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Vaughan Williams on Music

Online ISBN:
9780199851485
Print ISBN:
9780195182392
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Vaughan Williams on Music

David Manning (ed.)
David Manning
(ed.)

Teaching Fellow, Department of Music

Bristol University
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Published online:
3 October 2011
Published in print:
22 November 2007
Online ISBN:
9780199851485
Print ISBN:
9780195182392
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Almost 50 years since his passing, the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams continues to captivate audiences around the world, evoking the sound and spirit of folksong and the image of rural landscape. In this book, we read the composer in his own words, as he pursues two related ambitions: to create his own musical language, and to make early twentieth-century England a musical nation. The book contains 102 items written by the composer between 1897 and the year of his death, 1958, including articles for musical magazines, transcripts of broadcasts, obituary notices, and program notes, illuminating his work as a composer and highlighting his numerous other roles as an active supporter of amateur music-makers, a leader in the folk-song revival, educator, performer, campaigner for English music, and polemicist. By addressing a variety of topics, Vaughan Williams reveals the complex and volatile political, musical, and cultural contexts in which he worked over a period of six decades. In these circumstances, Vaughan Williams demonstrates the breadth of his knowledge, the depth of his understanding, and his commitment to communicating with a wide audience. His writings are purposely accessible to reach this audience, permeated with central themes of originality, folksong, a sense of history, and the importance of self-expression. Moreover, the collection reveals the emergence of Vaughan Williams' aesthetics of music during the early 1900s, as he came to terms with the legacy of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner in order to develop his personal musical idiom.

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