Introduction

There can be few composers who have ridden such a reputational roller-coaster as Ralph Vaughan Williams. Lionized as a revered national figure, and across the English-speaking world in the latter part of his life, within a decade of his death in 1958 he seemed in danger of being consigned to little more than a historical footnote: a Spohr or Telemann, perhaps. His hymn tunes, songs, shorter orchestral pieces and some choral and band works did continue to be staples of the repertoire – Vaughan Williams has, in fact, always been one of those rare beasts, a popular twentieth-century composer. Yet such popularity soon became confined largely to the amateur realm, and while this would surely have offered some comfort to Vaughan Williams, a passionate advocate of the music-making of ordinary people, it was inevitably overshadowed by the precipitous decline of his standing in the world of elite performance and critical opinion. As for new research into his life or music, by the early 1980s musicological neglect was almost total. In 1996 one of the editors of the present volume introduced another book of scholarly essays on Vaughan Williams, the first of its kind, with the reflection that even a decade earlier such a project would have seemed ‘to belong strictly to the realms of futuristic fantasy’. Though there may been a touch of rhetorical hyperbole in that judgement, it was only a touch. But by the mid-1990s the tide was finally turning. As the introduction to that book went on to argue, a variety of forces helped propel this revival in Vaughan Williams’s fortunes. Perhaps most significant – and reaching well beyond this one composer – were the breakdown of a monolithic narrative of twentieth-century musical modernism, and a historical reassessment of the cultural politics of British nationalism and imperialism (the latter crucial for a figure who had become so associated with a particular version of national identity); in both cases, these concerns arose at least in part from the application of poststructuralist and postmodern approaches to a discipline, musicology, that had hitherto rejected them. A new wave of interest in Vaughan Williams quickly gathered pace, and in the first decade of the new millennium continued to grow, spurred in part by the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death in 2008. A wealth of ground-breaking research has now appeared, including two further volumes of scholarly essays, several monographs, a number of important doctoral dissertations, and numerous periodical articles; this work has explored a wide variety of topics, including compositional processes, cultural contexts and reception history.