Vaughan Williams and His World: (The Bard Music Festival)

A biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of the most innovative and creative figures in twentieth-century music, whose symphonies stand alongside those of Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, and Roussel. After his death, shifting priorities in the music world led to a period of critical neglect. What could not have been foreseen is that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, a handful of Vaughan Williams’s scores would attain immense popularity worldwide. Yet the present renown of these pieces has led to misapprehension about the nature of Vaughan Williams’s cultural nationalism and a distorted view of his international cultural and musical significance. Vaughan Williams and His World traces the composer’s stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams’s music composed during and after the Second World War and affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music. This volume reclaims Vaughan Williams’s deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer.

Table of Contents:
Permissions and Credits Acknowledgments Ralph Vaughan Williams: Man and Music—An Introduction Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley Vaughan Williams and Cambridge Julian Rushton Vaughan Williams and the Royal College of Music Erica Siegel Vaughan Williams’s “The Letter and the Spirit” (1920) Introduced and Annotated by Ceri Owen Modernist Image in Vaughan Williams’s Job Philip Rupprecht “Finest of the Fine Arts”: Vaughan Williams and Film Annika Forkert Pilgrim in a New-Found-Land: Vaughan Williams in America Byron Adams Vaughan Williams’s Lecture on the St. Matthew Passion (1938) Introduced and Annotated by Eric Saylor Vaughan Williams’s Common Ground Sarah Collins and Daniel M. Grimley Tracing a Biography: Michael Kennedy’s Correspondence Concerning The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams Introduced and Annotated by Daniel M. Grimley and Byron Adams “His own idiom”: Vaughan Williams’s Violin Sonata and the Development of His Melodic Style O. W. Neighbour Critical Reception: Early Performances of the Symphony No. 9 in E Minor Introduced and Annotated by Alain Frogley Goodness and Beauty: Philosophy, History, and Ralph Vaughan Williams Leon Botstein Index Notes on the Contributors

About the Author :
Byron Adams is emeritus professor of musicology at the University of California, Riverside. He is an associate editor of the Musical Quarterly and editor of the volume Vaughan Williams Essays as well as the volume Edward Elgar and His World for the Bard Music Festival series, for which he also serves as a consultant. Daniel M. Grimley is professor of music and head of humanities at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow at Merton College. His books include Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian Identity, Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism, Delius and the Sound of Place, and Jean Sibelius: Life, Music, Silence.