Vaughan Williams, Ralph Books

R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford Lives)

Ursula Vaughn Williams

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Splendid biography! 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Written by his wife, Ursula, this is as authoratative as it gets. Filled with details, annecdotes, facts, histories and stories with a warmth that invites us to know and understand RVW as a person and as a composer.

I came to this book after reading many books about Gustav Holst. In doing so, I quickly learned of his friendship with RVW. The two were great friends. In this book, you get another perspective on that friendship and friendship with others. RVW was a kind, open, down-to-earth individual.

This is a remarakable biography about a remarkable human being. I'm glad he lived and wrote the music he shared with us all. This book helped me to understand the man and his times and his music. Highly recommended!

Editorial Review:

Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, a man of strong character and unflagging energy, was for sixty years at the center of musical events in England. Utilizing source materials only recently available, this biography, written by Williams's widow, presents a detailed, fascinating account of his career.

Vaughan Williams

Simon Heffer

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Customer Reviews:
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Editorial Review:

Unlike the fathers of the nineteenth-century English musical renaissance, who slavishly paid homage to the German masters, composers Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and his friend Gustav Holst threw off the shackles of the Teutonic school and drew their inspiration from the neglected tradition of folk-song.

The result was the creation of a distinctly English musical voice that evoked the cultural heritage of a nation. In particular, the sheer beauty, vitality, and aesthetic force of Vaughan Williams's works, which include The Lark Ascending, Greensleeves, the Tallis Fantasia, and nine symphonies, connected listeners to a timeless past and gave them a common national spirit, especially during turbulent, war-torn times.

This concise biography charts the course of Williams's remarkable life and career. Simon Heffer traces his privileged upbringing, his years of painstaking studies with Hubert Parry, Max Bruch, and Maurice Ravel, his promotion of folk-song and editorship of the English Hymnal, his close association with Holst and George Butterworth, and his emergence as the leader of English musical life.

The first truly English composer of the twentieth century, Williams was a genius of musical invention who is still beloved and admired in Britain and around the world.

The Wind Band Masterworks of Holst, Vaughan Williams and Grainger

Willis M. Rapp

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Editorial Review:

With this superb text, Dr. Rapp gives the wind band community both a historical and musical insight into three of its most revered composers. His study of their band works' evolvement through traditional folk music will serve as a fascinating resource, giving both veteran and novice conductors an invaluable understanding of the band repertoire's formative stages.

Vaughan Williams Symphonies (BBC music guides)

Hugh Ottaway

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Vaughan Williams (Master Musicians Series)

James Day

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Editorial Review:

Revised and expanded, this book considers recent work on the life and music of this leading English composer. Day presents Vaughan Williams as a part of the great post-Romantic reactionary movement in the company of composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky. The author also demonstrates that the circumstances of Vaughan Williams' life are reflected in his wide-ranging, powerful, and intense music.

The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Michael Kennedy

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

*The* standard study of Vaughan Williams's music. 5 out of 5 stars.
25 of 25 people found this review helpful.

I've known this book for over thirty years. Kennedy approachesVaughan Williams's catalogue both widely and deeply, with plenty ofmusical examples. Since I'm a Vaughan Williams headbanger, a book like this is my equivalent of hagiography. Kennedy assumes (correctly) that Vaughan Williams is one of the major composers of this century, and not just in England, and thus discusses works in a clear-eyed way, without special pleading, emotional ginger-up, or hysterical proselytizing. He gives us the musical "facts" of a work and shows, in purely compositional terms, why it's wonderful -- the most convincing argument of all. I've almost worn out my copy through reading and re-reading. When I listen to a Vaughan Williams work, I usually have the book handy. A classic of music writing.--Steve Schwartz

Editorial Review:

This is the authoritative account of Vaughan Williams's musical life-- the story of a great composer's career, and at the same time the story of music in England for over half a century. Kennedy considers the principal works in chronological order, outlining the main features of each and discussing details of the music's structure, often illuminating his point with a musical quotation. He also provides a good deal of biographical data, and so builds up a picture of the composer, as well as providing thumbnail sketches of many of Vaughan Williams's friends and colleagues. Kennedy's extensive knowledge of Vaughan Williams's output also enables him to refer back and forth across the works to pick out lines of development and influence. Along with Michael Kennedy's new preface, the second edition includes a full classified list of Vaughan Williams's works.

Working with R.V.W.

Roy Douglas

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Vaughan Williams (Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers)

Paul Holmes

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Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge Composer Studies)

Alain Frogley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Brilliant work, though not really for the general reader. 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

A landmark in Vaughan Williams criticism. The book handles questions both of intellectual milieu (Frogley's essay on English musical identity relates it to a wider movement) and of Vaughan Williams's musical art. The essay on VW's use of rhythm is outstanding, thoroughly refuting the picture of him as some musical bumpkin, but essays of this type require some familiarity with the nuts and bolts of music as well as the ability to read it. The book well rewards the effort it requires. This has become a favorite book, one that I reread.

Editorial Review:

Despite Vaughan Williams' seminal importance in British music, international stature as a symphonist, and wider significance as an icon of Englishness, very little new research on his life or music has been published since the mid-1960s. The ten essays presented here examine diverse subjects such as the place of Vaughan Williams in the construction of English national identity in this century, the role of rhythm in his symphonies, music for propaganda films, and his unpublished early orchestral pieces; major works such as the Tallis Fantasia and the Fifth Symphony are analyzed in depth.