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.

For most British composers active in the twentieth century, the actual writing of music was only one of many skills they were obliged to develop. Many composers were also actively engaged in the fields of teaching, performance, and administration, and could supplement their income with a variety of other jobs, ranging from adjudication and private tutoring to broadcasting and music criticism. Additionally, the growth in popularity of radio, television, and film opened up new opportunities for composers in lighter genres that had hitherto not been available, either to supplement their contributions to more traditional concert hall repertory, or as dedicated positions in their own right. This chapter will examine these various career paths and responsibilities, looking at how British composers’ training, abilities, interests, and sociocultural status shaped and directed their vocational trajectories.

ON THE EVENING of 12 October 1910, Ralph Vaughan Williams celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday by directing the premiere of A Sea Symphony at the fourteenth triennial Leeds Festival. Rehearsals earlier in the week had tested composer and performers alike. The singers’ abilities and endurance were pushed to their utmost by both the virtuosic music and Walt Whitman's complicated texts, and one can only imagine how Vaughan Williams – never the most easy-going of conductors – must have reacted when, during a rehearsal on 9 October, his music stand collapsed under the weight of the enormous manuscript score (one wit blamed the structural failure on ‘a heavy C’). Despite the challenges leading up to the concert, the Sea Symphony received a brilliant rendering, and won widespread acclaim from critics. J. A. Fuller Maitland writing in The Times, presciently speculated that the 1910 Festival might later be remembered as ‘the Festival of the “Sea Symphony”’, while the Manchester Guardian's Samuel Langford called it ‘the finest piece of sea music that we, a seafaring people above everything, possess’, adding that its debut definitely placed ‘a new figure in the first rank of our English composers’.

There to meet Vaughan Williams on the front line was Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, his former composition teacher at the Royal College of Music. Stanford too was at the Leeds Festival, the fourth (and final) for which he served as principal conductor, and had taken a close interest in his former pupil's new piece, going so far as to assist him at the podium during rehearsals. As it happened, Stanford also had a nautically themed work prepared for that year's Festival: Songs of the Fleet, Op. 117, a sequel to his Songs of the Sea (1904). Unfortunately for Sir Charles – and perhaps more than a bit frustratingly, in light of Vaughan Williams's triumph – the songs’ premiere on 13 October met with a distinctly cool response. Some of this may have had to do with Harry Plunket Greene's lacklustre solo performance (due to a ‘bronchial attack’, according to Henry Newbolt), which nearly all critics noted, but many also compared the set unfavourably to Songs of the Sea.

IT IS DIFFICULT to describe how the sea has fired the imaginations of British composers, performers, and concert audiences without lapsing into clichés of the most hoary and timeworn sort. Yet the fact that such clichés exist (and indeed, that they are so difficult to avoid) also stands as testament to the pervasiveness of the sea – both as a subject and as a source of inspiration – throughout British musical history. A bevy of distinguished British artists, ranging from Henry Purcell and Arthur Sullivan to Benjamin Britten and Judith Weir, have taken it as their theme in both comic and serious works, cultivated and vernacular alike. The sea has formed an iconic backdrop to sailors’ shanties and pierside brass bands; has inspired deeply personal laments for lost loves and transcendent accolades to humanity's potential; has influenced the creation of symphonies and string trios, madrigals and motion picture scores, operas and orchestral songs. In short, few subjects have received as much attention from as many generations of British musicians, attesting to its significant place within the nation's creative soul.

Yet for all of its storied history and transcendent power, the sea also plays entirely prosaic and everyday roles in British life: it is a site of work and play, facilitates enough trade and transport to unite a kingdom (and for many years, sustain an empire), and functions as both a means of access to and a barrier against the rest of Europe. Every day, its effects are felt in hundreds of ways, large and small, that are closely integrated with a sense of national and cultural identity, and which transcend complex boundaries of time, place, class, and aesthetics. Small wonder, then, that the sea's profound impact on the British musical imagination can reside in even the most ordinary and banal of settings – for example, a governmentsponsored weather report.