AT Reclaiming Beauty, Thomas F. Bertonneau reflects on works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, two twentieth century composers who sought to preserve traditional English folk music. Alluding to this tradition, compositions such as Vaughan Williams’ famous score, The Lark Ascending, evoked the gentle splendor of the landscape of England:

… Vaughan Williams and Holst began to tramp the countryside in Somerset, Hampshire, Essex, East Anglia, and Norfolk, notebooks at ready, to collect and annotate the archaic song-tradition that they well knew was on the verge of extinction. These were the years from 1902 to 1905. In addition to their project of preserving the treasury of the traditional ballads, love songs, and lullabies, both men had the notion that English folksong could become the basis of a novel and truly English concert music. That music would be new because its basis would be more ancient than that of the Germanic conservatory-vocabulary employed by Stanford and his peers.

There was one additional consideration – or rather a conclusion that both Vaughan Williams and Holst drew independently and that struck them as exploitable. The modes and melodic outlines of English folksong reflected the regional landscape; the tunes especially grew from the topography. As in Wordsworth’s lyrical ballad “The Solitary Reaper,” where the singing field-girl’s half-heard song seems to the reporter to express the “natural sorrow, loss, or pain,” that belongs to traditional life, in contact with the earth and season and sky: so too for the fellow folksong collectors, the tunes that they took down from those who sang them seemed saturated with an ethos – a character of place that imprinted itself on its denizens and that they bespoke in song. As Vaughan Williams wrote many years later in his study of National Music (1934), folksong is the expression of “the absolutely unsophisticated though naturally musical man… one who is untraveled and therefore self-dependent for his inspiration [and] whose artistic utterance will be entirely spontaneous and unself-conscious.” Or as Hubert Foss writes of Vaughan Williams himself in his study of the composer, he “grows from the earth”; according to Foss, Vaughan Williams “likes that which grows naturally” and “his roots are in the past.” Of Holst, Wilfrid Mellers writes in Romanticism and the Twentieth Century (1962), that folksong studies taught him how to compose “in lines that are vocally modal [and] free in rhythm,” so that even his purely instrumental inspirations resemble “folk-song or plainsong” in their melodic outlines. [cont.]

— Comments —-

Buck writes:

Only a few years ago, hearing The Lark Ascending, among a handful of other pieces, changed my listening habits overnight.

Perry writes:

Similar to Buck, I can say my listening habits were also changed by hearing such songs, specifically Ralph Vaughan Willams’ Tallis Fantasia. It was the first song that made tears well up in my eyes due to its sheer beauty. Then I found other English pastoral composers such as Holst, Finzi, and Butterworth, and this classical genre became my favorite of all.

Sadly, it seems that one would be hard pressed to find performances of these pieces in England today because they’re generally deemed too English and not nearly multicultural enough (as I understand it, the English people still love them but the elites do not). Edward Elgar’s Caractacus is even looked down upon because it points toward a great British Empire.

Ah, the joys of modern times.

Paul writes:

I look forward to the day when I retire and have more time to search for and listen to Irish, Scottish, English, and American folk music. Even Spanish ballads are nice. I have done some searching and discovering in the past (for example, Enya) and will continue to do so.

I detest musicals (except for a handful). I recall in high school telling my date, after about one-third of the way through West Side Story (years after it had left theaters), to stay but I would wait for her in the lobby. I went only because she wanted to see it on the big screen. She left with me.

I might add that West Side Story was particularly detestable because it glamourized thugs. I used to fight those guys. So I had no empathy for their ilk.

Someone would need to pay me about $500 to sit through Les Miserables. No kidding.

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