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
No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
english-composer
I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.
musical composer nations
A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.
two years musical
Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.
behinds
Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.
sound looks
It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
church inheritance concerts
Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?
country art thinking
I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.
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.
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.
opera used wagner
Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.
new-york night sight
There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.
talking tunes opera
The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
mean reality sound
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.