Ralph Vaughan Williams, Raw Emotion, and JMW Turner

I am actively trying to use this blog to highlight wells of inspiration and artistic vigor that occur in our own time, but I today I would like to take my readers (all two of you) back a little less than a century to gaze in slow wonder at the sublimity of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many English composers drew upon folk music as a source of raw material for their high-art masterpieces. This trend might be traced back to the 19th century's Romantic movements, both in music and in art. It is no coincidence that, in the mid 1900's the pastoral subjects of John Constable became popular just before folk music became popular in orchestral music.

But at the end of the century, new artistic forces had arisen. Classical, stuffy pastoral landscapes like Constable had given way to the wide swaths of paint applied by JMW Turner. No longer were attention to detail and accuracy of effect the criteria of excellence, but instead quality and clarity of impression, feeling. In his paintings, Turner took the real world and distilled it down into a blurry field of color and light, giving the observer not a historical account of what happened, but the feeling that the event or scene elicited.

Vaughan Williams does for music what Turner did for painting. Definitely taking a page from the playbook of Gustav Mahler - whose music has been said to "move like glaciers" - Vaughan Williams knits folk themes into a wide, slow moving quilt of raw feeling. There is no frill, there is no baroque ornamentation on his music; there is nothing to distract the listener as the music flows on in a single-minded, instinct-driven direction.

His players hold their notes so long, the strings and horns are so plentiful, and the punctuation so sparse, his music reminds us of the melodramatic fare that accompanies movies like Lawrence of Arabia. That's because Vaughan Williams shares the fate of another English composer, Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets, in that his music has been (and continues to be) relentlessly imitated by Hollywood soundtrack hacks.

If you'd like to know what I mean, here is one of Vaughan Williams's most famous works and one of my favorite pieces of music ever, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.