Skip to main content

The genius of Vaughan Williams

Apologies if it seems this is a heavy music week, though to be fair my earlier post was only using music to get to catchphrases. We've seen heavy defenses of Parry as an English composer recently - I think Ralph Vaughan Williams should get more recognition.

But, you say, this is the man who wrote the Classic FM listeners' favourite piece, The Lark Ascending. True. But Vaughan Williams has tended to be sneered at by the serious music mafia. After all, the man was a 20th century composer who liked tunes! Terrible.

I think part of the problem with appreciating RVW is that some of his big orchestral pieces verged on the mediocre - his true genius was in small music. Yet this isn't the kind of stuff that sniffy musical bigwigs bother with. I admit I'm biassed. I live all of five miles down the road from Down Ampney where Vaughan Williams was born. But the bias mostly comes from having sung some of his music that is wonderful.

The particular piece I love most is called Bushes and Briars. It's based on a folk song (which is another thing the musical great and good have against him. Folk songs are for silly people with beards), and it's a lovely tune, but what makes the piece is RVW's exquisite harmonies.

I have an absolutely rubbish recording for you to listen to (you'll probably have to turn your volume up). It's of my old college chapel choir (including me), and it was recorded over 35 years ago by the high-tech means of sticking a portable cassette recorder at the back of the concert hall. So the sound quality is awful. But I hope you will get a slight feel for the wonder of those harmonies.



Image from Wikipedia

Comments

  1. Truly beautiful! The recording sounded pretty fine on my computer too. I agree you learn to really love his music if you sing it - we sang his arrangement (not sure if that's the right word) of Shakespeare's Serenade to Music. That is a heavenly combination. First part here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo99F2pG1oc&feature=related

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Clare. I hadn't come across the Serenade to Music piece - lovely.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm rather fond of the Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm more than fond of it - it's bloody brilliant. Again, it's relatively small stuff. The 'theme' is just a hymn tune (one Tallis wrote under orders from Elizabeth I as there wasn't much music congregations could sing). Yet he works wonders with it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope