The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams Quotes

“The possibility of a musical modernity that was not characterized by sensationalism”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams

“With my own pupils now I always try to remember the value of encouragement. Sometimes a callow youth appears who may be a fool or may be a genius and I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius.”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams

“Yet for all his idiosyncrasies in writing for the stage, Vaughan Williams did create several works of great power and beauty. Given the degree to which he refused to compromise his artistic vision, and the long odds most English composers of his generation faced in having their stage works realized – not to mention the lack of encouragement from the English musical world in general – the fact that he met with any success at all is remarkable.”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams

“But it is the personal synthesis of elements taken from a wide variety of historical styles and periods that most strongly links the church music with Vaughan Williams’s output as a whole. This can be observed anywhere but is perhaps best illustrated by the Mass, a work whose neo-Tudor associations have obscured awareness of a wider eclecticism. Techniques favoured by sixteenth-century English church musicians – false relations, fauxbourdon-like textures, contrasts between soloist(s) and the full choir – are indeed present, but they are combined with others – canon and points of imitation, sectional division of the text (articulated by textural contrasts), emphasis on the church modes – that were the lingua franca of the period, common to English and continental music alike. Even these Renaissance techniques are but a ‘starting-point’32 for what is clearly a highly personal essay, however.”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams

“Unfortunately, Vaughan Williams talked and wrote a great deal of sheer nonsense about his supposed amateurishness.”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams

“Frank Sinatra, for instance, who had a wide knowledge of classical music, revered Vaughan Williams and the composer’s Job in particular,”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams

“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.”
― Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams