Vaughan Williams and his successors: Composers’ forum

As Michael Kennedy has shown in the previous chapter, Vaughan Williams’s posthumous reception has followed a pattern familiar to music historians: respectful mourning at his passing, comparative neglect as a younger generation of composers takes centre stage, and then gradual rehabilitation, in Vaughan Williams’s case one that was complete by the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is, one might say, the transition of a composer of the present – the apogee of a living tradition, known personally to those who performed and wrote about his music – to a composer of the past, known to performers and critics alike through that music and the scholarly discourse on it. Vaughan Williams’s reception today has thus been coloured by the historical distance of which this transition is both a cause and a symptom. Most obviously, it has been affected by twenty-first-century audiences’ experiences of – and changing trends in – post-war music: the Vaughan Williams that we hear today is inevitably going to sound different from the composer heard by the audiences who attended his premieres because of our knowledge of composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Ligeti, Xenakis, Glass, and Murail. On the other hand, Vaughan Williams’s centrality to the renaissance in British music in the first half of the twentieth century – both as a composer and, as David Manning has observed in Chapter 11, as a public figure who encouraged music-making in all levels of society – means that, at least in Britain, his successors are part of his legacy.