, Vaughan Williams wrote the ballad opera Hugh the Drover, set in England in 1812 and reflecting the solitary struggle of the English against Napoleon.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Vaughan Williams enlisted in the British army and served in Salonika and in France as an officer in the artillery. After the armistice he was a professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in London from 1919 to 1939. He also conducted the London Bach Choir from 1920 to 1928. In 1921 he completed A Pastoral Symphony. An interesting innovation in this score is the use of a wordless vocal solo in the last movement. In 1922 he visited the U.S. and conducted this work at the Norfolk (Connecticut) Festival. In 1932 he returned to the U.S. to lecture at Bryn Mawr College.

In 1930 Vaughan Williams wrote a MASQUE, Job, based on the British poet/mystic William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job. It was first performed in a concert version, then presented on the stage in London in 1931. His Fourth Symphony, in F minor (1931-35), first performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London in 1935, presents an extraordinary deviation from his accustomed solid style of composition. Here he experimented with DISSONANT harmonies in conflicting tonalities, bristling with angular rhythms.

Vaughan Williams always professed great admiration for JEAN SIBELIUS. In addition to the harmonious kinship between the two great contemporary nationalist composers, there was the peculiar circumstance that each in his Fourth Symphony ventured into the domain of modernism. Both were taken to task by astounded critics for such musical experimentation.

A peripheral work was Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Greensleeves, arranged for harp, strings, and optional flutes. This was the composer's tribute to his fascination with English folk songs. He had used it in his opera Sir John in Love, after Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, performed in London in 1929.

Vaughan Williams dedicated his Fifth Symphony in D Major (1938-43) to Sibelius as a token of his admiration. In the Sixth Symphony in E Minor (1944-47) Vaughan Williams returned to the normal serene style, although it has its turbulent moments and an episode of folksy dancing exhilaration.

Vaughan Williams was 80 years old when he completed his challenging Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7), scored for soprano, women's chorus, and orchestra. The music was an expansion of his sound track for the motion picture Scott of the Antarctic (1947-48) on the doomed 1912 expedition of Robert Scott to the South Pole. Here the music is almost geographic in its literal representation of the regions that Scott explored. In Sinfonia antartica Vaughan Williams inserted, in addition to a large orchestra, several keyboard instruments and a wind machine. In the epilogue of the work, he used quotations from Scott's journal. Sinfonia antartica was first performed in Manchester in 1953.

In the Eighth Symphony, Vaughan Williams once more returned to the ideal of absolute music. The work is conceived in the form of a NEOCLASSICAL suite. However, faithful to the spirit of the times, he included in the score such modern instruments as VIBRAPHONE and XYLOPHONE, as well as gongs and bells.

In his last symphony, Vaughan Williams at age 85 could still assert himself as a modern composer. For the first time, he used a trio of saxophones, with a pointed caveat that they should not behave "like demented cats" but rather retain their romantic character. Perhaps anticipating the inevitable, he added after the last bar of the score the Italian word niente. The Ninth Symphony was first performed in London in April 1958, just months before Vaughan Williams's death.

It is a testimony to his extraordinary vitality that after the death of his first wife Vaughan Williams married at age 80 the poet and writer Ursula Wood. In the following year he once more visited the U.S. on a lecture tour to several American universities.

In Vaughan Williams's works, there seems to have been no intention of adopting any particular method of composition. Rather, he used a great variety of procedures integrated into a distinctively personal and thoroughly English style, nationalistic but not isolationist. Vaughan Williams was particularly adept at exploring the modern ways of modal COUNTERPOINT, with tonality freely shifting between MAJOR and MINOR TRIADS. In this way, he astutely evokes MEDIEVAL and BAROQUE styles while still using modern techniques. Thus Vaughan Williams combines the modalities of the Tudor era with the sparkling POLYTONALITIES of the modern age.

In addition to the works mentioned above, Vaughan Williams composed the opera RIDERS TO THE SEA, after the drama by John Millington Synge (1925-32; London, 1937), and incidental and film music. His vocal music includes Songs of Travel for voice and piano, to texts by Robert Louis Stevenson (1904); Toward the Unknown Region for chorus and orchestra, after Walt Whitman (1905-07); On Wenlock Edge, song cycle for tenor, piano, and string quartet ad libitum, to poems from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1909); Five Mystical Songs for baritone, optional chorus, and orchestra (1911); Flos Campi, suite for viola, wordless mixed chorus, and small orchestra (1925); Five Tudor Portraits for mezzosoprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1936); Serenade to Music for 16 solo voices and orchestra (1938); and 10 Blake Songs for tenor and oboe (1958), as well as other English songs, arrangements of English folk songs, Anglican choral music, HYMN tunes, and CAROLS.

His orchestral works include In the Fen Country, symphonic impression (1904); The Lark Ascending, romance for violin and orchestra (1914—20); Fantasia on Sussex FolkTunes for cello and orchestra (1930); Suite for viola and small orchestra (1934); Five Variants of "Dives and Lazarus" for string orchestra and harp (1939); Concerto Grosso for string orchestra (1950); and concertos for violin, piano, oboe, and tuba. Among his chamber works are three string quartets (1898; 1909; 1942-44), Piano Quintet in C Minor, with double bass (1905), Phantasy Quintet for two violins, two violas, and cello (1912), Double Trio for string sextet (London), and Violin Sonata in A Minor (1954). He also composed keyboard pieces and made collections of religious songs, including The Oxford Book of Carols. He wrote lectures and articles, reprinted in National Music and Other Essays published in 1963, and collected folk songs.