To explore Vaughan Williams in context is a peculiarly appropriate project for a figure who famously declared: ‘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 life of the community’. Indeed, this quotation will be encountered frequently throughout this book. Across a career that stretched from the 1890s to the late 1950s, Vaughan Williams produced a huge and varied body of music; he also worked to promote and more deeply embed music within social and cultural life in England and Britain more broadly, achieving this through his compositions for amateur as well as professional musicians, and through his related work as a folk-song collector and arranger, hymn editor, writer, lecturer, radio broadcaster, administrator, conductor, and musical-, educational-, and social activist. By the interwar years Vaughan Williams was regarded as the most important English composer of his time, and, by the end of the Second World War, he had become a national if not an international celebrity.

This chapter explores Vaughan Williams’s collaboration with the Christian Socialist vicar Percy Dearmer to produce The English Hymnal (1906). It considers Vaughan Williams’s interest in community music-making alongside Dearmer’s political and religious community building. It draws parallels between the ecumenism of the Hymnal and both editors’ interests in national culture and its relationship with internationalism. These elements are all linked together by Vaughan Williams’s use of folk-song tunes as hymn tunes. This chapter positions the Hymnal as an early exploration of his interest in the place of these songs in national culture and cultural institutions. Finally, this chapter shows Vaughan Williams at an early stage of his music career as he begins to grapple with his place in relation to the English past – that of Tudor composers, folk songs, and the Church of England itself – paving the way for his future work.

In ‘Correspondents’, Hugh Cobbe reflects on the benefits for the study of composers that arise from the corpus of their letters. He describes the collection of the letters of Vaughan Williams, which he and his successor editors have built up to form a database of over 5,000 items that are publicly available online. Describing Vaughan Williams’s connections in terms of concentric circles of decreasing intimacy, he demonstrates what the correspondence reveals about the composer and his world. Relations with his two wives, Adeline and Ursula, are discussed and then relations with his close friends Ralph Wedgwood, Gustav Holst, Martin Shaw, Gerald Finzi, and Michael Kennedy. Thereafter the circles widen to include Adeline Fisher’s relations, his fellow composers, his Royal College of Music pupils, those conductors and soloists who regularly performed his works, his collaborators, and the critics who wrote about him. Cobbe also describes his concerns with non-musical issues, such as the release of interned German refugee musicians, and his enthusiasm for Federal Union as a movement for future peace. Overall, the letters provide a clear picture of Vaughan Williams’s breadth of vision and largeness of mind.

Despite popular perceptions of Vaughan Williams as being focussed primarily on nature and the pastoral, a vivid appreciation of urban environments played an equally crucial role in shaping his artistic vision. A Londoner for most of his adult life, he also spent significant time in Berlin and Paris, and had a special regard for New York. Yet while he relished the bustle and rich social diversity of London, the de facto capital of the world during his lifetime, he was also keenly aware of its deprivation and dark undercurrents. A London Symphony is the most ambitious musical work to thematicize the modern city composed anywhere before 1914, and it evokes psychological and experiential tropes central to modernism’s urban imaginary across the arts, including the collision of multiple social identities, temporalities, and spatial perspectives, and the associated alienation and fragmentation of the unitary self. The composer employs an exceptionally wide range of materials, juxtaposing folk song, ragtime, street noise, and much else, in a multilayered environment of sometimes violent dissonance and rhythmic dislocation. Yet the work strives to integrate such diversity within an overarching symphonic framework – a powerful metaphor for a vision of nation and humanity that underpinned the composer’s later work.

The chapter examines Vaughan Williams’s relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It focusses on the policy pressures and dynamics shaping BBC music broadcasting, and interrelationships between those and the creation, promotion, dissemination, consumption, and reception of Vaughan Williams’s music, reflecting on the ways in which a range of public and quasi-public bodies dedicated to the production and promotion of ‘national’ culture created a distinct political dynamic to the ‘field of cultural production’ in Britain in the period from the foundation of the BBC in 1922 through the interwar, war, and postwar years. It argues that this context and relationship is foundational for understanding his work, style, and reception, and invites (re)consideration of the role of authorial agency and authorial voice in reception history.

Throughout his life, Vaughan Williams was a notorious flirt. This love of women and flirtation permeates not only his music, but his professional and personal relationships alike. Yet, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Vaughan Williams was also a strong advocate for many women who sought to develop professional careers in the male-dominated music world. This conflict between his behaviour and actions presents a conundrum for those looking to investigate his broader advocacy of women on the one hand and his private behaviour on the other. This chapter explores the contradictory nature of Vaughan Williams’s behaviour and beliefs, from his period of teaching at the Royal College of Music, to the emergence of the nickname ‘Uncle Ralph’ and all that name entailed, revealing a more complex portrait than has hitherto been proposed of the composer’s relationship with his female composition students, in particular.

War formed a backdrop to much of Vaughan Williams’s life, and his understanding of its effects – whether from his service in the First World War or as a civilian on the home front during the Second World War – evoked some of the most powerful and poignant musical responses of his career, including The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Pastoral, Fifth, and Sixth symphonies. These and other compositions incubated and emerged during tumultuous periods in the realms of musical performance, broadcasting, publishing, and patronage. Vaughan Williams’s navigation of these fields reveals a cross-section of major issues of concern to myriad composers, performers, and institutions, including the limits of political and ideological tolerance, the role of the state in artistic sponsorship, the responsibility of the artist to society, and the nature of musical memorialization.

Vaughan Williams was much involved, as observer and practitioner, with the theatre of the ‘long’ Edwardian age: less with aspects of that theatre we might first think of now (its WestEnd actor-managers, its nascent New Drama) than with its more broadly popular elements.His interest in music hall and musical comedy is evident near the beginning of the London Symphony. He worked for two seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon as musical director of a non-metropolitan troupe, Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. (Sir John in Love would grow from this.) The age’s taste for pageants saw him compiling scores for an episode in the Crystal Palace’s London Pageant and for a Pilgrim’s Progress spectacular: music that connects with Hugh the Drover and his later Bunyan operas. More esoterically, he wrote music for actual and proposed revivals of Ancient Greek comedy and tragedy, also for a resurrected masque (a form he came to love). And he collaborated, or planned to collaborate, with the two most important English theatrical pioneers of the age: Harley Granville Barker, providing music for symboliste drama at his request, and Edward Gordon Craig, readying himself to work with him on a projected (though abandoned) ballet for Serge Diaghilev.

Vaughan Williams’s lifelong association with the English Folk Revival presents an unexpected paradox. Despite his substantial experience as a folk-song collector, holding leading positions in major Revival institutions, composing and arranging music for its performances and producing groundbreaking writings on theory, his contribution – if it is acknowledged at all – is reduced to the view that he was an establishment figure who simply continued the ideas of Cecil Sharp. This caricature of the man and his work – a cypher with nothing original to say and a toff unable to relate to working-class singers – is not only wrong but ignores all available evidence. Benefitting from recent republications of his own writings and new scholarship following the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this chapter positions Vaughan Williams as a tempering influence on the more dubious aspects of the Folk Revival. From his first day as a collector, his methods and approaches were advanced for their time. And while supporting the value of Sharp’s aim of revival, Vaughan Williams’s letters and actions show he directly challenged Sharp’s authoritarian and unsound assumptions. An undogmatic, respectful, and humane observer of the traditional music he encountered, Vaughan Williams still has much to offer to contemporary folk-song researchers.

This chapter situates Vaughan Williams’s involvement with dance in a capacious network of literary, theatrical, choreographic, and visual associations. Dance – performed (such as ballet and modern solos) and participatory (such as folk dance and other forms of social dance) – is crucial to understanding conscious and subconscious efforts at cultural renewal in interwar Britain, efforts that in turn should be understood as a response to the devastation of the First World War and as part of the story of modernist experimentation. In this context, Vaughan Williams’s important composition for the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, first staged in 1931, having been premiered in Norwich as a concert work the year before, was a crucial contribution to interwar dance history. Job’s context is the vibrant, formative, intensely experimental interwar period of twentieth-century British dance history. Job belongs to what cultural historian Susan Jones calls ‘an important transitional moment in British dance’; new experiments in collaborative theatre and dance stirred excitement, and Job was staged amidst a creative ferment that intermingled British and continental artists and visions. Job shared with much experimental interwar British theatre a focus on daring and provocative experiments with dance drama as cultural commentary.