Page 255 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

MODERN 1900–1950 253

See also: Dvorˇák’s Symphony No. 9 212–215 ■ The Dream of Gerontius 218–219 ■
Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 270–271 ■ Appalachian Spring 286–287

how the bird sings in the sky, its
notes floating heavenward. The
music was composed for violin and
piano in 1914 then orchestrated
before its first performances with
There is no difference piano in 1920 and with orchestra
in kind, but only in the following year. The virtuosity
degree, between Beethoven of the solo violin part reaches back
and the humblest singer to the uncluttered purity of Bach’s
of a folk song. concertos. In the score, Vaughan
Ralph Vaughan Williams Williams quotes from Meredith’s Ralph Vaughan
poem describing the lark’s flight: Williams
“He rises and begins to round/He
drops the silver chain of sound/Of Born in 1872, the son of a
many links without a break/In country vicar, Ralph Vaughan
chirrup, whistle, slur, and shake.” Williams was brought up in
In the same way, the violin’s Surrey by his mother, who
emptied rural areas of much of opening solo soars upward in a was widowed when Ralph
their population, and their folk single unbroken phrase from its was three. After studying at
traditions, spurred Vaughan low register to its very highest, Cambridge University and the
Williams, Holst, and their fellow with the orchestra’s quiet Royal College of Music, he
composer George Butterworth accompanying chord breaking worked in London as a church
into going into the countryside off to leave the violin singing and organist and conductor and as
to collect English folk songs before trilling alone in the empty sky. editor of The English Hymnal.
they disappeared. Then the soloist and orchestra A period of private study
The composers were drawn to explore two main themes: a lilting in Paris in 1908 with Maurice
the naturalness of folk music and first one and a simple, balladlike Ravel helped to crystallize
Vaughan Williams’s true
to the pastoral landscapes from second. Neither of these is a folk musical voice. Military service
which it came. As their music song, yet each sounds as if it might in World War I interrupted a
began to reflect these influences, be, and neither could have been lifetime of composing, but
they were denounced as members written without the influence of his large output included nine
of a backward-looking “cowpat English folk music. ■ symphonies, four operas,
school” of composing, a term much choral music, and a
coined by British composer sequence of small, highly
Elisabeth Lutyens. In fact, they individual orchestral works,
had initiated a quiet revolution in including The Lark Ascending.
20th-century music that influenced After his death in 1958,
the Australian composer Percy his ashes were interred in
Grainger as well as Yorkshire-born It never seems to occur Westminster Abbey, London.
Frederick Delius in his orchestral to people that a man
masterwork Brigg Fair (1907). might just want to compose Other key works
a piece of music.
Pastoral inspiration Ralph Vaughan Williams 1903–1909 A Sea Symphony
The essence of this new musical 1910 Fantasia on a Theme
by Thomas Tallis
style is distilled in Vaughan 1922 A Pastoral Symphony
Williams’s The Lark Ascending— 1922–1951 The Pilgrim’s
based on a 19th-century poem by Progress
George Meredith, which describes

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