Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a friend and contemporary of Gustav Holst, composer of the famous orchestral suite "The Planets". His compositions cover a wide range of categories, including symphonies, operas, ballets, choral music and film scores. Vaughan Williams's music has often been said to be "characteristically English".
"Peter Ackroyd writes, "If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless." Ackroyd quotes music critic John Alexander Fuller Maitland, whose distinctions included editing the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the years just before 1911, as having observed that in Vaughan Williams's style "one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new." "His style expresses a deep regard for and fascination with folk tunes, the variations upon which can convey the listener from the down-to-earth (which he always tried to remain in his daily life) to the ethereal. Simultaneously the music shows patriotism toward England in the subtlest form, engendered by a feeling for ancient landscapes and for a person's small yet not entirely insignificant place within them." In 1934, Vaughan Williams stated, "The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation." |