Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams OMwas an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over nearly fifty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth12 October 1872
english-composer
I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.
english-composer
No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
music men path
The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
attitude believe ignorance
The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance.
unsaid duty left
The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.
long soul generations
The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.
disappointment world next
But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
musical composer nations
A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.
behinds
Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.
teacher cutting ideas
Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.
opera used wagner
Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.