Happy birthday Vaughan Williams!
Vaughan Williams turns 150
We’re hearing a lot about Ralph Vaughan Williams this year, as it’s his 150th anniversary. Which I’m happy about, because I love Vaughan Williams’ music — but also because it’s an opportunity to explore music by the many, many women he taught. Vaughan Williams stands out among twentieth-century composers for being a committed advocate of women’s music. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who frequently expressed surprise that women were able to compose, or caveated letters of recommendation with disclaimers about gender, Vaughan Williams seems to have expected that women would compose, and treated them accordingly. He accepted them as students, and supported their work long after they left his class. It speaks volumes that his students included (among others) Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Ruth Gipps, Ina Boyle, Helen Glatz, Joan Trimble, Madeleine Dring, Dorothy Gow, Imogen Holst and Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Vaughan Williams taught more successful women composers than most of his colleagues put together.
I’ve been exploring music by these women and their relationships with Vaughan Williams for a Radio 3 documentary (which you can hear from Sunday 9th October here). This has been such a joy, not least because we unearthed scores by Helen Glatz during recording (a post on that to follow!) and I got to meet people who knew Vaughan Williams and his students, who spoke really lovingly about all of them. One of the things that stuck with me was how much the Royal College of Music, and Vaughan Williams’ group in particular, was a space for female friendship to flourish. He encouraged his students to be each others’ best friends and most reliable critics. While under his tutelage, many women made friendships that would last for the whole of their lives, offering one another support and encouragement across the years.
Dearest Grace…Dearest Betty
Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams were especially close and, thankfully for us, left behind traces of their friendship in copious delightful letters. I can’t imagine two composers better suited to one another — both were forward-thinking modernists who embraced composers like Stravinsky and Bartók, and they wrote some of the most exciting music that came out of Britain in the twentieth-century (bizarrely underplayed given how good it is; it baffles me that so many of their works are still in need of a commercial recording). Maconchy was shy, Williams outgoing, but both were no-nonsense individuals completely driven by their music.
Whenever they needed feedback on their scores or criticism about their ideas, these two women turned to one another. When Williams thought Maconchy’s 1930 Suite for Chamber Orchestra ‘brilliant’, with ‘scoring [that] is heavenly so new & so vital’, she was still able to comment that ‘I thought the finish of No. 5 a bit too abrupt & unprepared’, adding the advice that ‘I do feel something vital ought to happen before a finish.’ They offered one another careful and considered guidance, helping one another to shape their voices as they changed and developed over time.
The letters give a fascinating insight into how they thought about composing broadly, and also about their contemporaries. Stravinsky, Bartók and Britten were favourites (Britten and Williams would also become close friends). When Williams heard Billy Budd, she thought the opera ‘was full of compassion’, with moments that were ‘unbearably moving’. But they critiqued the work of their favourites as much as each others. Passing judgement on Britten’s Sinfonietta, Maconchy pointed out that ‘some of the material is rather uninteresting in itself (though always just the right kind of theme in the right place) but he does know how to make something out of it.’ And after hearing Stravinsky’s Duo Concertant (‘I felt lots of it absolutely manufactured’), Williams remarked that he was ‘the sort of person who’ll write one great work & then go completely phut for a few years — then another masterpiece.’ The way they talk about their music and others’ shows just how deeply embedded they were within British musical life, which makes it all the more frustrating that their music is less-known now than that of the men who they worked alongside.
Even Vaughan Williams — or ‘Uncle Ralph’, as they called him — came up for evaluation. They admired their teacher greatly, but were nonetheless able to view him as a colleague and a friend as much as a role model, submitting his works to the same critique as their own. ‘The great fault of Uncle Ralph’s scores is’, Williams astutely observed, ‘that there is too much thematic material going on at the same time & that so often the rhythmic balance is all wrong & sounds muddled.’ Rhythm was one of the main bones of contention between him and his younger pupils — Vaughan Williams thought the rhythmic intensity of works like The Rite of Spring so much superficial brilliance, while Maconchy and Williams loved the pulsing, driving fire behind modernist works like this.
But for all their musical differences, Maconchy and Williams clearly valued Vaughan Williams and the support that he gave them in the form of recommendation letters and continuous encouragement. When Maconchy was at a particularly low ebb with her music being sidelined for performance, Vaughan Williams was there to nudge her on. ‘I was about 30 before I ever heard even a song of mine done in public’, he reminded her. ‘Push on and perhaps one day the key will turn in the lock.’ He was a constant in their musical lives until his death in 1958 — which Maconchy felt as ‘a stunning blow’ — and perhaps most important to their music was the way in which he encouraged them to stand up for what they believed in musically. Reflecting on what his lessons had imparted, Williams mused to Maconchy that ‘more & more I regard Uncle Ralph as a pioneer whose work will be finished by someone else; don’t you? Really, if it hadn’t been for him, where would we all have been. We might all have been self-satisfied reactionaries — Elgarians?? […] There’s something much bigger about Uncle Ralph’s attitude of mind — freer & more progressive so that I think it’s a fine thing to be influenced by him.’
Vaughan Williams had his faults, but his students were unanimous in their praise of his teaching. Reflecting on her time as his pupil, Ruth Gipps wrote that ‘from V.W. I tried to learn not only about music but about how to live. So far as I know he was the only altogether good person I have ever met.’ At a time when women struggled to be taken seriously as composers, he almost single-handedly nurtured a whole generation of British musicians, not one of whom imitated his own style. His students produced music as different as their personalities. And that, I think, is a legacy to be proud of.
You can hear me exploring the lives and music of Ina Boyle, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Helen Glatz and Ruth Gipps in Vaughan Williams: An Unconventional Teacher on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday 9th October at 18:45. It will be available on the iPlayer afterwards and on BBC Sounds.