🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
🎼

Music

Ralph Vaughan Williams

1872–1958 · English

English pastoral school / English musical renaissance

Ralph Vaughan Williams was the leading English composer of the first half of the 20th century. Drawing on English folk song and Tudor church music, he forged a distinctively English voice across nine symphonies, choral works, hymns and operas. He also collected folk songs and edited The English Hymnal.

How to spot them

  • ▸Rich, modal string harmonies with an ancient, church-like glow — the Tallis Fantasia uses a string orchestra split into two groups plus a solo quartet, echoing like a cathedral
  • ▸A solo violin trilling and soaring freely above soft orchestral chords, as in The Lark Ascending
  • ▸Gently rolling folk-song melodies and pastoral, misty harmony — critics nicknamed the style "cowpat music"
  • ▸Folk-tune arrangements such as Greensleeves with harp and flute, or brisk military-band marches in the English Folk Song Suite

Key works — listen

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910)

For double string orchestra, premiered in Gloucester Cathedral at the Three Choirs Festival

Recording: Orchestra d'archi dell'esercito degli Stati Uniti · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The Lark Ascending (1914 (revised 1920))

Romance for violin inspired by George Meredith's poem; frequently voted Britain's favourite classical piece

Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934)

Arranged by Ralph Greaves from music in Vaughan Williams's Falstaff opera Sir John in Love

A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1) (1903–09)

Choral symphony setting Walt Whitman, premiered at the Leeds Festival in 1910

Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7) (1949–52)

Developed from his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic, with wind machine and wordless voices

Quick-fire facts

  • •His first name is pronounced "Rafe"
  • •He was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, and was a great-nephew of Charles Darwin
  • •He wrote nine symphonies, including A Sea Symphony, A London Symphony, A Pastoral Symphony and Sinfonia antartica
  • •He was music editor of The English Hymnal (1906), for which he wrote the tune "Sine Nomine" ("For All the Saints")
  • •He collected English folk songs in the field from 1903 onwards
  • •He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and later the Royal Garrison Artillery during the First World War
  • •His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey
  • •His Overture to The Wasps was written for a Cambridge Greek play production in 1909

Drill it — 9 cards

1 / 9new card

Sources

  • Encyclopaedia Britannica — Ralph Vaughan Williams
  • Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Vaughan Williams, Ralph