"History is a nightmare from which I am
trying to awake.”
–
Ulysses by James Joyce.
The words of poet Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s
novel are spoken in the historical moment of
1904 Dublin, a time which to our contemporary
eyes appear halcyon days of dulcet and pacific
calm. The full horror of history which the
20th Century was about to unfold, though
foreshadowed, lay at least a decade into the
future. Still, the comment raises a central
issue facing every working artist: the effect
of one’s historical period and the events
within it upon the psyche and the creative
output of the artist.
Certainly the history of the 20th Century
(which continues unaltered into our current
millennium) appears particularly nightmarish,
unprecedented in scope and intensity. One need
only mention the mass slaughter of two World
Wars, the increased mechanization of life and
the corresponding atomization of the
individual, the enslavement of the population
under increasingly effective totalitarian
regimes of State and Corporate power, the
increased alienation from Nature
disintegrating the ancient cultural links to
past times and universes, and the explosion of
technology that forms the alien and polluted
environment in which the modern human lives
and which threatens to end that existence on
Earth, to see why some observers of the
history of Western art of the 20th Century are
led to comment that the art documented the
collective mental breakdown of the Western
psyche. The extent of that mental breakdown
culminated, by mid-century, in the likelihood
of destruction of the entire human species by
all-out nuclear war. What had been neurotic
and psychotic had reached the suicidal. “May
you live in interesting times,” runs the
familiar adage. All of us know by now that the
statement is a curse.
Perhaps from our perspective of the increasing
menace of the 21st Century, we take a kind of
perverse pride in assuming that our particular
“interesting times” are singularly bad, that
no time in history has been as nightmarish. It
is highly likely that humans living in other
awful times of the past also considered their
situation as uniquely horrifying: witness the
almost unceasing proclamation of “The End
Times” over the last 2,500 years every time
the slightest crisis arose. Are our times any
worse than those that saw the West invaded by
Mongols, assaulted by Islam, and slain by the
Black Death? One of the oddly comforting
truisms of history is that despite all the
horrors and nightmares, life goes on. Children
are born, families are raised, work is done,
art is created. The horrors of the Medieval
Era did not stop the construction of the
Gothic cathedrals; Napoleon’s conquering of
Vienna did not halt Beethoven’s completion of
the Eroica Symphony (though it did
force him to change its dedication); the
world-altering slaughter of World War I, which
effectively destroyed an entire generation of
Englishmen, did not prevent Ralph Vaughan
Williams from composing his Pastoral
Symphony and The Lark Ascending.
By the time of Stephan Dedalus’ plaint in
1904, Ralph Vaughan Williams was already 32
years old, had completed two symphonies, and
had begun his deep study of English folk music
and Tudor religious music. His long life (he
died in 1958) and his equally long artistic
career (he composed two symphonies in his
80’s) spanned the crucial turning points of
the history of the West. Born during the
zenith of the British Empire (1872), his life
extended through the depths of that Empire’s
disintegration, his death coming at the nadir
of the Cold War (1958). Given the cultural and
artistic history of his times one would expect
jarring and anxiety-ridden disintegrative
music, that hallmark which we usually call
“Modern.” Yet Vaughan Williams was able to
create works of utter and compelling beauty,
works that transcend the historical
limitations of the time of their composition.
It has been said that Joyce (Vaughan Williams’
rough contemporary) wrote as if the world was
well lost to Art. Vaughan Williams composed
music as if the world was lost to Beauty.
The story goes that the inspiration for
Vaughan Williams’ 3rd Symphony, the
Pastoral, was sparked during the depths of
World War I, when Vaughan Williams, now in his
mid-40’s and serving in the Ambulance Corps,
would drive his ambulance up a ridge
overlooking a valley to watch the sun set on
the landscape. There he heard a distant bugler
practicing his call and perhaps he also heard
the wordless, feminine song of Nature that
were to emerge in his Pastoral Symphony
to such stirring effect. Certainly one is
almost shocked that the horror of World War I,
which murdered and brutalized an entire
generation, could find such utterly beautiful
and contemplative expression in Vaughan
Williams’ symphony, a Pastoral that
equals those of Beethoven and Sibelius. I have
constantly returned to it, its spell
undiminished even after 30 years of repeated
listening. If there was ever an example of a
creative artist transcending his times, of
creating beauty from the ruins, Vaughan
Williams is it.
The Lark Ascending, Vaughan Williams’
other work that spanned the World War, is
similarly transcendent of its historical time,
revealing a beauty and peace that never fails
to move one to the depths and carry one to
exalted and sublime heights. Moreover, it has
this affect on everyone to whom I have ever
played it, from 6-year old children,
head-banging Heavy Metal enthusiasts, to
people who swear that they don’t like
Classical Music.
Vaughan Williams has been called the musical
poet of the English countryside, the center of
that English school of composers who sought
inspiration in and attempted to give musical
expression to the English landscape. Vaughan
Williams’ deep connection to Nature permeates
his music, even when the work is not strictly
a tone poem named after a particular English
locality. Everyone who speaks the English
language partakes of the cultural tradition of
that language, and senses, though perhaps
subliminally, the landscape from which the
language grew. It takes only a small leap of
imagination for speakers of English (and
especially those who are acquainted with its
art and literature) who are not residents of
England to find a spiritual kinship in the
English countryside, whose spirit of place
resonates so deeply and sympathetically
throughout English culture. Though only
occasionally spectacular and rarely
overwhelming, the English landscape contains a
subtle beauty that allows a sense of
well-being and a sense of being at home, an
understated sense of Nature and humanity
evolving and changing hand in hand. The hand
of history, of almost limitless depths of
time, leads one throughout the land. Even at
its most wild and most remote, Nature seems
touched by the hand of man. The landscape is
that eternal background upon which the scroll
of time and history unfold, that island harbor
surrounded by the sea, that genius locii
that reveals its own eternal secrets to
those who will listen.
The English landscape finds as deep an
expression in Vaughan Williams’ music as it
does in the literary works of Wordsworth,
Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence; perhaps more
so, since music is capable of depths of
expression impossible to utter in words.
Vaughan Williams captures the mood of the
landscape often through long contemplative
musical movements, subtly and delicately
scored, suffused at times by that signature
English melancholy that is so often a prelude
to the realization of ultimate peace. Bombast
is absent, as largely is dynamic climax,
melodies are often built up of fragments based
on the imagination of meditation, rather than
the Classical patterns of formal logic.
Significantly however, the world of words
appears in many of Vaughan Williams’ works: he
wrote music based on the poetry of
Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman and others in a
variety of forms, from symphony, to masque, to
choral works and song cycles. Even The
Lark Ascending’s inspiration is sourced
from a poem. The sung word and the effects
obtained by mass singing are deeply rooted in
his work. Some of his more contemplative
scoring for woodwinds seems to have an almost
choral-like quality, the individual
instruments almost like individual singers.
Despite the literary associations with some of
Vaughan Williams’ music, it is not limited
strictly to the programmatic. Vaughan Williams
resisted a too-literal interpretation of his
music: like the dimensional historical depth
of the English landscape, his music operates
on multiple levels, the strictly
representational being only one. Even in such
a seemingly literal work such as the
transcendent The Lark Ascending, the
lark serves as a metaphor, a jumping-off place
for violin playing that is at heart ineffable.
One need not know the title of this
composition, nor its origin in a poem, to
grasp the music and to be utterly moved by it.
There is no doubt that Vaughan Williams’
feeling for nature and the English landscape
was reinforced by his deep study of English
folk music. Like his contemporaries Bela
Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, Vaughan Williams
collected folk songs in the countryside,
preserving a extant musical tradition that was
about to disappear. The immersion into
European folk-music connects one to an ancient
psychic universe, and to a musical language
based on Modes, a language which Classical
Music since roughly 1600 has largely ignored.
Though he never quoted folk melodies directly
in his symphonies, they do appear as almost
subliminal templates, hinting rather than
depicting. His Fantasia on Greensleeves,
which does directly use two old folk songs, is
perhaps emblematic of the sources of his
inspiration; at least one of the sources
claiming authorship of the ancient folksong
Greensleeves was King Henry VIII.
Vaughan Williams’ deep involvement with the
English ecclesiastical composers of the Tudor
and Elizabethan periods (he served as Editor
of The English Hymnal) was another
source of his inspiration, both in theme and
form. The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas
Tallis, Williams’ first recognized
masterpiece (1910), draws from that
transitional era of the English Reformation,
the composition rooted in the ancient Phrygian
mode, leading to a complex emotional intensity
that seems to defy the later simplification of
Western Music into the Classical Major/Minor
scales. This modal language, used in many of
Williams’ melodies, creates a new depth, and a
different emotional dimension to the
distinctive thread of English melancholy in
his music. Melancholy alters from simple
sadness, depression, despair, or desolation to
reveal a new bittersweet dimension, a
revelation that the sadness of life is not its
ultimate and final meaning. The emotional
complexity of his Modal musical language
allows Williams’ to confront the “nightmare of
history” unflinchingly, deeply aware that
emotions cannot be distorted into simplistic
dualistic frameworks. His language permits the
expression of mutually exclusive, seemingly
self-contradictory emotions simultaneously.
Duality is penultimate, and thus, is never a
final statement of reality, either of humans
or of Nature. The illusion of duality seems to
be the central theme of all truly great
artists, as it is of mystics, and of the
esoteric aspects of religion throughout time.
Although Vaughan Williams was to write a
goodly amount of ecclesiastic and religious
music, he did so from a non-sectarian point of
view, indeed one can scarcely call him a
believer in the conventional sense. Like all
great artists, Vaughan Williams understood the
meaning behind religious symbols and creeds,
and was able to utilize them creatively
without the need of formal acceptance and
submission to a creed.
Williams’ mastery of orchestration, which
seems to have at least partly resulted from
his studies with Maurice Ravel in 1908-9 is
another hinge of Vaughan Williams’
inspiration, themes, methods, and musical
language. The four works I’ve mentioned –
Fantasia on Greensleeves, Fantasia on a Theme
by Thomas Tallis, The Pastoral Symphony, and
The Lark Ascending – (which happened to be
the first works of my own initiation into the
spell-binding world of Vaughan Williams’
music,) are as good an entry point as any to
anyone wishing to experience his music. Not
only are these individual works eminently
beautiful on their own, they are also easily
accessible and listenable. They open the
listener to the rest of Vaughan Williams’
musical world. Though there are any number of
excellent recordings of his music, the
performances by Adrian Boult as conductor
still stand out as primary, Boult having often
performed the premieres of many of Williams’
works. Hugh Bean’s violin performance in
The Lark Ascending (with Boult conducting)
sets the standard for this wonderful piece of
music. The LP record version’s second side,
which mates the final movement of the Sixth
Symphony with The Lark is one of
the grandest mood-building segues ever of the
LP format. Perhaps the only exceptions for me
are the Morton Gould performances of the
Tallis and Greensleeves fantasias, which
possess an emotional intensity that some other
performances of these two works seem to lack.
Similarly, if there ever was an indisputable
rationale for owning a highly neutral,
true-to-timbre, and musically revealing audio
system, the music of Vaughan Williams is
surely it. Much of his music is subtle and
full of dynamic nuance, the orchestration
delicate and based on differing voices amidst
the woodwinds, violins, and violas, and moving
with a slow pulse that needs to be coherently
tracked if it is not to disintegrate into
unrelated fragments. The demands of the music
also argue strongly for the ownership of a
first-rate turntable: the CD format’s
difficulty with timbre, subtle dynamic
changes, nuance, and the maintenance of pulse
can easily lead to fatal distortion of the
music’s meaning. One need also mention the
excellent recording quality of the many Boult
performances (including the complete nine
symphonies) on the English EMI label that mate
beauty of recording with the music’s own
inherent beauty as a further benefit of LP
listening.
The desire to experience beauty has always
been one of the primary motivations for
listening to music, or experiencing any of the
Fine Arts for that matter. It strikes me as
singularly odd that the achievement of beauty
as a central artistic goal has all but
disappeared in writings about music and art in
the last century. It appears that the very
word ‘aesthetic’ is now a contradiction.
Instead of beauty, we hear about
“self-expression,” “solving technical
problems,” “challenging and confronting the
audience,” or promulgating an “ism,” be it
psychological, political, or social. The
creation and communication of beauty is not
even mentioned. At their most insane, certain
schools of thought deny that art has any
meaning whatsoever, that the artist is
oblivious of any ‘message,’ and that the only
truly creative work is that of the critic, who
de-constructs the work to reveal its social,
cultural, political, and psychological
conditionings and determinism. Ernest
Hemingway once stated that a 100% accurate,
completely fool-proof Bullshit Detector was
essential for every writer. One is threatened
with deafness as the Bullshit Detectors go
off.
Still one wonders about this disappearance of
beauty as a core achievement of a work of art.
Is the world indeed lost to Beauty and to Art?
The English writer Colin Wilson attempted to
create an “existential criticism” of music in
his Chords and Dischords, an essential
tenet of which was that to be a great artist
was also to be a great human being: that the
quality of the artist’s vision of life and
reality ultimately sets the limits to the
greatness of the artistic creation. A deeply
disturbing fact of the last forty or so years
is the complete lack of the emergence of any
artists that can even be considered major, if
not, indeed, great. Where are our Mozarts,
Joyces, Blakes, Turners, or Beethovens? Is
their something peculiar about our own “ruins”
that precludes the emergence of great artists?
Ralph Vaughan Williams is certainly a major
composer: his sixty-plus years of
compositional creativity resulted in nine
Symphonies, five Operas, and an extensive
number of works in a variety of musical forms.
The fact that his historical life overlaps
that of ours is significant: we share the same
nightmare of history. That he was able to
create works of beauty out of that nightmare
of ruins that rival any artist in history
leaves no doubt that he is indeed also one of
the greatest. Those who hold the experience of
beauty as a central meaning of life will
certainly love his music; those attempting to
awaken from the nightmare of history will
surely find a path. Or, at least, a road sign.
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