Ralph Vaughan Williams

RALPH VAUGHAN- WILLIAMS was a figure of great importance to British music in the first half of the twentieth century, one of the founders of the movement for a new national school of English composition. He was born into a clergyman's family of Anglo-Welsh ancestry, a distant descendant of Charles Darwin. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and with the leading figures of late 19th-century English music, Sir Charles Stanford and Sir Hubert Perry, at the Royal College of Music in London, where he was a fellow student of the composer Gustav Holst and the conductor Leopold Stokowski. He then went on to study composition in Berlin with Max Bruch and with Maurice Ravel in Paris. From the early years of the twentieth century he began to collect and research the musical folklore of Norfolk County, recording over 140 songs from various rural regions and lecturing on musical folklore. After his involvement in the First World War he became Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. In parallel he was organist and active conductor of the Bach and Handel Society choirs. He advocated the creation of a national professional music based on musical folklore and the revived traditions of the English masters of Tudor times. These ideas defined the specific character of his music, which incorporated modal elements and rhythmic freedom derived from folk song and old medieval tunes. This gives his style a vivid individuality and at the same time a typically English character. His wide-ranging oeuvre encompasses various genres: six operas (most famously Sir John in Love, based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor), ballets, nine symphonies, various orchestral opuses such as the three Norfolk Rhapsodies, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra, cantatas and oratorios, piano, vocal, organ and chamber music, and arrangements of folk songs. He was also one of the first English composers to actively create music for the cinema.