Vaughan Williams Fantasia On Christmas Carols Program Notes Haydn![]() Ralph Vaughan Williams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ralph Vaughan Williams. OM (i. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over nearly fifty 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 1. Vaughan Williams was born to a well- to- do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on Christmas Carols. Fantasia on Christmas Carols Ralph Vaughan Williams. Choir MIDI learning files for works by Ralph Vaughan Williams CyberBass.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (* 12. 1911 folgte der Liederzyklus On Wenlock. Fantasia on Christmas Carols f Vaughan Williams' Fantasia On Christmas Carols transports the listener back to the villages. Program Notes - Yvonne Grover. Fantasia On Christmas Carols. 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 1. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1. The Lark Ascending (1. His vocal works include hymns, folk- song arrangements and large- scale choral pieces. He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1. Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1. 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. Life and career. The judges Sir Edward and Sir Roland Vaughan Williams were respectively Arthur's father and brother. When the young Vaughan Williams asked his mother about Darwin's controversial book On the Origin of Species, she answered, . Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way. He displayed signs of musical talent early on, composing his first piece of music, a four- bar piano piece called . He did not greatly like the piano, and was pleased to begin violin lessons the following year. He was generally happy there, although he was shocked to encounter for the first time social snobbery and political conservatism which were rife among his fellow pupils. His academic and sporting achievements there were satisfactory, and the school encouraged his musical development. His views on religion did not affect his love of the Authorised Version of the Bible, the beauty of which, in the words of Ursula Vaughan Williams in her 1. After a compulsory course in harmony with Francis Edward Gladstone, professor of organ, counterpoint and harmony, he studied organ with Walter Parratt and composition with Hubert Parry. We pupils of Parry have, if we have been wise, inherited from him the great English choral tradition, which Tallis passed on to Byrd, Byrd to Gibbons, Gibbons to Purcell, Purcell to Battishill and Greene, and they in their turn through the Wesleys, to Parry. He has passed on the torch to us and it is our duty to keep it alight. They were not convinced that he was talented enough to pursue a musical career, but feeling it would be wrong to prevent him from trying, they had allowed him to go to the RCM. Moore and Bertrand Russell, the historian G. Trevelyan and the musician Hugh Allen. She and Vaughan Williams grew close, and in June 1. Cambridge, they became engaged to be married. He graduated as Bachelor of Music in 1. Bachelor of Arts the following year. Parry had by then succeeded Sir George Grove as director of the college, and Vaughan Williams's new professor of composition was Charles Villiers Stanford. Relations between teacher and student were stormy. Stanford, who had been adventurous in his younger days, had grown deeply conservative; he clashed vigorously with his modern- minded pupil. Vaughan Williams had no wish to follow in the traditions of Stanford's idols, Brahms and Wagner, and he stood up to his teacher as few students dared to do. Stanford emphasised the need for his students to be self- critical, but Vaughan Williams and Holst became, and remained, one another's most valued critic; each would play his latest composition to the other while still working on it. Vaughan Williams later observed, . Although the organ was not his preferred instrument. He held the position at St Barnabas, in the inner London district of South Lambeth, from 1. He disliked the job, but working closely with a choir was valuable experience for his later undertakings. They honeymooned for several months in Berlin, where he studied with Max Bruch. There were no children of the marriage. He wrote articles for musical journals and for the second edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited the first volume of Purcell's Welcome Songs for the Purcell Society, and was for a while involved in adult education in the University Extension Lectures. From 1. 90. 4 to 1. The English Hymnal, of which he later said, . He had always been interested in them, and now followed the example of a recent generation of enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp and Lucy Broadwood in going into the English countryside noting down and transcribing songs traditionally sung in various locations. Vaughan Williams incorporated some into his own compositions, and more generally was influenced by their prevailing modal forms. After unsuccessfully seeking lessons from Sir Edward Elgar. Instead, he was introduced by the critic and musicologist M. Calvocoressi to Maurice Ravel, a more modernist, less dogmatic musician than d'Indy. For a rising composer it was important to receive performances at the big provincial music festivals, which generated publicity and royalties. Fuller Maitland of The Times and Samuel Langford of The Manchester Guardian, were strong in their praise. The former wrote of the fantasia, . Throughout its course one is never sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new. In the same year he wrote The Lark Ascending in its original form for violin and piano. Joining the Royal Army Medical Corps as a private, he drove ambulance wagons in France and later in Greece. Frogley writes of this period that Vaughan Williams was considerably older than most of his comrades, and . The continual noise of the guns damaged his hearing, and led to deafness in his later years. He revised some earlier pieces, and turned his attention to other musical activities. In 1. 91. 9 he accepted an invitation from Hugh Allen, who had succeeded Parry as director, to teach composition at the RCM; he remained on the faculty of the college for the next twenty years. It was not until 1. A Pastoral Symphony; the work was given its first performance in London in May conducted by Adrian Boult and its American premiere in New York in December conducted by the composer. Kennedy lists forty works premiered during the decade, including the Mass in G minor (1. Old King Cole (1. Hugh the Drover and Sir John in Love (1. Flos Campi (1. 92. Sancta Civitas (1. Vaughan Williams, who thought of himself as a complete Londoner, was sorry to leave the capital, but his wife was anxious to live in the country, and Dorking was within reasonably convenient reach of town. From September to December of that year he was in the US as a visiting lecturer at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. After Holst's death Vaughan Williams was glad of the advice and support of other friends including Boult and the composer Gerald Finzi. The ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1. Fourth Symphony (1. Hubert Foss dubbed it . After his anti- war cantata Dona nobis pacem in 1. Fifth Symphony was completed. Despite their both being married, and a four- decade age- gap, they fell in love almost from their first meeting; they maintained a secret love affair for more than a decade. Whether Adeline knew, or suspected, that Ursula and Vaughan Williams were lovers is uncertain, but the relations between the two women were of warm friendship throughout the years they knew each other. The composer's concern for his first wife never faltered, according to Ursula, who admitted in the 1. Adeline, whose place in Vaughan Williams's life and affections was unchallengeable. At Adeline's behest the widowed Ursula was invited to stay with the Vaughan Williamses in Dorking, and thereafter was a regular visitor there, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. The critic Michael White suggests that Adeline . Its serene tone contrasted with the stormy Fourth, and led some commentators to think it a symphonic valediction. William Glock wrote that it was . He had been working intermittently on a musical treatment of John Bunyan's allegory for forty- five years, and the 1. The reviews were respectful. Vaughan Williams commented to Ursula, . It was the year of Queen Elizabeth's coronation; Vaughan Williams's contribution was an arrangement of the Old Hundredth psalm tune, and a new setting of . He was a leading figure in the Society for the Promotion of New Music. He received an enthusiastic welcome from large audiences, and was overwhelmed at the warmth of his reception. On 1. 9 September, at a crowded memorial service, the ashes were interred near the burial plots of Purcell and Stanford in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey. The basis of his work is melody, his rhythms, in Kennedy's view, being unsubtle at times. For the voice he composed songs, operas, and choral works ranging from simpler pieces suitable for amateurs to demanding works for professional choruses. His comparatively few chamber works are not among his better known compositions. They commented that the composer's vision is expressed in two main contrasting moods: . The first mood, generally predominant in the composer's output, was more popular, as audiences, preferred .
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