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Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody. He wrote many works for amateur and student performance. He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice until his late thirties; his studies in 1907–1908 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped him clarify the textures of his music and free it from Teutonic influences.

Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending . His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and large-scale choral pieces. He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951. Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing was successful and has been frequently staged.

Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams's personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman, who later became his second wife. He went on composing through his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at the age of eighty-five. His works have continued to be a staple of the British concert repertoire, and all his major compositions and many of the minor ones have been recorded. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. October 1872 – 26. August 1958
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Ralph Vaughan Williams: 13 quotes0 likes

Famous Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

“The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

National Music (1934) p. 129.

“There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City – the intuition that I had been there already.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

"Musical Autobiography" (1950); cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) p. 30.

“I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Quoted in Michael Kennedy The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams ([1964] 1992) p. 246, on the authority of Bernard Shore and Sir Adrian Boult.
Said at rehearsals for the premiere of his Symphony No. 4 in 1935.

“Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

"Film Music", The R. C. M. Magazine, February 1944.

“The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Letter to Lord Kennet, 1941; cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) p. 243.

“The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

National Music (1934) p. 123.

“Film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

"Film Music", The R. C. M. Magazine, February 1944.

“Before going any further may we take it that the object of art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means which we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves?”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

"The Letter and the Spirit", in the journal Music and Letters, vol. 1 (1920) p. 88.

“The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Note in the score to The Poisoned Kiss (1936).

Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes about music

“It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Quoted in Michael Kennedy The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams ([1964] 1992) p. 302. He reportedly said this to Roy Douglas regarding whether his Symphony No.6 was meant to be programmatic.

“The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

From an article in The Vocalist magazine, 1902; cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) p. 400.

“Art for art's sake has never flourished in England. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry, like our laws and our constitution, have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with music. 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 – if we seek for art we shall not find it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

"Who Wants the English Composer?" (1912); cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) pp. 101-2.

“In the next world, I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Said to Sylvia Townsend Warner two weeks before his death; published in William Maxwell (ed.) The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1982) p. 168.

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