Before I begin, I just want to comment on a phenomenon that I find very odd indeed. Nearly all my posts have page view counts in single or double digits, and by double digits I mean like 30 max. My page on Tim Winton's The Turning, on the other hand, has scored 300+ page views, plus a +1! And, yes, I made sure that my settings don't count my own page views.
The most bizarre thing is, The Turning is the one book that I know that I'm definitely not going to write about in my final exam because it just didn't click with me. Not only was it my worst (as in, received the lowest mark) in-class essay all year but I had trouble finishing it. I quite liked reading Winton's children's books as a kid, but I'm not really one for the somewhat dark realistic fiction that The Turning offers, plus over the past couple of years I've been finding it somewhat difficult to get my mind to settle and concentrate on reading, particularly when it's about bad things happening to good people.
Maybe all of those page views and the +1 were actually from other students who share the same views as I do and just want a quick study guide...?
Anyway, back to Vaughan-Williams. Vaughan-Williams was heavily influenced by English folk songs, Tudor music and the poetry of Walt Whitman. He was very "English" and his music often reflected his nostalgia for the English countryside. He was born in Gloucestershire in 1872 and later studied music at Cambridge University and at the Royal College of Music in London. He began his career as a church organist, but in 1905 he also became the director of the amateur Leith Hill Music Festival and the next year became the editor of The English Hymnal, which he wrote some hymn tunes for. Between 1919 and 1939, he was also the professor of composition at the Royal College of Music. In 1935 he was awarded the Order of Merit for services to music and in 1939 his music was banned in Germany for apparently being "anti-Nazi propaganda." Like most other patriotic Brits of the time, Vaughan-Williams did join the army for WWI, working as part of the field ambulance services in the Royal Army Medical Corps. The exposure to gunfire damaged his hearing, causing him to become deaf later on in his life.
As I said before, Vaughan-Williams was heavily influenced by folk songs and all other things purely English. In fact, he also went around collecting them (just like Bartók and Kodály in Hungary). He arranged these folk songs and often incorporated them into his own compositions. He also took a lot of inspiration from English literature and from older English composers, writing a Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and a Fantasia on Greensleeves. In the Fen Country was a more original composition by Vaughan-Williams that was based on the style of English folk music. Of course, with such a large compositional output, not all of it was based on English stuff- some of his works were also inspired by composers from other countries like Bach, Handel, Debussy and Ravel. In fact, he studied orchestration under Ravel.
The work that I'm going to focus on this time is Ralph Vaughan-Williams' Songs of Travel song-cycle, based off poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson, who was Scottish, not English. Ha. Anyway, it's composed for piano and baritone, and was originally published in two volumes. The accompaniment was later orchestrated by Vaughan-Williams himself, but I'm going to concentrate on the piano versions for now. Vaughan-Williams' piano accompaniments are usually simpler than those written by his contemporaries, but that's fine by me as it means that I can actually somewhat play the piano accompaniment to The Vagabond. Anyway, simplicity certainly doesn't mean ineffective in this case.
The entire song cycle is about a young man as he experiences all kinds of different trials and tribulations and lives and grows during his journey throughout life. These are themes that are also found in song-cycles by Schubert and Mahler, specifically Winterreise and Die Schoene Mulleren by Schubert and Lieder Eines Fahrenden Coselli by Mahler. The first eight songs were first performed in London in 1904 but there was one other song that was left unpublished at the time. It was later discovered by Vaughan-Williams' wife after his death, and was published in 1960. (That sounds like a long gap, but Vaughan-Williams died in 1958. Why Vaughan-Williams didn't finish the song between 1904 and his death is beyond me. Maybe he only thought to write it towards the end of his life, or maybe he ran out of inspiration.)
Most of the songs have little musical references to each other. For example, Youth and Love has a few references to the first part of the melody of The Vagabond in its piano part. There are also some instances of word painting (using the music to reflect the meaning of the words). For example, the second syllable of "below" in The Vagabond is sung on a relatively low note, a downward leap of a minor 7th from the note before it. Youth and Love has the words "and far on the level land" all on the same note, as well as a high, loud note for the word "cries" and a pianissimo low note that decrescendos for the word "gone."
Apart from that I don't really have much more analysis on this work. I think we're going to learn more about it in class this Thursday (wait... that's tomorrow), though, so maybe I can update this part then as well as flesh out (and re-organise) the stuff on Vaughan-Williams' life and compositional output. Until then, happy listening (and performing)!
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