Alain Frogley, ed. Vaughan Williams Studies. Cam bridge University Press, 1996. xvii, 241 pp. Reviewed by Edward Macan For many years after his death in 1958, Ralph Vaughan Williams was a figure in eclipse. Considered the doyen of living British composers during the interwar years, his stock began to plunge after World War II-slowly at first, then more quickly after his death. By the early 1960s, when even rela tively conservative composers had adopted elements of serialism (Cop land, Ginastera, and Britten, to name a few), it had become fashionable to view Vaughan Williams as a reactionary composer whose pastoral rumina tions were escapist and narrowly parochial. It is true that the standard bi ography-by his widow, Ursula Vaughan Williams (1964)-and the stan dard study of his music (Kennedy 1964) appeared during the 1960s. Otherwise, though, interest in Vaughan Williams's music was certainly at low ebb in the quarter century between the early 1960s and mid-1980s. In the last decade, however, there have been signs that Vaughan Williams's stock is once again rising. There has been a notable increase in the number of Vaughan Williams recordings released, including both reis sues of historic performances and new releases of previously unavailable works; the first-time availability of the film music, currently appearing on a series of releases by the Naxos label, is especially welcome. 1 During the past few years the academic world has witnessed, after a long dry spell, the appearance of several Ph.D. dissertations devoted to Vaughan Williams, as well as Wilfrid Mellers's (1989) study of the music, and a bibli ographical guide (Butterworth 1990); a second guide is currently in preparation.2 And now, for the first time, comes a collection of essays on Vaughan Williams and his music, entitled Vaughan Williams Studies, edited by Alain Frogley and published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. To say this is a welcome addition to the canon of Vaughan Williams writings, however, is not to say that the merit of the individual essays is as consistently high as one might desire. To be sure, several of the ten essays do break genuinely new ground. On the other hand, there is a tendency in some of the essays to present. conventional wisdom as new revelation. Furthermore, with a couple of notable exceptions, one finds a somewhat troubling lack of engagement with, if not an outright lack of awareness of, new works from both inside and outside the discipline which have the po tential of profoundly affecting future Vaughan Williams research.3 Much of the book is permeated by an overreliance on the same three sources: Kennedy, Ursula Vaughan Williams, and Mellers. 102 REVIEWS 103 The writer who shows the surest grasp of relevant new sources is, not surprisingly, editor Alain Frogley. In his "National Character and the Reception of Vaughan Williams," Frogley argues, for the most part suc cessfully, that the stereotype of Vaughan Williams as a rustic pastoralist out of sync with the twentieth century tells us more about the biases of con temporaneous critics than it does about Vaughan Williams, and that a more balanced assessment is long overdue. Frogley points to recent work by historians and cultural theorists dealing with the important cultural im plications of pastoralist imagery in twentieth-century British thought as in dicative of Vaughan Williams's engagement with (rather than evasion of) mainstream intellectual currents of his era. He argues that the insular (i.e., "peculiarly English") element of Vaughan Williams's music has often been exaggerated by critics, although Vaughan Williams's writings, which are often much more dogmatically nationalistic than his music, may have left him open to some of the charges of parochialism that have been lev eled against him. He notes that the "conservative" element of Vaughan Williams's music was long exaggerated as well. Only since the 1970s, when it has again become "permissible" for art music composers to write tonal music, has it become easier to apprehend the quietly subversive tonality that runs through much of his music.4 Towards the end of his life, when he had become the living embodiment of British music, Vaughan Williams made an inviting target for younger composers, who saw him as a compla cent Establishment lackey. As Frogley notes, this was especially unfair, as Vaughan Williams's socialist and internationalist views were far from the reactionary image of him that eventually emerged.5 While Frogley does emphasize the impact of English nationalism, so cialism, and pastoralism on Vaughan Williams's work, he never identifies the three as being explicitly linked together into a larger, overarching perspective. This is unfortunate. Vaughan Williams's equation of English ness, communitarianism, and pastoralism would seem to link him to a tradition of "radical pastoralism" in British culture that stretches back at least to Blake and William Morris in the nineteenth century, if not to the radical seventeenth-century religious/political sects like the Ranters and the Seekers. I believe that viewing Vaughan Williams as part of this larger cultural/political trend in British history invites a promising new interpre tation of British musical pastoralism, one that emphasizes its engagement with earlier British cultural, political, and social concerns, rather than fo cusing on its lack of engagement with (and apparent reaction against) early twentieth-century musical modernism. It is also unfortunate that Frogley seems to be unaware of work done independently by Bill Martin and myself, which sees this vein of radical pastoralism extending into British popular music of the 1960s and 1970s; this would have enabled 104 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY him to connect Vaughan Williams's work not only backward, but forward in history.6 On the whole, though, Frogley has done a real service by citing a number of relevant recent texts by historians and cultural theorists; a musicologist wishing to pursue an interdisciplinary approach to Vaughan Williams scholarship could easily compile a working bibliography from Frogley's footnotes. Two of the other contributors, Julian Onderdonk and Jeffrey Richards, take up different strands of Frogley's nationalist/pastoralist tapestry. Onderdonk's "Vaughan Williams's Folksong Transcriptions: a Case of Idealization?" (which summarizes some of the key points of his forthcom ing Ph.D. dissertation) focuses on the cultural implications of Vaughan Williams's folksong collecting activities. During the late nineteenth cen tury, as the social changes wrought by industrialization became more acute, English folksong became a major component of an emerging rural ist nationalism that was especially strong amongst the British intelligentsia. Folksong was credited with almost mythic powers of social and cultural renewal, and was seen as a potent tool for reforming popular musical taste. During the past thirty years, folklorists have evaluated the folksong revival of Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams, and their circle from a Marxist perspective, and have tended to see their work in a largely negative light.7 Folklorists point to the social and cultural separation of the urban middle class collectors from the rural agrarian workers who were their subjects, and the way that the collectors idealized (and thus distorted) folksong, as part of a process whose effect was "to reinforce the existing power struc ture ata time of national uncertainty" (119). While not denying that in his notations Vaughan Williams did some times unconsciously simplifY given folksongs to create an idealized version of the tune, Onderdonk notes that at other times Vaughan Williams could be completely scrupulous in his notation of textual and melodic irregular ities, even if he felt the singer had rendered the folksong incorrectly. In short, Onderdonk argues that Vaughan Williams's folklorist critics are un justifiably reductive in their argument that his collecting work was simply a ruse for him to "invent" a folksong tradition. There are too many exam ples where Vaughan Williams lets the singer's irregular performance "speak for itself," even when it must have been tempting for him to edit the performance down to a version that would have more closely corre sponded to his own ideas of effective melodic writing (especially in terms of avoiding excess repetition). Likewise, Onderdonk chides the folklorists for their one-dimensional interpretation of the rural nationalism of the Sharp/Vaughan Williams circle as mere cultural imperialism. It is true that the folksong collectors did use folksong to express a strain of English pastoralist nationalism that tended to the advantage of the upper classes, by focusing on an idealized stable rural society ("stable" being the key REVIEWS 105 word here) as the cornerstone of English greatness.8 On the other hand, they also showed genuine respect for agrarian working-class culture, and their work shows a real utopian impulse through its encouragement of in terclass cooperation and, by extension, the creation of a more egalitarian society. It is therefore surprising that Onderdonk never mentions that both Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp were socialists. As the collectors themselves must have realized, the glorification of folksong contained genuinely subversive undercurrents vis-a.-vis prevailing class relationships, somewhat similar, I would suggest, to the glorification of African American jazz by white American jazz critics earlier in this century.9 Jeffrey Richards's "Vaughan Williams and British Wartime Cinema" takes up a very different strand of Vaughan Williams's nationalism: his music for British propaganda films during the World War II era. In its attempt to rally public. morale during the grueling fight against Nazi Germany, the Ministry of Information sought to project in its films an im age of British character that emphasized tenacity, courage, selflessness, and egalitarianism. For Vaughan Williams, who had made the "construc tion of Englishness" in music one of the goals of his life's work (143), scor ing these films must have seemed like a very natural assignment. Richards gives a fairly expansive survey of the films (which include 49th Parallel, Coastal Command, and The Flemish Farm) as well as the accompanying mu sic. This is most useful, since both the films and (until very recently) the music have been unavailable. He notes that Vaughan Williams's approach to film scoring was different from that of Hollywood film composers, who wrote the music very rapidly in conjunction with a rough-cut of the picture. Vaughan Williams was sent a script and a set of cues, and often composed his score before the film was finished, leaving it to the musical director to fit the music to the finished film. While Vaughan Williams him self saw such film scores simply as a means for a composer "to serve the community directly through his craft if not through his art" (140), it is clear he also felt that some of this film music transcended the purely func tional; Richards cites examples of several themes from the film scores that were to reappear in the Sixth Symphony.!o Furthermore, Richards notes that the films offered Vaughan Williams a forum in which to reconcile his British nationalism with his equally strongly held political international ism.!l Two of the shortest essays in the collection, by Michael Vaillancourt and Hugh Cobbe, are among the most important: both address (from dif ferent angles) the relationship of Vaughan Williams's oeuvre to the German tradition. Vaillancourt's "Coming of Age: the Earliest Orchestral Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams" traces, for the first time, the emer gence of Vaughan Williams's mature style through a series of unpublished orchestral manuscripts (now located in Yale University Library and the 106 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY British Library). Vaillancourt sees 1902 as a watershed year, and notes that in the orchestral work composed between 1902 and 1907 (of which only In the Fen Country survives in any published form) the Germanic influences decrease in direct proportion to the emergence of the hallmarks of the mature Vaughan Williams style: pentatonic melodies, modal harmony, ternary structures, and widely-spaced chord streams moving in oblique or contrary motion. Cobbe's "Vaughan Williams, Germany, and the German Tradition: a View from the Letters," forms a nice counterpoint to Vaillancourt's article, since it draws on Vaughan Williams's writings (including a number of un published letters and forgotten articles) to trace a profound shift between 1890 and 1910 in Vaughan Williams's attitude toward the German tradi tion. Between 1890 and 1900, Vaughan Williams viewed "great music" and German music as essentially one and the same, and was an enthusiastic Wagnerite.12 Soon after the turn of the century, however, Cobbe sees a notable cooling on Vaughan Williams's part towards the German tradition and all it entailed. Of course, he never rejected it entirely-throughout his life, he grappled with the legacies of Bach and Beethoven (and to a lesser extent, perhaps, Wagner and Brahms). However, as his own style co alesced between 1900 and 1910 under the impetus of English folksong, Tudor church music, and French impressionism, he evinced increasingly less sympathy for German music after Wagner; he was cool to Strauss and Mahler, and quite disliked the music of the Second Viennese School. Many years after the emergence of his mature style, when he undertook to help musicians fleeing Nazi Germany, he urged the refugees to respect English musical institutions, lest the resurgent influence of German music overwhelm the revived English tradition he had done so much to bring into being.13 As Cobbe suggests (although perhaps not as straightfor wardly as he could have), the "insular" and "parochial" aspect in Vaughan Williams's polemics about national style must be understood in light of these fears. The remaining five essays are somewhat more problematic. Anthony Pople's essay "Vaughan Williams, Tallis, and the Phantasy Principle" assays to demonstrate how Vaughan WiHiams's justly renowned Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) stems from the turn-of-the-century revival of the Elizabethan/Jacobean "phantasy" genre (encouraged from 1905 by W. W. Cobbett's competitions, which generated 134 "Phantasy" composi tions between 1905 and 1907), yet totally transcends the limitations of the genre.14 Pople achieves this goal admirably enough, but his article loses focus as he attempts to grapple with too many other issues simultaneously. He suggests the unstated program of the Tallis Fantasia is nothing less than to present a journey through English music history. This hypothesis REVIEWS 107 is interesting, but highly subjective, since it assumes precisely the kind of unwritten program that Vaughan Williams was constantly rejecting in con nection with his symphonies.15 He also spends considerable time mulling the reasons behind the revisions of 1913 and 1919, although A. E. F. Dickinson (1962:177-94) undertook a similar task, and Pople never really makes a case for challenging Dickinson's conclusions. I find it curious that Pople never mentions Elgar's Introduction and Allegro of 1904. This work prefigures the unusual antiphonal division of string orchestra and string quartet that is such an important part of the Tallis Fant<:tsia, embraces a similar approach to melodic evolution in a loose ternary structure, and also makes a nod to the nascent early-music movement (Elgar's stated model was Handel's concerto grossi). It seems extremely likely that Vaughan Williams would have been familiar with the piece; the period of his greatest interest in Elgar coincides closely with the date of the Tallis Fantasia's composition (Foss 1950:31). Byron Adams's "Scripture, Church, and Culture: Biblical Texts in the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams" sets out to document the development of Vaughan Williams's religious beliefs over the course of his life. Adams's conclusion is that during the World War I era, Vaughan Williams shifted from a hard-nosed atheism to a "soft" agnosticism, and seems to have ac cepted the possibility-perhaps even the likelihood-of some kind of exis tence after death. He finds specific evidence of this shift in viewpoint (i.e., Vaughan Williams's use of an excerpt from Plato's Phaedo concerning the immortality of the soul as an epigraph to his Sancta Civitas of 1926), and more generally notes that Vaughan Williams did not set any Biblical verse until 1913, but that he then proceeded to do so with increasing frequency during his later years. While I tend to agree with Adams's conclusion, I do not find it particularly revelatory-as Ursula Vaughan Williams said of her husband in her biography of 1964, "He was an atheist during his later years at Charterhouse and at Cambridge, though he later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian" (1964:29). Adams argues that it is necessary to set the matter straight because of the "often-heard argument that Vaughan Williams was some sort of chretien malgre lui" (l09); however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Adams is simply creating a straw-man here, since he cites no commentator, major or minor, who has advanced such an argument.16 I suspect that Adams may, to a certain degree, exaggerate the hard edgedness of Vaughan Williams's youthful atheism. It certainly seems doubtful that he was ever really a materialist along the lines of "the Apostles," a circle including G. E. Moore, G. M. Trevelyan, and Bertrand Russell, with whom he had a great deal of contact during his years at Cambridge. A word that has often been used in connection with Vaughan 108 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY Williams's music is "visionary." Other than listening to the music itself, I think the best way to understand the application of this word to Vaughan Williams's music is through the following statement by the composer himself: [T] he object of an art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties-of that, in fact, which is spiritual. ... The human visible, audible and intelligent media which artists (of all kinds) use, are symbols not of other visible and audible things but of what lies beyond sense and knowledge. (Vaughan Williams 1987:122) This Neoplatonic concept of the nature of music is quite removed from the materialist mentality of the Cambridge apostles. Although annunci ated in 1920, I think it reflects a philosophy that is just as operative in the early masterworks (e.g., the Tallis Fantasia of 1910) as in his post-World War I output. The last three essays in the collection deal more strictly with stylistic matters, and argue against the notion of Vaughan Williams as musical reactionary and rustic country bumpkin. Lionel Pike discusses the impor tance of rhythmic development in the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Sym phonies in his "Rhythm in the Symphonies: a Preliminary Investigation." Pike does succeed in demonstrating the importance of rhythmic develop ment to the overall symphonic process of the three symphonies he chooses to discuss, especially the Sixth. One is again struck, however, by the man ner in which conventional wisdom is presented as new revelation. Pike repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the interplay of duplet and triplet rhythms in Vaughan Williams's music, which he attributes to the influence of Brahms (167). However, as early as 1954 Elsie Payne (whom Pike never cites) emphasized the duplet/triplet interpenetration as a ma jor aspect of Vaughan Williams's style, and demonstrated convincingly that this element of Vaughan Williams's practice emerged as a result of his work with English folksong (Payne 1954:103-26). Pike also fails to distinguish between two very different approaches to rhythm apparent in Vaughan Williams's work. There is the prose-rhythm approach often associated with Vaughan Williams, and evident in the Tallis Fantasia, the Mass in G minor, and the first, second, and fourth movements of the Pastoral Symphony: A slow quarter-note pulse is a con stant element, but there is a weak sense of regular beat groupings (hence the shifting meters in the composer's notation), and a fluid shift between duplet and triplet divisions of the beat. Mter the mid-1920s, however, a second, more motoristic approach begins to appear with greater fre- REVIEWS 109 quency: the speed of the pulse increases, beat groupings become much more regular and marked, and short, repetitive patterns are juxtaposed to generate cross-rhythms (often of a duplet versus triplet nature) and poly rhythms.17 The first, third, and fourth movements of the Fourth Sym phony, "Satan's Dance of Triumph" from Job, and the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony (which Pike discusses) exemplify this approach to rhythm, which seems to have resulted from Vaughan Williams's exposure to inter war neoclassicism in general, and in particular to his friend Gustav Holst's music of the 1920s.l8 I have discussed these two rhythmic approaches in greater detail elsewhere (Macan 1991:263-77). Pike does not cite my work, which is unfortunate, since I believe that a major challenge facing Vaughan Williams commentators is to address how these two approaches are synthesized in the music of Vaughan Williams's final twenty years, the era that takes in all three of the works Pike discusses here. Arnold Whittall's "Symphony in D major: Models and Mutations" ad dresses the quietly subversive treatment of tonality in the Fifth Symphony to demonstrate that Vaughan Williams is capable of projecting a sense of ambivalence and doubt that is totally in tune with the twentieth-century artistic modernism he supposedly spurned. Whittall is especially interested in the ramifications of the opening sonority (a D-major triad over a C pedal point). The movement is cast in a sonata-allegro format, but the predictability of the thematic structure is at odds with its tonal instability, since C and F seem to have as much claim to "tonic" as D (even at the close of the movement, when the Dover C sonority returns without bring ing a sense of resolution). Resolution, Whittall argues, comes only in the fourth movement, after a final reappearance of the Dover C sonority, when D is finally confirmed, and the music is freed to rise peacefully into the stratosphere, metaphorically speaking, into a realm beyond human comprehension. Even here, Whittall argues, "all traces of a question mark cannot be entirely erased ... Vaughan Williams's Fifth uses its 'human side' to raise questions about 'eternity' which are by definition unanswer able in terms of human experience" (212). The work is, therefore, emi nently modern in spirit. Whittall's detail and insight is first-rate, if occasionally long-winded, although his anxiety to establish Vaughan Williams as a "good modernist" now seems a bit dated, since, as he also points out, one could just as easily claim him as a precursor of what he calls the "anti-modern" movement typified by composers such as Gorecki, Part, and Tavener (188). One also wishes that Whittall (and some of the other authors, for that matter) had engaged Richard Greene's important new study of Gustav Holst (see note 3). Greene's analysis of Holst's music on semiological lines, and his identification of various pastoralist musical metaphors in Holst's style, has 110 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY obvious relevance. to Vaughan Williams scholarship-the two composers shared certain stylistic gestures as a result of their common interest in English folksong and Tudor church music-and offers an obvious comple ment to Whittall's hermeneutic interpretation of the Fifth. The final essay in the collection, Oliver Neighbour's "The Place of the Eighth Among Vaughan Williams's Symphonies," succeeds better in its sub text-discussing Vaughan Williams's symphonies as a coherent body of music-than it does in its stated goal, which is to elucidate the special nature of the Eighth. Neighbour notes that Vaughan Williams did not view his symphonies as a consciously planned sequence of works with spe cial significance until the last decade of his life: by the time of the Eighth Symphony's publication (1956), when he had finally agreed to sanction the numbering of his symphonies, his view seems to have changed some what. Neighbour avoids implying that one should attempt to read the se quence as autobiographical or even programmatic (in the Lisztian sense). He argues, however, that there are certain philosophical preoccupations which Vaughan Williams returns to again and again in the symphonies, perhaps more single-mindedly than in any other genre he worked in. Neighbour finds a pervasive "near despair at the human condition"; "the search for stoicism in [life's] contemplation"; and "a counterbalancing be lief in things of the spirit" (227). Neighbour argues that some of the sym phonies develop one or another of these themes in particular: the Third ("Pastoral") is concerned with stoic contemplation, the Fourth with de spair, and the Fifth with the possibilities of spiritual transcendence. This formulation seems to me to be the first successful explanation of Vaughan Williams's symphonies as a unified body of music, and it is only when he turns to the place of the Eighth Symphony in the group of nine that his inspiration falters. In an attempt to identify some sort of overrid ing idea that predominates in the Eighth, Neighbour cites a number of apparent cross-references Vaughan Williams makes in this symphony to his own earlier works, as well as to the works of other composers. How ever, beyond identifying a very vague "human quality" (232), Neighbour never clearly articulates what, if any, deeper correspondence these quota tions may have, so that at the end he is left merely stating the obvious: the Eighth is a lighter work than the other symphonies. In sum, then, Vaughan Williams Studies is a mixed bag. Unfortunately, Cambridge University Press does nothing to help the book's cause. The volume contains no information on the contributors, virtually no bibliog raphy, and only the most perfunctory of indexes; it is hard to avoid the im pression that the publisher skimped wherever possible, which hardly seems justifiable based on the cost ($59.95 in the U.S.). And while the au thors do sometimes cite each others' essays, it is usually in a perfunctory REVIEWS 111 way: with the possible exception of Frogley, they never seem to really en gage each others' work in the manner of (to give but one example) the magisterial collection of essays on Wagnerism edited by William Weber19 (Large and Weber 1984). But perhaps this is an unfair comparison. Mter all, there has now been a century of serious study of Wagner and his music, but, as Frogley notes, "in many ways, the work of Vaughan Williams research has only just begun" (xvii). Perhaps the present volume is not a giant step in this direction, but it is an important one, nonetheless. Notes 1. The release of the film music is to be especially welcomed because it focuses attention on Vaughan Williams's engagement with the popular culture of his day, a facet of the composer's life work that has been in danger of being submerged by the emphasis placed on his "serious" works. 2. The most important new study of Vaughan Williams's music to appear in the last decade is Mellers (1989). Butterworth (1990) was the first bibliographic guide to appear; a similar guide by Alison McFarland is forthcoming from Scolar Press. 3. Within the discipline, Richard Greene's (1994) important new study of Gustav Holst's music, which makes extensive use of semiological analysis, would certainly seem to offer some important new avenues to analysts of Vaughan Williams's music; for instance, it identifies and discusses a number of distinctive "pastoral" metaphors in Holst's music that have obvious counterparts in Vaughan Williams's output. From outside the discipline come a number of studies by histo rians and cultural theorists which attempt to evaluate the work of Vaughan Williams, Holst, and contemporaneous British composers from a cultural and po litical, rather than from a strictly musical, perspective. Among the most important are Harrington (1989), Stradling and Hughes (1993), and Boyes (1993). It is fair to say that all of these studies arrive at some debatable conclusions, and Stradling's and Hughes's English Musical Renaissance, while an important work and genuinely groundbreaking in many ways, is undermined by its unexamined but pervasive premise that British art music of the 1860-1940 era must in fact be inferior to con temporary Continental music. Nonetheless, this new body of work does shed new light on connections between Vaughan Williams's music and contemporary cul tural currents, and offers opportunities to evaluate Vaughan Williams's achieve ments in a new light. 4. Arnold Whittall discusses this issue in connection with the Fifth Symphony in his essay in the present volume. I would also point to the Third ("Pastoral") Symphony, where the quiet, placid surface of the music does not succeed in ob scuring the sense of uncertainty, and at times anguish, conveyed by the frequent bitonal episodes. 5. Currently, the authoritative study of Vaughan Williams's politics is Harring ton (1989). For an attempt to reconcile Vaughan Williams's nationalist and inter nationalist perspectives, see Jeffrey Richards's "Vaughan Williams and British Wartime Cinema" (145-46) in the present volume.