Ralph Vaughan Williams, Composer for the people

An introduction to the series…

Welcome to chapter two of my medici.tv collaboration! You may have joined me over the summer when I helped co-present the live coverage of the Verbier Festival in Switzerland (which you can still see on catch-up). Joining Annie Dutoit-Argerich for the second week, we welcomed everyone from Sheku Kanneh-Mason to Paavo Järvi – on the best seat in the house, courtesy of our glass-fronted Studio VF nestled backstage between dressing rooms. Memorably this led to one broadcast featuring the background piano practise of one Evgeny Kissin, whose dressing room was next-door! You can imagine, it was musical paradise for a composer like me. Up close and personal with the world’s greatest musicians… which is also my aim in this new article series.

This is the impetus for our new Portraits series: putting some fabulous composers under a spotlight to present them as people, explore their role in the world… and perhaps shine a light on names or aspects of their work that deserve greater credit. 

Cue, my first ‘Pepper Portrait’…

Ralph Vaughan Williams

I touched on a composer being a communicator: that’s why this British musical legend is my ultimate role model. The man who back in 1912, said: ‘the composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole community. If we seek for art, we shall not find it.’

Little wonder why Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958) held J.S. Bach as his idol, that most practical and purposeful of musicians. Rooted in his community, Vaughan Williams (RVW hereon) pointed out that ‘the great names in music were at first local, and the greatest of them all – J.S. Bach – remained a local musician all his life.’ Whether it was drawing on folksongs he collected in the English countryside, providing smaller ensemble-friendly versions of his symphonies, or happily organising music festivals for amateurs, RVW was determined to underline that a composer must not sit in an ivory tower.

To set the mood, listen to The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams:

World War Two

That sense of comradeship feels doubly appropriate in 2025, 80 years since the end of the Second World War. To mark the occasion, I presented a special concert of RVW’s music with the National Trust, who now look after his rather epic childhood home at Leith Hill Place in Surrey (the highest point in Southeast England, where on a clear day you can see up to London and down to the coast). Joining flautist Lisa Friend and Royal biographer Hugo Vickers, we played RVW arrangements of English folk songs, his scores to propaganda films, and chatted about his role in the conflict. The wartime period says much about the man.

Aged 67 by the time conflict broke out, RVW still played his part: he shovelled sand into sandbags alongside much younger men, worked as an Air Raid Warden, organised concerts for troops and wrote inspiring music for BBC broadcasts. Even before, in 1938, he had joined a Committee for Refugees from Nazi Oppression that met every month to help relocate those fleeing persecution. Without anyone knowing, he quietly paid the school fees for a twelve-year-old Jewish refugee (her family only discovered this years after his death); he helped organise the purchase of a building that would be a place for refugees to meet and relax; he also helped to create a committee that released musicians who had been interned. RVW is a supreme example of a composer who is human first, musician second. Without humanity and spirit, what does music express?

Film music

The Second World War provided an interesting creative opportunity, too. In 1940, RVW received a phone call late one Saturday night, asking him if he’d consider scoring a film. When the composer asked how long he’d have to complete it, he was told: ‘until Wednesday’! The 49th Parallel was a spy adventure seen as an attempt to convince the Americans of the danger posed by Nazi Germany. The London Symphony Orchestra recorded the score, and such was its success that words were later added to the stirring Prelude to create a hymn, The New Commonwealth. Subsequent RVW wartime film scores included a Crown Film Unit picture about the flying boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, and a movie charting the magnificent sites looked after by the National Trust (reminding everyone what they were fighting for). 

So, we must place Vaughan Williams alongside Korngold as one of the first classical film greats. He recognised that movies brought possibilities of a Wagnerian ‘total work of art’. He saw, too, that film work was a great teacher. Working with a director to a set image and forced to cope with much cutting and changing, it’s hard to score a movie with an ego… Or as RVW put it: ‘if you write music for films, you must be prepared to have your head cut off, your tail cut off, even your entrails taken out, and you still must make musical sense’. 

A man in his seventies, writing film music for the first time: it speaks to his open-mindedness. Little wonder why he once criticised a music student by saying ‘you never attempt anything which you know you cannot do’ (and how many wonderful students he had: Ruth Gipps, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Grace Williams and Elizabeth Maconchy, to name a few…). 

The eternal student

Yet this celebrated teacher and adventurous composer felt chronically under-educated in music, describing his entire life as a battle against ‘amateurish’ technique. He certainly followed the advice of his early teacher Hubert Parry, who once said ‘a composer must write music as his musical conscience demands’. But sadly, his later musical instruction wasn’t always so helpful. Charles Stanford helpfully labelled one of his student’s new pieces: ‘damnably ugly. All rot, my boy’.  Nothing like a bit of encouragement… So, in his thirties, RVW headed to Europe to study with Bruch and Ravel (dream team!). He stayed in Paris for three months to acquire ‘a little French polish’, and it’s interesting to trace a growing sense of air and transparency in RVW’s own writing (Ravel’s motto was ‘complex, not complicated’, after all). Ravel was several years younger than his student, but that didn’t stop RVW constantly seeking to improve his craft.

For a composer who made no secret about the influence of individuals and sounds around him, it makes sense his ‘breakthrough’ piece was a fantasia: an improvisation on another composer’s core ideas. The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis was one of his first distinctive masterpieces (this at the age of 39). He cleverly distils aspects of the original Tudor theme; there are biting false relations and his trademark modal harmony, keeping to a relatively sparse style that avoids fugal techniques and maintains a sense of air. Textural conversation, then as now, was a key aspect of Tudor writing, and where Tallis wrote for antiphonal choirs – a kind of ping pong between vocal groups – here RVW opts for the then-fairly-unprecedented instrumentation of string quartet with double string orchestra. Such a heavy string texture could easily sound dense, but somehow RVW makes it shimmer and glow. Listen to how he uses these forces alternately as one massed ensemble, as smaller sub-groups and as soloists; the combined string groups provide a complete statement of the theme together, then echo each other before the spotlight shifts to solo viola and violin, and then the texture builds back up again. It’s a wonderful textural diminuendo and crescendo. A spacious sound no doubt designed to match the cavernous acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral, where the piece premiered.

Much has been made of the folksong link in RVW’s ‘sound’, and it certainly proved a creative catalyst in finding his own voice. He would ask local labourers and pub drinkers to sing him a folk song twice, noting it down carefully and then comparing differences between each rendition. In a single decade he collected over 800 songs and variants in this way (and one of them became the Christmas classic, O Little Town of Bethlehem). Their frequent modal sound and free-flowing melody seeped into his writing; like folksong, melodies in his Sixth Symphony build up from a number of shorter motifs that string together through tiny variations. There are ever-so-slightly-irregular metres that wrongfoot us, just as folksong embraces the occasional asymmetry. Often – and this sometimes became a criticism – people found it difficult to distinguish what was folk music and what was RVW.

Vaughan Williams spoke of ‘cribbing’: that is, drawing on elements of another composer’s music and making it your own. But it was, he argued, a fundamental part of a composer’s process: ‘the best composers store up half-fledged ideas in the works of others and make use of them to build up perfect edifices which take on the character of their maker’. In a century that was so dominated by the quest for originality, I think RVW is a healthy reminder that being yourself and all you have absorbed is original enough. 

You could argue writing music is an act of courage, but RVW was brave in more than just his writing. As we approach Remembrance and mark eighty years since the end of World War Two, we would do well to remember the incredible unifying, communicative, humanistic, altruistic power of music as represented by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

To delve further into RVW’s world, discover this historic BBC film capturing Sir Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall on 12 October 1972 — exactly one hundred years after the composer’s birth.

A moving tribute from one of Vaughan Williams’s closest friends and greatest champions: here.