The Choral-Orchestral Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Autographs, Context, Discourse combines contextual knowledge, a musical commentary, an inventory of the holograph manuscripts, and a critical assessment of the opus to create substantial and meticulous examinations of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s choral-orchestral works. The contents include an equitable choice of pieces from the various stages in the life of the composer and an analysis of pieces from the various stages of Williams’s life. The earliest are taken from the pre-World War I years, when Vaughan Williams was constructing his identity as an academic and musician—Vexilla Regis (1894), Mass (1899), and A Sea Symphony (1910). The middle group are chosen from the interwar period—Sancta Civitas (1925), Benedicite (1929), Magnificat (1932), Five Tudor Portraits (1935), Dona nobis pacem (1936)—written after Vaughan Williams had found his mature voice. The last cluster—Thanksgiving for Victory (1944), Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the ‘Old 104’ Psalm Tune(1949), Sons of Light (1950), Hodie (1954), The Bridal Day/Epithalamion (1938/1957)—typify the works finished or revisited during the final years of the composer’s life, near the end of the Second World War and immediately before or after his second marriage (1953).

This authoritative account of Vaughan William's musical life portrays the story of a great composer's career, and traces the course of music in England during his lifetime. The edition includes a comprehensive list of his work, and an index.

"For this comprehensive account of Vaughan Williams's musical career, the author has had unrestricted access to the composer's private papers. This book includes many letters which illuminate Vaughan Williams's intentions and contains quotations from his writings and from contemporary reactions to his music over nearly sixty years. Besides the straightforward narrative of a full and busy life of music, there is a critical commentary on the works themselves. Special importance is attached to the authoritative catalogue of works which forms the first appendix. All known published and unpublished works are listed here, with full details of instrumentation, revisions, and first performances. Particular attention has been given to accuracy of dates. All the composer's own programme notes are reprinted. For the first time it is possible to have a full picture of Vaughan Williams's creative activities before 1905 as well as of his career after he became firmly established." --Book jacket.

(Meredith Music Resource). This exciting work, by one of today's most highly regarded music scholars, brings new light to the more than two dozen works by Ralph Vaughan Williams for military band, brass band and wind ensemble. Vaughan Williams' unique relationship with fellow composer Gustav Holst is examined as well as his relationships with personnel at the Royal Military School of Music, the BBC and the Salvation Army. There's much more in this hard-to-put-down volume for conductors, performers, students and aficionados! "...the contributions of Jon Mitchell have become a cornerstone of serious scholarship in our field. ...a welcome insight into the life and works of Vaughan Williams. Contained within are valuable insights into the world of Vaughan Williams that, for the majority of us, will be an undiscovered country." Craig Kirchhoff Professor of Music/Director of Bands University of Minnesota (a href="http://youtu.be/8U3fN1SPXVE" target="_blank")Click here for a YouTube video on Ralph Vaughan Williams' Wind Works(/a)

This catalog was originally published in 1964 as part of Michael Kennedy's The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Now published separately, with minor revisions and corrections to the main catalogue of musical works and to the bibliography of Vaughan Williams's prose writings, this work also includes a list of folksongs from the original volume.

Critical annotations and supportive text will direct scholars to the most relevant studies in their discipline Multiple indices make it easy to locate items within the guide

Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the greatest English composers. He studied under such teachers as Parry, Charles Wood, and Alan Gray, and later in Germany with Max Bruch and in France with Ravel, developing a strongly individual style that marked him out, with Holst and others, as one of theleaders of the twentieth-century revival of English music. He never hesitated to express his views in plain, vigorous prose, and he became well-known for his essays which combine typical common sense with a true composer's sensitivity. This collection contains all his writings that he thought worth preserving in book form. The themes and subjects discussed in these essays reflect his wide range of interests and cover such topics as nationalism in music, the evolution of folk-song, and the origins of music, as well as pieces on individual composers such as Beethoven, Gustav Holst, Bach, Sibelius, Arnold Bax, andElgar. Also included are more general reflections of the making of music, its purpose and effects, and the social foundations of music.

Vaughan Williams' nine symphonies are among the finest pieces of music written in the twentieth century, each one revealing new aspects of Vaughan Williams' formidable creative personality. But for many years these works were undervalued by imperceptive critics - and Vaughan Williams did himself no favours by joking, with misplaced humility, about what he felt was his own lack of expertise. Lionel Pike's penetrating analysis of all nine works reveals the hidden complexities that lie below the surface. He argues that RVW' has been consistently denied his rightful place in twentieth-century music and in the history of the symphony, and that close investigation can uncover elements of construction that show the mind of a genius at work. LIONEL PIKE is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway (University of London), and has been organist of the college chapel since 1969. For four years he was Dean of the Faculty of Music in the University of London. He was a chorister and assistant organist at Bristol Cathedral, and at the University of Oxford he was organ scholar of Pembroke College.

The book comprises a selection of some 750 letters of the composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, selected from an extant corpus of about 3,300. The letters are arranged chronologically and have been chosen to provide a cumulative pen-picture of the composer in his own words. In general the letters reflect VW's major preoccupations: musical, personal and political. It was not VW's way to discuss his inner creative processes but he does discuss his music, once it had been written: for example there is much to illustrate the process of 'washing the face' of his major pieces before, and after, they had reached the concert platform. There is correspondence with collaborators such as Gilbert Murray, Harold Child and Evelyn Sharpe who provided texts; with his publishers (mainly OUP) about printing scores and parts; with conductors such as Adrian Boult and John Barbirolli about performances. He was in regular correspondence with fellow composers such as Gustav Holst, George Butterworth, Gerald Finzi, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Alan Bush and Rutland Boughton. There were his pupils: Elizabeth Maconchy and Cedric Thorpe Davie amongst others. A series of close personal friendships is well represented: his Cambridge contemporary and cousin Ralph Wedgwood, Edward Dent, and latterly Michael Kennedy. Above all there are insights on his lifelong devotion to his first wife, Adeline, and his growing friendship with Ursula Wood, who was to become his second wife.

Serious scholarship on the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is currently enjoying a lively revival after a period of relative quiescence, and is only beginning to address the enduring affection of concert audiences for his music. The essays that comprise this volume extend the study of Vaughan Williams's music in new directions that will be of interest to scholars, performers and listeners alike. This volume contains the work of eleven North American scholars who have been recipients of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship based at the composer's own school, Charterhouse, which was created and has been supported by the Carthusian Trust since 1985. This wide-ranging and detailed collection of essays covers the spectrum of genres in which Vaughan Williams wrote, including dance, symphony, opera, song, hymnody and film music. The contributors also employ a range of analytical and historical methods of investigation to illuminate aspects of Vaughan Williams's compositional techniques and influences, musical, literary and visual.