Britten and Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams's "A Musical Autobiography," written for and included in Hubert Foss's pioneering study of his music, provides valuable insight into the roles played by English folksong, Anglican hymnody, and specific individuals in shaping his creative growth up to about 1908. Notably absent, however, is any significant discussion of the music that he wrote during that period, much of which he had either withdrawn from performance or had declined to publish. Foss himself made explicit what Vaughan Williams had only implied: that those works lacked any particular value, dismissing their study as "at best a task for a prying biographer, at worst a task for a musical resurrection-man" (Foss 1950, p. 80).


This perspective dominated the larger historiographical record until the end of the twentieth century, when Ursula Vaughan Williams finally allowed her husband's withdrawn or obscure early works to be published and recorded. The creative diligence, competence, and professionalism that Vaughan Williams practiced throughout his career are all on display in these pieces, but so too is evidence that foreign models played far more crucial roles in shaping Vaughan Williams's early compositional idiom than typically acknowledged-arguably more significant ones than the conspicuously "English" influences often emphasized (either by the composer or researchers).


This historiographical gap has had long-term ramifications on the perception of Vaughan Williams's musical development. A review of works written between 1891 and 1908 reveals the composer exploring an array of idioms and techniques, punctuated by occasional glimpses of practices that would come to define his mature style. His disinclination to revisit these works makes sense, given his philosophical commitment to the importance of local cultural influences in the development of an individual style, as well as his reluctance to draw attention to pieces that did not meet his later creative standards. Taken as a whole, however, these early compositions reshape our understanding of Vaughan Williams's creative development. They reveal a greater level of technical facility than previously assumed, suggest that their suppression was motivated by ideological concerns as much as aesthetic ones, and undercut narrowly nationalist readings of his artistic legacy. 

Among the many projects Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) left unfinished is a Christmas Sequence, a drama in the spirit of _Noye's Fludde_ (1958). While little original music for the project survives, Britten had thoroughly planned for the inclusion of audience carols―in the manner of the hymns sung in _Noye's Fludde_ and _Saint Nicolas_ (1948), and the audience songs in _The Little Sweep_ (1949)―and extensively annotated his second draft libretto with carol choices and harmonizations. Britten's congregational hymn-singing has drawn critical attention for its ambivalent relationship to ideas of Britten as a musical modernist: the singing has been read as a site of cultural nostalgia (Rupprecht, 2013, Wiebe, 2012), or of collective expression verging on "coercion" (Sheppard, 2001). In organizing his Sequence around these congregational carols, however, Britten draws on precedents of audience participation both within his own oeuvre, and in modernist theatre performance (such as Brechtian _Lehrstück_). Moreover, part of the complexity of assessing Britten's modernism arises from the persistence with which he employed elements not typically associated with the modernist project: his dedication to composing for children and amateurs, his use of audience participation, and his engagement with tropes and narratives drawn from the Church of England. Insofar as it engages with all of these elements, Britten's unfinished Christmas Sequence, I contend, offers much to encourage a more nuanced understanding of Britten's ongoing commitment to an individual and idiosyncratic modernism in the last years of his career.


I begin by contextualizing English musical modernism in Britten's final years. Next, I examine critical discourses which have considered Britten's uses of congregational singing, to illustrate the distance such criticism has reified between his works on sacred themes and his engagement with modernism. Finally, I examine the composition history, sketchbook materials, and draft libretto of the Christmas Sequence, highlighting their similarity to elements of his _Children's Crusade_ (1969), with its Brecht libretto and modernist commitments. I argue that Britten's congregational singing, like much of his engagement with the sacred, is in fact an important aspect of his musical modernism, rather than an instance in which he evades or retreats from the modernist.

Ralph Vaughan Williams espoused a practical aesthetic, as he believed that composers must first address national concerns before reaching out to the international. Although too old to serve in the Armed Forces during the Second World War, Vaughan Williams was determined to serve his nation in its fight against fascism. Anxious for war work, he mentioned to his friend Arthur Benjamin that he would like to try his hand at film music. Benjamin contacted Muir Mathieson, the musical director of the wartime Ministry of Information, who quickly offered Vaughan Williams the opportunity to score the 1941 Michael Powell film, _49th Parallel_. Shortly after, Vaughan Williams scored the transnationally filmed documentary-drama _Coastal Command_, a Crown Film Unit production made in 1942; it was directed and scripted by J.B. Holmes. 
¶  The men and women of the Coastal Command protected allied shipping from the Arctic Circle to the coast of West Africa, and from the Baltic Sea up to a thousand miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. The dramatic story created for the film consisted of re-enactments of everyday routines for the flying crews, tactical officers and ground staff of the RAF Coastal Command. Although there has been virtually no previous scholarship linking _Coastal Command_ to the Sixth Symphony, musicologists have speculated on links between the symphony and another wartime film. This paper posits that the music for _Coastal Command_ directly anticipated the general idiom and, in several instances, thematic material for Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony, which he worked on throughout the Second World War. This research examines and compares the musical phrasing and harmonic structuring between the audio and visual scores of both the film score and symphony. In addition, this paper tracks the history of revisions to both the film score and symphony, as well as the editorial notes of Vaughan Williams's wartime views on his music for this transnationally-made morale-boosting documentary.