ave Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams and His World, ed. Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley (University of Chicago Press, 2023)

U Chi Press announced a sale on their musicology books, and the only one I really wanted was this collection of essays. I consider VW to be one of ... what? "the greatest"? Too dogmatic. "my favorite"? True, but too weak. "most profound, most moving"? maybe ... composers out there, and I enjoy reading about him, despite his living a placid and uneventful life. (Well, there was the ménage à trois, but let's ignore that.)

The book has a lot of interesting articles, discussing his visits to the US, his time teaching composition at the Royal College of Music (did you know that his students included Anna Russell? the musical parodist? VW complained that her Sullivan pastiches were getting into his head and interfering with his own music), lots on the technique and placing of his film music.

But the best article is the last one, by the conductor (and frequent writer) Leon Botstein. It's a sweeping discussion of the nature, meaning, and evaluation of VW's music. It begins with a fine description of the same argument I've been making about what I call "the hidden city." By the time of VW's death in 1958, music like his was in critical disrepute, while high modernism, especially atonality, had the prestige. His music was thought dull and insignificant. But over the decades since, the cult of modernism has faded, and "the emergence of new music with overt spiritual and expressive ambitions, evident links to popular cultural forms, and free of a lingering distaste for nineteenth-century Romanticism" has also also encouraged a re-evaluation of earlier 20th century music. VW shares these aesthetics, especially that of creating music informed by a deep philosophical basis. Botstein then goes into that basis, attributing this particular form to VW's specific generation, citing his friendships, began as students at Cambridge, with the philosopher G.E. Moore and the historian G.M. Trevelyan. (VW also knew Bertrand Russell there, but he had less impact.) Botstein traces how VW's views on the function and ethics of music, apparent in his compositions, reflected the work of these thinkers (and also that of the historian H.A.L. Fisher, who was VW's brother-in-law). VW himself read history, music not being a topic for an undergraduate major in his time.

Botstein concludes by comparing VW to two slightly younger prose writers who shared a similar aesthetic. Surprise, they're Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Specifically and most interestingly, he says that Tolkien, despite his deep Catholic faith, showed in his fiction "a resolute, universal, and essentially secular sensibility," with which I agree - Tolkien was deliberately trying not to limit his audience to fellow believers. In this, and in the religious sensibility which nevertheless drapes his works, Tolkien was like VW, who, though not a churchman, was open to the spiritual and moral world attached to religion - he wrote a lot of religious music. But where Tolkien seems to reject the modern (overstated, but it's there), VW sought to integrate it.

Botstein writes a lot about VW's holding beauty in music as a virtue, rather ignoring works like the brutal (but also curiously jolly) Fourth Symphony and the nihilistic Sixth. But that could be part of his engagement with the modern. Anyway, fascinating essay.