Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hunt for English Folk Tunes

A 20th-century English composer’s quest to preserve English folk songs led him to finding his own creative style.

Ralph Vaughan Williams signs the guestbook at Yale University at age 82. Public Domain

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s best music has a popular, almost earthy quality that he shares with very few 20th-century composers. In other words, he is nice to listen to. Pieces such as “The Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’” have a natural sound that is very different from the forced experiments of his modernist contemporaries. This is undoubtedly the reason why he is so often performed and recorded.

He is also enjoyable in a different way than his great European predecessors are. The majesty of Williams’s music is simpler than the grandiosity of Beethoven’s, and more melancholy than the classical symmetry of Mozart’s. While this was an intentional move, it took him many years to forge this distinctive style. It is a story involving rigorous study and hundreds of miles of journeying over the English countryside.

Nurture Over Nature

Williams was interested in music from an early age, resolving to become a composer while still a schoolboy. Unlike Mozart, however, he wasn’t a child prodigy. His best work dates to later in life. (This is the reason he is old in most of his pictures.) While many of the best composers—especially German ones—came from musical families and received direct training from youth, Williams was the son of a vicar. His original style was a product of thorough study and carefully honed discipline.