MODERN 1900 –1950 253
emptied rural areas of much of
their population, and their folk
traditions, spurred Vaughan
Williams, Holst, and their fellow
composer George Butterworth
into going into the countryside
to collect English folk songs before
they disappeared.
The composers were drawn to
the naturalness of folk music and
to the pastoral landscapes from
which it came. As their music
began to reflect these influences,
they were denounced as members
of a backward-looking “cowpat
school” of composing, a term
coined by British composer
Elisabeth Lutyens. In fact, they
had initiated a quiet revolution in
20th-century music that influenced
the Australian composer Percy
Grainger as well as Yorkshire-born
Frederick Delius in his orchestral
masterwork Brigg Fair (1907).Pastoral inspiration
The essence of this new musical
style is distilled in Vaughan
Williams’s The Lark Ascending—
based on a 19th-century poem by
George Meredith, which describeshow 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
piano in 1920 and with orchestra
the following year. The virtuosity
of the solo violin part reaches back
to the uncluttered purity of Bach’s
concertos. In the score, Vaughan
Williams quotes from Meredith’s
poem describing the lark’s flight:
“He rises and begins to round/He
drops the silver chain of sound/Of
many links without a break/In
chirrup, whistle, slur, and shake.”
In the same way, the violin’s
opening solo soars upward in a
single unbroken phrase from its
low register to its very highest,
with the orchestra’s quiet
accompanying chord breaking
off to leave the violin singing and
trilling alone in the empty sky.
Then the soloist and orchestra
explore two main themes: a lilting
first one and a simple, balladlike
second. Neither of these is a folk
song, yet each sounds as if it might
be, and neither could have been
written without the influence of
English folk music. ■Ralph Vaughan
WilliamsBorn in 1872, the son of a
country vicar, Ralph Vaughan
Williams was brought up in
Surrey by his mother, who
was widowed when Ralph
was three. After studying at
Cambridge University and the
Royal College of Music, he
worked in London as a church
organist and conductor and as
editor of The English Hymnal.
A period of private study
in Paris in 1908 with Maurice
Ravel helped to crystallize
Vaughan Williams’s true
musical voice. Military service
in World War I interrupted a
lifetime of composing, but
his large output included nine
symphonies, four operas,
much choral music, and a
sequence of small, highly
individual orchestral works,
including The Lark Ascending.
After his death in 1958,
his ashes were interred in
Westminster Abbey, London.Other key works1903–1909 A Sea Symphony
1910 Fantasia on a Theme
by Thomas Tallis
1922 A Pastoral Symphony
1922–1951 The Pilgrim’s
ProgressSee also: Dvorˇ ák’s Symphony No. 9 212–215 ■ The Dream of Gerontius 218–219 ■
Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 270–271 ■ Appalachian Spring 286–287There is no difference
in kind, but only in
degree, between Beethoven
and the humblest singer
of a folk song.
Ralph Vaughan WilliamsIt never seems to occur
to people that a man
might just want to compose
a piece of music.
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