Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams
(1872-1958)
Eminent composer and folk-song collector, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was born at the vicarage in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, the youngest of the three children of the Revd Arthur Charles Vaughan Williams and his wife, Margaret Wedgwood.
His early musical inclinations began whilst attending Charterhouse School, a school that encouraged musical expression. He organized a concert there in 1885 which included a piano trio he had composed. This was to be the shape of things to come.
Vaughan Williams’ real professional formation did not begin until 1890, when he entered the Royal College of Music. He studied with the most authoritative British composer of the day, Hubert Parry. He studied music and history at Trintiy College, Cambridge, then returned to the Royal College as a pupil of Charles Stanford, another dominant figure in British musical life of the mid-1890s. In 1898 Vaughan-Williams was involved in the formation of the Folk-Song Society.
Vaughan-Williams had been aware of both John and Lucy Broadwood's published collections of folk songs and became caught up in a tide of interest in them towards the end of the century. He collected his first song, Bushes and Briars in December 1903 at Ingrave in Essex and began lecturing in the subject that year.
During the next ten years he went on to amass over 800 songs and carols, together with some singing games and country dance tunes, from East Anglia, Sussex and Herefordshire.
The First World War put an end to this chapter in his life, though the influence of folk song stayed with him and was significant in a number of his most famous orchestral works. It was also fundamental in his editing of The English Hymnal, published in 1906, for which he borrowed tunes from a number of prominent collectors of the period.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was President of the English Folk Dance and Song Society when he died in 1958. It was decided to rename the library in his honour.
The Ralph Vaughan Williams folk song notebooks are currently housed at the British Library, London. They cover the period 1903-1914, and the regions of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Yorkshire. The Ralph Vaughan Williams broadside collection and scrapbooks of song texts and letters are housed at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London.
Browse Ralph Vaughan WIlliams' collection in the Full English digital archive.
