Vaughan Williams on Music
"Vaughan Williams was a man of indefatigable energy and curiosity: a gracious, open-hearted spirit. All this and more emergest here."--Andrew Green,Classical Music"David Manning is to be commended for his tactful and thorough editing of this splendid collection of writings by the great British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. By assembling and organizing these essays, many of which are being reprinted for the first time since their initial publication, Manning has revealed the breadth and depth of Vaughan Williams's views on music, and thus has provided readers with a breathtaking panorama of a long and distinguished career. That Vaughan Williams was one of the towering composers of the twentieth century goes without saying, but this collection amply demonstrates that his social and aesthetic concerns were those of an intelligent, warmhearted, and sensible liberal humanist who possessed a lively and often felicitous prose style."--Byron Adams, University of California, Riverside"Vaughan Williams was a prolific and provocative writer of prose as well as music. This fascinating collection, ranging from the independent-minded responses of a young composer to Wagner and Brahms in the 1890s, to influential pronouncements on hot-button issues of the 1950s such as the fledgling BBC Third Programme, reveals the extraordinary range of his interests and sympathies, and the lifelong passion with which he threw himself into nurturing myriad different dimensions of his country's musical life."--Alain Frogley, University of Connecticut