This authoritative account of Vaughan William's musical life portrays the story of a great composer's career, and traces the course of music in England during his lifetime. The edition includes a comprehensive list of his work, and an index.

"For this comprehensive account of Vaughan Williams's musical career, the author has had unrestricted access to the composer's private papers. This book includes many letters which illuminate Vaughan Williams's intentions and contains quotations from his writings and from contemporary reactions to his music over nearly sixty years. Besides the straightforward narrative of a full and busy life of music, there is a critical commentary on the works themselves. Special importance is attached to the authoritative catalogue of works which forms the first appendix. All known published and unpublished works are listed here, with full details of instrumentation, revisions, and first performances. Particular attention has been given to accuracy of dates. All the composer's own programme notes are reprinted. For the first time it is possible to have a full picture of Vaughan Williams's creative activities before 1905 as well as of his career after he became firmly established." --Book jacket.

(Meredith Music Resource). This exciting work, by one of today's most highly regarded music scholars, brings new light to the more than two dozen works by Ralph Vaughan Williams for military band, brass band and wind ensemble. Vaughan Williams' unique relationship with fellow composer Gustav Holst is examined as well as his relationships with personnel at the Royal Military School of Music, the BBC and the Salvation Army. There's much more in this hard-to-put-down volume for conductors, performers, students and aficionados! "...the contributions of Jon Mitchell have become a cornerstone of serious scholarship in our field. ...a welcome insight into the life and works of Vaughan Williams. Contained within are valuable insights into the world of Vaughan Williams that, for the majority of us, will be an undiscovered country." Craig Kirchhoff Professor of Music/Director of Bands University of Minnesota (a href="http://youtu.be/8U3fN1SPXVE" target="_blank")Click here for a YouTube video on Ralph Vaughan Williams' Wind Works(/a)

The Choral-Orchestral Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Autographs, Context, Discourse combines contextual knowledge, a musical commentary, an inventory of the holograph manuscripts, and a critical assessment of the opus to create substantial and meticulous examinations of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s choral-orchestral works. The contents include an equitable choice of pieces from the various stages in the life of the composer and an analysis of pieces from the various stages of Williams’s life. The earliest are taken from the pre-World War I years, when Vaughan Williams was constructing his identity as an academic and musician—Vexilla Regis (1894), Mass (1899), and A Sea Symphony (1910). The middle group are chosen from the interwar period—Sancta Civitas (1925), Benedicite (1929), Magnificat (1932), Five Tudor Portraits (1935), Dona nobis pacem (1936)—written after Vaughan Williams had found his mature voice. The last cluster—Thanksgiving for Victory (1944), Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the ‘Old 104’ Psalm Tune(1949), Sons of Light (1950), Hodie (1954), The Bridal Day/Epithalamion (1938/1957)—typify the works finished or revisited during the final years of the composer’s life, near the end of the Second World War and immediately before or after his second marriage (1953).

Critical annotations and supportive text will direct scholars to the most relevant studies in their discipline Multiple indices make it easy to locate items within the guide

Ever since its premiere just before the composer's death, Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony has divided critical opinion and remained something of an enigma. Yet the composer thought highly of the work, and went against his usual practice by preserving all the sketches. This study, the firstof its kind on a work of Vaughan Williams, analyses the symphony and traces its genesis through hundreds of pages of sketches and drafts; it also offers a general introduction to the composer's working methods. The manuscripts show how the composer worked meticulously to create the complexexpressive ambivalence of the finished work, transforming in the process simpler conceptions redolent of his earlier music. Most crucially, however, the sketches reveal an underlying programme, centred on the theme of innocent sacrifice and drawing on Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Stonehenge,and Salisbury Cathedral. Vaughan Williams's new musical path in the symphony, it emerges, was closely allied to the continuing evolution of his visionary agnosticism.

Serious scholarship on the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is currently enjoying a lively revival after a period of relative quiescence, and is only beginning to address the enduring affection of concert audiences for his music. The essays that comprise this volume extend the study of Vaughan Williams's music in new directions that will be of interest to scholars, performers and listeners alike. This volume contains the work of eleven North American scholars who have been recipients of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship based at the composer's own school, Charterhouse, which was created and has been supported by the Carthusian Trust since 1985. This wide-ranging and detailed collection of essays covers the spectrum of genres in which Vaughan Williams wrote, including dance, symphony, opera, song, hymnody and film music. The contributors also employ a range of analytical and historical methods of investigation to illuminate aspects of Vaughan Williams's compositional techniques and influences, musical, literary and visual.