Ralph Vaughan Williams (incidentally, pronounced: \u201cRayf, not<\/u> Ralf\u201d) is perhaps Britain\u2019s most important and influential composer of the first half of the twentieth century.\u00a0 Prolific in most musical genres, he was an active composer from his student days right up until his death in 1958, at the age of eighty-six.\u00a0 He composed dozens of works that are part of the core repertory of British music of the last century, including the important series of nine symphonies.\u00a0 He lived a long life\u2014long enough to have written in a number of rather different styles, all of them authentic and reflective of his changing interests and the times.\u00a0 He was born into an educated, upper middle class family, attended Cambridge University, and studied with eminent musicians and scholars, including a stint with Maurice Ravel.\u00a0 Among his early close friends and fellow students were such luminaries as Bertram Russell, Leopold Stokowski, and, of course, Gustav Holst.<\/p>\n
In addition to his early activities as a rising composer, he and Holst were among the leaders in the efflorescence of serious study and collection of English folksong that arose in the late nineteenth century.\u00a0 He and Holst frequently spent time in the countryside tracking the rapidly vanishing body of song, writing them down, and preserving them.\u00a0 He later served as president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.\u00a0 And, inevitably, his appreciation of this great literature became a major influence on one facet of his musical style\u2014evidenced by every American band student\u2019s encounter with his English Folksong Suite.<\/em><\/p>\n Another important interest and activity of his early on was his editorship of the English Hymnal <\/em>(1906), his interest in the great English composer, Henry Purcell, and of all of the music, in general, of the Renaissance in England.\u00a0 It is the latter that is the inspiration for one his early and most beloved compositions, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.<\/em><\/p>\n Thomas Tallis, along with William Byrd, was the most important of English composers of the Tudor era.\u00a0 He served under English monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, dying in 1585.\u00a0 If you were quick you would have seen his character on the television show, \u201cThe Tudors,\u201d\u00a0 so he certainly was not obscure.\u00a0 And he was resourceful, for though he openly maintained his faith as a Roman Catholic, he served under various religious regimes.\u00a0\u00a0 One of his important publications (with his partner, Byrd, he enjoyed a monopoly granted by Elizabeth I printing any kind of music) was his 1567 collection of polyphonic settings of Psalm tunes.<\/p>\n In 1910 Vaughan Williams chose the third one of these as the basis for his own composition.\u00a0 He was familiar with it, for he had included it in the 1906 English Hymnal. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0The tune\u2019s original title is simply \u201cThird Mode Melody,\u201d which refers to it being in the Phrygian church mode.\u00a0 Not major, and not minor, it is a marvelously mysterious mode that can be heard by playing the scale from \u201ce\u201d to \u201ce\u201d on the white notes of the piano.\u00a0 Written for strings, alone, the composer divides the orchestra into three groups of varying sizes, thus providing some interesting textural changes.\u00a0 The main tune is heard several times, but like any good composer, Vaughan Williams take various elements of the melody and creates the \u201cfantasy,\u201d which of course was a typical musical procedure during the sixteen century.\u00a0 A winsome diversion takes place not too long after the beginning in the form of a viola solo, this theme appearing in the full orchestra towards the end.\u00a0 A dry description this is, doing little justice to a sonorous, timeless evocation of the genius of an earlier musical style that is rarely heard in the modern concert hall.\u00a0 Vaughan Williams simultaneously created a tribute to one of the high points in the English arts, along with a perfect reflection of his own twentieth-century musical \u00e6sthetic.<\/p>\n –Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a92025 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[154],"class_list":["post-222","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-ralphvaughanwilliams"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}