response 1 of 31:

Oct 25 12:29 UTC 2002

I believe the traditional radio announcer pronunciation of RVW's first 
name goes back to the mournful little speech Sir Adrian Boult recorded 
on the first LP, on the Everest label, of RVW's 9th Symphony.  It 
began, "We had hoped that our beloved friend, Rafe Vaughan Williams, 
would have been with us here in the studio for the recording of his 
last symphony, but his death took place just seven hours before we 
began our work on it."

response 3 of 31:

Oct 26 13:41 UTC 2002

Ah, a fellow RVW aficionado!  My recollection that RVW himself 
preferred strangers to call him "Ralph" instead of "Rafe" is from the 
Michael Kennedy bio, which I haven't seen in at least twenty years so 
who knows?  It made a kind of sense, barely, but of course Ursula's 
book rules.

My take on the symphonies, fwiw:

1. The Sea Symphony has never appealed to me as much as the others.  
It's a mighty choral work in its own right, but it's young RVW before 
he found his voice.  

2. The London Symphony comes closer.  The business about emerging from 
the fog and then receding back into it is nice, and the second movement 
is a wonderfully moody nocturne.  And of course everyone loves the 
orchestral imitation of a harmonica in the third movement.

3. The Pastoral is my favorite.  (It's also RVW's third "vocal" 
symphony if you count the soprano solo in the last movement.)  It is a 
magical piece of work for me and for lots of others, but I think its 
appeal is limited.  The critic who said it reminded him of a cow 
looking over a fence probably expressed the majority opinion: this is 
not exactly a pulse-pounding excitement.  

4. Very prickly, yes, but better than anything that followed it, in my 
opinion.  The second movement might be the greatest single orchestral 
movement he ever wrote.  The finale, with that fugal epilog, is 
actually frightening.  One of the RVW symphonies I've heard performed 
live.  I was terrified that someone might start clapping during the 
long pause before that final angry staccato chord, but no one did.

5. An absolutely beautiful piece of music.  The scherzo is a small 
masterpiece in itself.  The slow movement is one of those enthralled, 
suspended-in-time pieces.  A better use of his Pilgrim's Progess music 
that the opera itself, imho.

6. The flowering of RVW's late style, for which I have the sort of 
exasperated affection we have for our parents when they get old and 
cranky.  But it's a masterpiece nevertheless.  It is the most Mahlerian 
or Shostakovichoid of his symphonies.  A real drama is played out.  The 
first movement is the gem -- better than the famous pianissimo last 
movement, imho.  The coughing and rustling of the audience during the 
finale in the one live performance I attended was excruciating.  Stick 
with the CD, and listen to it on headphones.

7. Really just a suite of music from his soundtrack to Scott of the 
Antarctic.  More late-period music, not a big favorite of mine.  The 
stupendous fortissimo organ passage in the glacier movement is neat-o, 
though.  My old Boult/London LP has John Gielgud reading aloud the 
passages from Shelley, the Bible, Donne, Scott's journals, that RVW 
placed at the head of each movement in the score.  This practice was 
apparently not what RVW intended, and was discontinued thereafter.

8. I absolutely love this little symphony.  I have nothing to base this 
opinion on, but I suspect that in it RVW was answering Beethoven's 
8th.  It's quirky, a little silly, "unbuttoned" as Beethoven said of 
his own 8th.  Like Beethoven's 8th, it's relatively short in duration: 
it fits on one side of an LP.  Anyway, I love it.  You smile all the 
way through it.  It's got to be the most approachable and listenable of 
his symphonies, but not very characteristic and for that reason maybe 
not the best introduction to his music.

9. One last tremendous effort by an old man, and the strain shows.  But 
that's part of the music's appeal, I think.  The image of old RVW 
ascending to heaven on glittering clouds of glory at the very end is 
unmistakeable, but surely not intended by RVW hiself.

A very approximate list of my favorites in descending order might look 
like: 3, 5, 4, 6, 8, 2, 7, 9, 1.  4 and 5 are tied, really.  8 would be 
higher, but it's so jokey and slight.

response 5 of 31:

Oct 28 21:14 UTC 2002

Kevin: Hey, RVW's "English Folk Song Suite" (for band) is incredibly 
catchy!  So are Holst's two Suites for band.

Michael: If you're referring to Kennedy's _The Works of Ralph Vaughan 
Williams_, it's better described as a discussion of his music than a 
biography, though it has biographical material in it.  I browsed 
through the 1980 edition - the section on RVW's personal life, and 
Kennedy's account of his own friendship with RVW - and found at a 
glance nothing about the pronunciation of his name.

A few more comments on the symphonies:

The Sea Symphony (which isn't really any more of a symphony than 
Sibelius's Kullervo is) I agree doesn't sound very characteristic of 
the composer's later developed style - though in some places it does.  
I don't hold that against it.

I really ought to get to know the Pastoral better.  I don't have a CD 
of it, which is one barrier.  I think it was Constant Lambert (or 
possibly Elizabeth Maconchy) who came up with the "cow looking over a 
gate" line, to which I reply, after Churchill, "Some cow! Some gate!"  
Despite its reputation, the Pastoral is not an eventless quiet musing, 
but a work of strength and passion.

The Fifth is the symphony I've most closely studied, partly in 
connection with a marvelous concert performance of it, by the late San 
Jose Symphony of all people, that I once heard.  (I'd forgotten about 
that when I last wrote.)  I'm impressed with the careful detail work 
that puts it together, from the shaping of the harmony in the opening 
theme on.  I'm sure this applies equally well to all his work.

I'd guess that the Sixth requires a riveting performance of this 
(properly) riveting music.  After the implacability of what comes 
before, the finale should be sat through in stunned silence!

I consider the Antartica much superior to the reputation it gets from 
its origin.  Lots of works that aren't film music get described as 
sounding as if they were (it's a favorite comment of Shostakovich-
bashers), and the Antartica would probably be susceptible to such 
remarks even if it didn't have a film-music origin.  But the very fact 
that the comment is made in such a loose way suggests it's over-used.  
If one didn't know the work's origins, would it be a fair criticism?  
Not in some other cases, and not I think here.

You're quite right, to my understanding, that the inscriptions should 
not be recited.  They're printed in the score; they should be printed 
in program notes and liner notes.  That's all.  I have the later Boult 
recording on LP (London), which does this.

If you like the fortissimo organ passage in this work, you should 
definitely get "Job" if you don't have it.

Yes, the Eighth is great fun.  The sound is entirely different, but the 
spirit reminds me of some of Malcolm Arnold's earlier works (before he 
tried to recast himself as Hamlet).

response 7 of 31:

Oct 29 00:00 UTC 2002

Or "The Lark Ascending".  There's gorgeous music for you, and it's 
basically quiet and contemplative, like the Pastoral Symphony is 
wrongly supposed to be.

The Radio 3 page of "Discovery" programs 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/discover.shtml> has a 
particularly good program on the Tallis Fantasia, partly because it's 
comparative.  They play the original Tallis hymn, which I'd wanted to 
hear for years but never got a chance.  They analyze the richness of 
the opening chord as being caused by its being a widely-spaced chord 
played mostly on open strings, and compare it to the openings of 
Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler" and Ives' "The Unanswered Question," 
which are similar, have much the same effect (especially the 
Hindemith), and whose composers were more explicit about the emotional 
connotation they were after than RVW was.

A while ago I went looking for videos of films he'd scored.  
Found "49th Parallel" and watched that.

response 9 of 31:

Oct 30 17:18 UTC 2002

The programs on that BBC web site (which I discovered through Ken 
Josenhans recommending their radio link) are of variable quality, but 
mostly pretty helpful.  I haven't listed to the one for the RVW 5th 
Symphony yet, nor (I must confess) have I heard all of the program for 
the Tallis Fantasia - ran out of time while I was listening to it.

But I did listen to two Tchaikovsky programs in full (my brother is a 
big Tchaikovsky fan, as so many tyros in the classical field are, and I 
wanted to preview them before recommending this to him), and found the 
program on "Romeo and Juliet" rather wayward (presenting the piece very 
much out of chronological order, and imposing a distinctly eccentric 
conception of its construction), but the one on the 4th Symphony was 
excellent.

Coming back to RVW, what do you think of his symphonies _as_ 
symphonies?  The strict 19th century conception of a symphony as a work 
in sonata form had pretty much gone by the wayside by his time, but 
there's still a sense in which some works are more symphonic than 
others.  (See Robert Simpson's essay in volume 2 of the Penguin 
Symphony.)  I get the impression that the Sea and London Symphonies, at 
least, are really more multi-movement tone poems than real symphonies, 
and had the composer died after them, he wouldn't be thought of today 
as a symphonist at all.  (Remember that he didn't number the works 
until years later, retroactively, and that many other composers have 
used the word "symphony" to describe works not subsequently thought of 
as symphonies at all - Sibelius's Kullervo, Goldmark's Rustic Wedding, 
Felicien David's extravaganzas, etc.)

Nevertheless I heard them as works of symphonic heft, the way that La 
Mer is a work of symphonic heft.  And there's no question in my mind 
that the central trilogy, numbers 4-6, are not only real symphonies, 
but that they're important symphonies and, as a group, one of the most 
outstanding sequences ever written, better _as a sequence_ than 
Shostakovich's war symphonies, numbers 7-9.

("Better than Shostakovich" is very high praise from me.)

response 11 of 31:

Nov 1 17:33 UTC 2002

It just occurred to me:  If you hear some really bad Vaughan Williams music,
or some good music very badly played, does it make you want to ralph or want
to rafe?  ;-)

response 13 of 31:

Nov 1 23:00 UTC 2002

Is there any bad RVW?  Lots of great composers wrote some really bad 
music - Shostakovich certainly, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, even Schubert - 
but I can't recall any from RVW.

Above, I was speaking of two different levels of approach towards the 
ideal symphony.  By "symphonic heft" I mean weight, seriousness, a 
certain degree of complexity, a lack of just making pleasant sounds for 
the heck of it (not that there's anything wrong with that).  RVW's Sea 
and London have that, so to my ears does La Mer; Bartok's Concerto for 
Orchestra I'm not so sure of.

But the "true symphony," the level which RVW's 4-6 attain but (to my 
ears) the earlier works do not, has a concision and an inter-knit logic 
that goes beyond the previous virtues.  The London Symphony is very 
attractive and very well-constructed, but it has an episodic nature and 
not so much of the inter-knit construction.  By that I mean things like 
the repeated interweaving of a motive or interval throughout the work.  
If the London does that, it doesn't so much sound like it does it.

response 15 of 31:

Nov 2 19:41 UTC 2002

In a letter to the October "Journal of the RVW Society," Charles Long 
offers a possibly revisionist version of the "cow looking over a gate" 
quip:

Doubtless every single member of the RVW Society is wearily familiar 
with the seemingly disparaging comment by Philip Heseltine (aka Peter 
Warlock) about 'a cow looking over a gate' in relation to Vaughan 
Williams's A Pastoral Symphony (June 2002 RVW Journal, page 6). But how 
many are aware of the context in which that alleged remark was made? 
The quotation comes, in fact, from Cecil Gray's 'Peter Warlock: A 
Memoir of Philip Heseltine' published in 1934. In full, the relevant 
passage runs as follows: 'after a performance of V.W.'s Pastoral 
Symphony he [Heseltine] exclaimed, "A truly splendid work!" and then, 
with a smile, "You know I've only one thing to say against this 
composer's music: it is all just a little too much like a cow looking 
over a gate. None the less he is a very great composer and the more I 
hear the more I admire him."'

response 17 of 31:

Nov 29 08:16 UTC 2002

I've been thinking about the numbering and naming of RVW's symphonies.

His earliest symphonies originally came out with no numbers, just 
names, like this:

A Sea Symphony (1909)
A London Symphony (1913)
A Pastoral Symphony (1921)

I particularly like the unpretentiousness of the indefinite article on 
each of these: so much less declamatory than THE Eroica or THE Great C 
Major, and it fits with the unpretentiousness of the music.

Due partly to the titles, and partly to the relative lack of 
traditional symphonic construction in these works, if VW had left it at 
that, he might have gone down in musical history along with Felicien 
David and Karl Goldmark, composers who wrote works they called 
symphonies but who aren't generally thought of as symphonists.

But then he wrote a series of works with very tight, truly symphonic 
construction, without numbers and also without titles:

Symphony in F Minor (1934)
Symphony in D Major (1943)
Symphony in E Minor (1947)

Then came:

Sinfonia Antartica (1952)

And then he wrote another symphony in D (minor, this time), and I guess 
the possibility of confusion was what caused him to give it a number 
and retroactively number its predecessors:

Symphony No. 8 in D Minor (1955)
Symphony No. 9 in E Minor (1957)

A lot of commposers in this situation might have left the Sea Symphony, 
or even all of the first three, out of the numbering system (cf 
Tchaikovsky's unnumbered Manfred Symphony among many others).  But now 
they're all known by the numbers as much as by anything else.

But it occurred to me, in a whimsical mood, to try to name the others.  
The first three all had programs, in the sense that there was a clear 
concrete image or set of extramusical images each was trying to 
convey.  It seemed, and still seems, to many people that Nos. 4-6 are 
equally clear in their imagery.  The composer denied any such messages, 
but if he hadn't denied it, we might have had these entirely apt 
titles, each based on the forward-looking imagery that many critics 
have claimed for them:

A War Symphony (1934)
A Peace Symphony (1943)
A Nuclear Holocaust Symphony (1947)

Rename the next one in the same format:

An Antarctic Symphony (1952)

And we're stuck with the last two, which don't have the same kind of 
extramusical connotations, but still have distinct characters.  With 
some diffidence, I'd name them:

A Comic Symphony (1955)
A Cryptic Symphony (1957)

I can't imagine doing such a thing for many other composers.  RVW's 
symphonies are more individually distinct from each other than the 
symphonies of any other composer I can think of.  He's the anti-
Bruckner.

response 19 of 31:

Feb 24 21:35 UTC 2003

I see the Spano/Atlanta recording of the Sea Symphony won some 
Grammys.  Has anybody here heard it?

response 21 of 31:

Mar 8 04:59 UTC 2003

Yes, I have actually heard that recording: I wrote a review of it for WCBN
when it came out.  It's been a long time since I listened to it, though, so
I can't remember the details.  I remember feeling that it was a very
passionate and competant recording.  If anyone's interested I can dig up the
review.  It's not very in depth, since it was just a brief description for
DJs scanning for music to play.

response 23 of 31:

Mar 25 05:42 UTC 2003

sorry for the delayed response: college life recently forced me to become
busy.  I will retrieve the review sometime!