Vaughan Williams on Music
Researched Bibliographic Dossier
Verified edition data and a musicological research note prepared specifically for this work.
- Title
- Vaughan Williams on Music
- Author
- Ralph Vaughan Williams
- Editor
- David Manning
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Place
- Oxford and New York
- Year
- 2007
- Extent
- 435 pages
- ISBN
- 9780195182392
- Online ISBN
- 9780199851485
- Language
- English
- Type
- Collected writings / primary source edition
SCOPE & CONTENT
Edited by David Manning, this volume gathers Vaughan Williams’s writings on musical life, English music, continental composers, folk song and his own repertory. It turns the composer into a primary source for the intellectual and institutional history of British music. Essays, lectures, program notes and shorter texts reveal how he thought about national tradition, musical education, public culture, amateur music-making and the practical responsibilities of composers and performers.
RESEARCH VALUE
The collection is valuable because it replaces quotations detached from context with a broad documentary corpus. Vaughan Williams’s statements about nationalism and folk song can be compared with his comments on Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and contemporary musical life, revealing a more complex thinker than the label “English pastoralist” suggests. Manning’s editorial organization and supporting apparatus make the writings usable as research evidence rather than as a collection of famous sayings.
EDITORIAL ORGANIZATION
The writings are grouped thematically into musical life and English music, continental composers, folk song, British composers, and program notes on Vaughan Williams’s own and other music. This structure allows ideas expressed decades apart to be studied comparatively while retaining bibliographic information about the original contexts.
PRIMARY-SOURCE SIGNIFICANCE
For research on twentieth-century British music, the book documents not only compositional aesthetics but institutions, education, broadcasting, festivals, folk-song collecting and the language through which musicians argued about national culture. It is therefore both a composer sourcebook and a broader cultural document.
- Format
- File size
- 10.3 MB
- Catalogue completeness
- 8 / 10 core bibliographic fields