Vaughan Williams Essays.(Book Review)

Edited by Byron Adams and Robin Wells. Aldershot, Hants, Eng.: Ashgate, 2003. [xxii, 280 p. 1-85928-387-X. $84.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

The eleven contributors to this volume of essays have all been Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellows. Funded by the Carthusian Trust (attached to the composer's old school, Charterhouse), these scholars were able to travel from their home institutions in North America to spend time researching in the United Kingdom. The main methodologies employed in this collection are studies of the compositional process and criticism.

Various facets of the compositional process are considered, including close reading of sketches and investigation of the assembly of texts. Three writers examine sketches for the symphonies. Byron Adams's study of the Sixth Symphony joins the compositional process at a late stage, detailing, for example, how a saxophone solo in the Scherzo is revised from a "blandly modal and rhythmically square" original (p. 11) into the syncopated, chromatic final version. While the first and third movements received a number of revisions of a similar scope, the second movement was only slightly changed, and the Epilogue virtually untouched in the extant sources. While Adams's investigation deals with a relatively small number of detailed revisions, his argument is well illustrated with concise music examples.

By contrast, although Stephen Town gives an overview of the genesis of A Sea Symphony, there is such a vast quantity of extant material that it is hard to get a sense of what issues were at stake in the compositional process, especially as no music examples are provided. The appendix of physical details of sources would be an essential part of a monograph, but in a brief article perhaps interpretation of representative examples would have been more beneficial By contrast the first half of Town's article is well illustrated with examples from published sources, where some influential works are discussed. A third essay considering the symphonic compositional process is contributed by Murray Dineen, which includes a transcription of a significant early sketch for the Filth Symphony. The bulk of this article is analytical, proposing the tradition of aurally transmitting folk song as an analogy to the thematic argument.

In respect of two song cycles, the question is asked whether the posthumously published editions represent the composer's final intentions. Rufus Hallmark considers whether Vaughan Williams decided that "I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope" should end the Songs of Travel, or if the original eight-song cycle was his preferred version. Renee Cherie Clark asks whether the Four Last Songs are fragments of two projected song cycles, or if they were intended to be performed together. Both authors unsettle commonly held assumptions about the respective works, illuminating their arguments with new historical information.

The composition of two stage works, Job and Pilgrim's Progress, were also complicated affairs. Alison McFarland positions a number of protagonists in the multiple versions of the text upon which Job was finally based. Vaughan Williams, resisting the influence of a director and costume designer, reinterprets Blake's illustrations, envisioning "a darker and more somber view of the story." Job is now cast as "a passive, enduring figure, a pawn in the ongoing conflict of good and evil, who plays little or no part in his own redemption" (p. 44).

In Pilgrim's Progress, Vaughan Williams clearly takes a different view of the central character from Bunyan, renaming "Christian" as "Pilgrim." Nathaniel G. Lew traces the composer's extended engagement with this story, leading finally to the debut of the operatic version in 1951. Early reception, and the work's extended genesis, inform a detailed critical engagement with The Pilgrim's Progress. More positive assessments of this work have tended to blame poor staging as the central reason for its unpopularity. Lew points out that Vaughan Williams was also involved in staging decisions, and proposes that he