The Music of 1909–1914

While Vaughan Williams’s immediate post-Paris compositions demonstrate new levels of technical facility and expressive individuality, they are better thought of as representing a transitional stage between his period of apprenticeship and his postwar career. As a whole, works from this era are stylistically inconsistent, but evince the development of a compelling and idiomatic compositional voice. Most conspicuously, pentatonicism, modes, whole-tone scales, and octatonicism increasingly augment or replace the fin-de siècle chromatic tonality that had dominated much of Vaughan Williams’s music up to that point, sometimes extending practices drawn from English folk song or hymnody, contemporary French music, and Tudor-era works (real or imagined). Some of his early compositions engage with such materials and practices, but usually in brief or isolated contexts; the works completed after 1909 more thoroughly integrate them into their underlying design, suggesting a fundamental reconsideration of their potential function. The range of works undertaken during this period is also quite wide, spanning incidental music for plays to two large-scale symphonic works, with appropriately varied musical language reflecting either the provenance, origins, or external associations connected with each piece. However, Vaughan Williams also seems to be increasingly aware of his proclivity for the grandiose gesture, and demonstrates a growing desire to bring it under control.