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23 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Julian Onderdonk, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, Ceri Owen, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    Vaughan Williams in Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 1-8

  • Summary

    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.

  • Chapter 19 - Literature

  • from Part IV - Arts
  • Edited by Julian Onderdonk, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, Ceri Owen, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    Vaughan Williams in Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 161-168

  • Summary

    Drawing upon their respective expertise in early twentieth-century literature and music, Matthew Ingleby and Ceri Owen explore the centrality of literature within Vaughan Williams’s work and career, demonstrating that his literariness was not simply an outgrowth of his personal artistic proclivities, but rather was mediated by several institutions that were key to the production of a new sense of English national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. By contextualizing Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and choices for musical settings – including his interest in historically remote, non-contemporary, and Anglophone writers and texts – it is argued that such choices should be read less as evidence of the reactionary, conservative nationalism with which he has often been associated, and more as an indication of his participation in forward-looking currents within twentieth-century literary culture. Ingleby and Owen conclude by proposing that, while the nation may have been the frame through which Vaughan Williams often articulated a complex relation to modernity, his powerful interest in internationalist figures such as Walt Whitman and William Blake suggest that his cultural nationalism formed part of a broader humanitarian aspiration, one that was implicitly indebted to his literary imagination.

Page 1 of 2