":Now I've checked, and, unfortunately for ""true"" enthusiasts, Steinberg does not call this work a ""true choral symphony"". He calls it, in fact, ""more a cantata than a symphony in the ordinary sense"" (p. 655). (Hard for a piece to be a ""true choral symphony"" if it's not even a ""true"" symphony.) There is evidence that Vaughan Williams would have agreed with Steinberg and was using the term symphony in the title more or less figuratively, roughly in the manner that Stravinsky later used it in his Symphony of Psalms. From Ursula's biography, p. 95: ""On of my [Ralph Vaughan Williams's] most grateful memories of George [Butterworth] is connected with my London Symphony....he [Butterworth] said in his characteristically abrupt way: 'You ought to write a symphony.' From that moment [a ""moment"" well past the composition and first performances of A Sea Symphony] the idea of a symphonya thing which I had always declared I would never attemptdominated my mind.""   

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