‘You can’t place too much store on what’s written down’ (conductor Martyn Brabbins, interviewed in September 2020). This chapter highlights performance issues and philosophies that have arisen from conducting the music of Vaughan Williams. As Hugh Cobbe has noted, ‘the manuscript was merely the first stage for Vaughan Williams’, but for those proceeding beyond that stage, his scores make significant interpretational demands. This is partly due to Vaughan Williams’s (arguably quite generous) attitude to performers, and particularly the agency that his scores give to musicians to make their own choices. Some of the issues raised by Sir Adrian Boult in his correspondence with Vaughan Williams are used as a starting point for interviews with present-day conductors: Martyn Brabbins, Sir Andrew Davis, David Lloyd Jones, Sir Roger Norrington, Christopher Seaman, and John Wilson. Performance for all the musicians interviewed here is about the agency given to performers to explore the ‘inner workings that are often hidden’, the ‘kernel’, and their ‘instinctive reaction’, a position that contrasts greatly with the far more prescriptive notation of other British composers such as Elgar or Britten.

In 1907, fresh from his studies with Ravel, Ralph Vaughan Williams returned to Cambridge for a performance of his recent Towards the Unknown Region, and was captivated by the ‘new spirit’ revitalizing its cultural institutions. His music was warmly received, and at that critical point in his life, encouraged, while its academic dimension helped him to confirm his self-belief and refine his ideas. His music was played, discussed, and appreciated through local performances of his recent compositions, the Wasps, early chamber music, and his first opera, Hugh the Drover. In the years up to the First World War, he experimented with different styles, and in a sympathetic atmosphere discussed his new compositions, his developing views on teaching, and on the place of music in everyday life. His early Cambridge connections continued to play active roles throughout Vaughan Williams’s long creative life.

The general outlines of Vaughan Williams’s politics are encapsulated in a remark to Rutland Boughton: ‘Ever since I had a vote I have voted either Radical or Labour’. He was born into considerable financial security, in a family broadly of religiously Nonconformist and politically liberal bent. Despite living as rentier capitalists (with a private income produced from a landed estate, and in the composer’s own case, later, from music royalties), the family and Vaughan Williams himself felt that sensitivity to class difference, and to a harmonious coming together of the classes, were the bedrock of a progressive politics. Hence his musical style, which blends ‘low’ and ‘high’ aesthetics, and ‘folk’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ styles. And hence, too, his professional work with amateurs, both as a composer and conductor, and also as an advocate for the highest quality of musical production (which he felt to be to the benefit of all), both in broadcasting and in competitions he helped to adjudicate. At the national level his was also an important voice on the panels of both the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain (as well as its predecessor, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts).

This chapter deals with the reception of Vaughan Williams’s music in the musical press on the continent and in North America prior to the First World War. The process played out in three distinct stages: (1) 1901–5, when Vaughan Williams was virtually unknown beyond Britain, and just the appearance of his name was something of a novelty; (2) 1906–9, when the press began to cite performances of individual works and even comment (though briefly) upon them; and (3) 1910–14, when he began to receive critical scrutiny in terms of individual works, general stylistic traits, and his place among his English contemporaries. In all, by the eve of the First World War, Vaughan Williams’s reputation was slowly but surely spreading beyond England.

Some perspective: most of the notices in the foreign journals came from their London correspondents, many of whom were themselves English; in a way, then, ‘foreign’ pertains more to readership than to those who shaped opinions. Thus in New York, for example, it was only in the 1920s that Vaughan Williams became something of a staple in the concert halls and therefore the subject of interest among local critics.

This chapter examines the relationship between Vaughan Williams’s music and ideas of landscape. Although images of landscape and nature have often figured prominently in the reception of Vaughan Williams’s work, closer attention to their historical context reveals that they were highly contested and contingent terms. Vaughan Williams’s preoccupation with landscape hence emerges as a highly productive creative tension throughout his composition output, from his early orchestral tone poems to his final symphony.

Historical revivalism has proved to be an ever-constant thread in the reception of Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries. Question of cultural heritage and national history were pressing ones during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime, both as topics of academic study and subjects of popular appeal. England in this period drew enormous pride from its literary and artistic history, and this history in turn fuelled a national image that helped create a sense of a unique national destiny. For the period’s perceived musical ‘renaissance’, similarly, the important influence of English heritage and the nation’s historical musical canon on new English works was a persistent trope.

It is important, however, to create more nuanced accounts of how historical revivalism figured in English musical modernism. In this chapter, I focus on three main elements in English musical revivalism during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. First, I explore contemporary attitudes towards history, English musicological writing during the period, and new attitudes towards manuscripts and archival research. I then outline how the products of music historians and archival researchers created actual performances of early music via editions and concerts. Finally, I note the expansion of this ‘sounding’ early music into spaces where historical music could be marketed as an element of mass culture.

Although nowadays Vaughan Williams is sometimes associated in popular writing with a Romantic musical style, broadly conceived, this is a view that few of his contemporaries would have recognized. Indeed, his own understanding of the term suggests that he saw himself marking a break with the earlier, largely Germanic Romantic tradition that culminated in Wagner and Strauss.  Nevertheless, several important aspects of his musical and aesthetic views form strong continuity with earlier Romantic thought. These include viewing music as (1) self-expression; (2) the expression of a community; and (3) a revelation or intimation of the beyond.  The tension between these three, partially antithetical, conceptions of music informs his creative output in often productive ways that are teased out over the course of this chapter.

Vaughan Williams lived through times of rapid social change, unprecedented violence – two world wars – and political determination in the aftermath of those wars to build a better world for their survivors. His hopes for the democratization of ‘high culture’, and especially for wider popular participation in music-making, were shared by other influential figures in Britain’s overlapping cultural and educational establishments, though not by everyone: there was an elite backlash, with ‘standards’ maintenance the declared point of contention. (Simple snobbery probably did have something to do with it.)

This chapter explores Vaughan Williams’s work for the cause of cultural democracy, places it in social and political context, and names his most determined opponents. It focusses particularly on his roles as a member of Britain’s Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, set up soon after the start of the Second World War to help maintain civilian morale, and as a founding member of CEMA’s peacetime successor body the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand. It was a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. The chapter compares Vaughan Williams’s outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan in particular, tracing the ways in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape became emblematic of that feature of English political and legal history that tended towards incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of ‘continuity within change’ that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom and of national self-determination.

Vaughan Williams was an eclectic composer and he required a period of twenty years to find his individual voice. Much emphasis has, in the past, been placed on the ‘breakthrough’ of folk song and on the composer’s supposed admittance of technical inferiority during this lengthy period of stylistic discovery. It is argued here, however, that this supposed affliction was due as much to a public-school self-modesty and that, in truth, he was no less advanced than his major peers. Moreover, this chapter attempts to accentuate the importance of his compositional ‘training’, under Parry, Charles Wood, Alan Gray, Stanford, Max Bruch, and Ravel, and, more particularly, the numerous continental and home-grown influences (notably Wagner and Parry), over and above the revelation of folk song in 1903, which played a dominant role in shaping his later style.

Vaughan Williams’s film scores are considered in light of the state of the British film industry from the 1930s into the post–Second World War period, and of the implications of the composer’s bold decision to try his hand at what many of his contemporaries might have regarded as a rather inferior use of music. His contribution of scores for both feature films and documentaries involved some interesting ideas of his own about the genre of cinematic music. The responses of contemporary critics reflected the complexity of British attitudes to the dominance of Hollywood as much as the inventive ways in which Vaughan Williams negotiated the specific constraints upon British film-making during the Second World War and the demands for ‘propaganda’.