The Music of 1951–1958

The pace and scope of Vaughan Williams’s writing in the 1950s is remarkable by any measure, but his place in British music also began undergoing a complicated process of renegotiation. As younger composers like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett rose to international prominence, certain critics accused Vaughan Williams of embodying an outdated approach to English music that embraced provinciality, amateurishness, and conservatism, both political and aesthetic—charges that his indifference to serialism (among other high modernist practices) seemed only to reinforce—even though such portrayals misrepresented and oversimplified his musical significance and philosophy. Moreover, his completion of three further symphonies during this period—all of which feature transformative cyclical themes, large-scale structural links, and consecutive hexatonic juxtapositions—show that his imagination remained active and his skills undimmed when it came to large-scale works (which also included the choral work Hodie and the massive Violin Sonata in A Minor), while pieces like the Tuba Concerto effectively demonstrated his continued ability to extract beauty even from the most unexpected sources. Several other smaller-scale pieces—including music for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Variations for Brass Band, and numerous songs and occasional works—evoke practices of earlier years: the spontaneity and easy rhythmic flow of folk song, a Ravelian clarity of texture, pastoralism’s parallel fifths and triadic modality, and the deeply felt sincerity of expression that Vaughan Williams strove to realize throughout his long and distinguished career.