Ralph Vaughan Williams
The art of making poems is not exclusively a skill of the literate: it occurs orally in pre-literate societies, or in societies with mostly illiterate members. Some of the oral poetry achieves a high level of sophistication, as in the epics of Homer or the works of the Welsh bards. In both cases authorship is either traditionally ascribed or actually identified. But most such poetry is as anonymous as the cave-art of Lascaux. It may be of strikingly good quality, but its exact provenance and date can often not be pinned down; and usually who created it can only be looked at as Unknown — signified, perhaps, by X, the letter used by illiterates on wills and other documents.
In the English-speaking world, the great repository of such poetry is the folk-song. The words, of course, are inextricably an adjunct of the tunes. But if considered on their own, they frequently have an eloquence that is valid in its own right. Here, though, a distinction must be made. Reference is only to authentic folk-songs, not to the vapid ditties of pop-singers who call themselves “folk artists”, but who think that a repertoire of three chords on a guitar qualifies them for that title, musically, and whose verbal competence seldom reaches beyond the most threadbare clichés.
Among the many peoples of Britain and Ireland, and in many parts of the United States, traditional and genuine folk-songs are extraordinarily rich in poetic value. As in any culture, their predominant themes are love and faith. In that, they reflect two of the predominant urges of the human heart. Great writers, everywhere, have tackled both subjects with eloquence and subtlety. But sometimes the simplest folk-lyric can equal the impact of the world’s enshrined masterpieces.
Consider, for instance, the world of divine love, as mapped in the English folk-songs collected by Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams: in “The truth sent from above”, with its flexible rhythms on the redemptive grammar of the Incarnation; in the Coventry Carol, with its plangent lament over the Massacre of the Innocents; or in “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day”, with its astonishing riff on the Passion in the idiom of almost a tarantella.
Or again, consider the Negro Spirituals, not as mangled by the showy coloraturists of decorated excess, recorded in boastfully state-of-the-art studios, but as humbly and truthfully sung by the legendary Roland Hayes, recording them definitively for the ages in his own old age: in “He never said a mumblin’ word”, that devastating evocation of the crucified Christ; in “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, with its homing instinct for Heaven; or in “All God’s Chillun”, that profound voicing of trust in Providence.
The coin of love, always, has two sides: the love of God; and the love of human kind, especially love between men and women. That last is universal; and in the lyrics of folk-songs, it finds fine expression wherever English is spoken. In Ireland, “The Sally Gardens” laments young love in a sorrowing over loss, as does “The Ash Grove” in Wales; in America, “She’s gone away” embodies a devotion that would go ten thousand mile to annul that absence; and in England, such absence has surely never been more sharply voiced than in the Western Wind quatrain — “Western wind, when will thou blow / The small rain down can rain. / Christ, that my love were in my arms, / And I in my bed again!”
Lovers of folk-songs, of their words and tunes, owe a lasting debt of gratitude to the tireless collectors who preserve them before they are irretrievably buried under the slag-heap of contemporary pop-culture: to Edith Fowke in Canada, to Alan Lomax in the United States, and to Ralph Vaughan Williams in England. They tracked down elderly people who still knew the old songs and could sing them; and they wrote down what they heard. They were, in a sense, musical archaeologists; and they devoted themselves to the making of accurate history. With Fowke and Lomax, this was a pure and disinterested work of research and conservation. That was true with Vaughan Williams, too. But in his case, there was more to it than that. He was also a major composer, of symphonies and oratorios; and his absorption of the English idiom of folk-music had a marked effect on his own musical style.
Technically, this is manifest in two aspects of his style: in his harmony and his rhythm. Although he became a true modernist, with a sure grasp of dissonance (notably in the Fourth Symphony in F minor), in his harmonic procedures the echo of a modal past was sometimes audible. And his rhythmic procedures were not confined to the strict patterns of simple or compound time: in English folk-song, he had encountered the irregularity of 5/4 time, as had Glinka in Russian folk-song, and he learnt from this a rhythmic flexibility that especially suited his talent.
These were among the formative influences on him, technically. But for the essence of Vaughan Williams we have to look below the surface, beyond the technique. There is something about the feel of his music that is quintessentially English, redolent of the English countryside. It is something bred in the bone of people of his generation in the West Country. He was born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, in 1872; and when he died, in 1958, he left behind a monument of sound that speaks magnificently of his time and place. Perhaps the most exalted of his many works is the “Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis”: it has a nobility, at once solid and soaring; and in that, it is counterpart of the noble poetry in stone by the unknown architect of Gloucester Cathedral, at once weighty and sublime, with its massive pillars and its high vaulting — this was where the Tallis Fantasia was premièred in 1910, at the Three Choirs Festival. Other and later works were played there, too, as were works by his younger contemporary, Herbert Howells, who also hailed from Gloucestershire, and who began his musical career as organ student at the Cathedral.
The son of a Church of England parson, Vaughan Williams was not a practising Christian. Yet much of his music was highly spiritual. Agnostic he may have been, but he willingly served as the finest hymnal editor of modern times. His “English Hymnal” of 1906 is remarkable for two things: for its inclusion of Gregorian Office hymns, that treasury of anonymous modal composition; and for the incorporation of the two truly magnificent modern hymns, his own “For all the saints who from their labours rest”, and “In the bleak midwinter” by Gustav Holst. Neither composer was a religious believer; but their two hymns are religious masterpieces worthy of Tallis at his best — in vivid contrast to the shoddy rubbish secreted by televangelists.
Tallis, an organist in his youth, at Waltham Abbey, has been called the Father of English Church Music. His younger colleague, William Byrd, also a one-time organist, at Lincoln Cathedral, had a wider range of both sacred and secular composition, and has been justly called the Father of English Music. Both men were deeply rooted in their land and its culture. Their distant heir, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was an equally rooted man. His music rose up out of his native soil. “The Lark Ascending”, for violin and orchestra, links earth and heaven in a way more profoundly familiar to a countryman than to any city-dweller. And in his Third Symphony, the Pastoral, for all its complexity and size, he is at one with the eight hundred simple tunes and texts he collected long ago, which sprang, like him, from the very ground of being.
