Vaughan Williams In Perspective

Biography of British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The composer explains in his own words his pursuit of two related ambitions: to create his own musical language, and to make early 20th-century England a musical nation. The book contains 102 items written between 1897 and 1958, including articles for musical magazines, transcripts of broadcasts, obituaries and programme notes.

Challenging residual doubts about Vaughan Williams's role and significance within twentieth-century music and culture, this book places and explores his life and music in their broad musical, cultural, social, and political contexts. Chapters by scholars from a range of disciplines re-evaluate the composer's life and career within a world marked by both rapid change and refigured traditions - a world in which cultural and political nationalism was a fact of everyday life. Building on scholarship that has established Vaughan Williams as aesthetically and politically progressive, the book advances a revisionist perspective by broadening understandings of the nature of his responses to modernity. This portrait of a modern composer emerges not merely by focussing on underrepresented interests and pursuits, but also by contextualizing activities that have been misrepresented as merely 'conservative' and 'backward-looking'.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Research and Information Guide presents the most extensive annotated bibliography of its subject yet produced. It offers comprehensive coverage of the English composer's prose works and accounts for over 1,000 secondary sources from all critical and scholarly eras. A single-numbering format and substantial indexes facilitate efficient searches of what is the most complete bibliography of Ralph Vaughan Williams since Neil Butterworth's guide to research was published by Garland in 1990.

Serious scholarship on the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is currently enjoying a lively revival after a period of relative quiescence, and is only beginning to address the enduring affection of concert audiences for his music. The essays that comprise this volume extend the study of Vaughan Williams's music in new directions that will be of interest to scholars, performers and listeners alike. This volume contains the work of eleven North American scholars who have been recipients of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship based at the composer's own school, Charterhouse, which was created and has been supported by the Carthusian Trust since 1985. This wide-ranging and detailed collection of essays covers the spectrum of genres in which Vaughan Williams wrote, including dance, symphony, opera, song, hymnody and film music. The contributors also employ a range of analytical and historical methods of investigation to illuminate aspects of Vaughan Williams's compositional techniques and influences, musical, literary and visual.

A comprehensive reassessment of this towering figure of twentieth-century music, examining works, cultural context and reception in Britain and beyond.