Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Michael McCormick
18 December 2017
ECOLOGY IN R.V. WILLIAMS AND A.E. HOUSMAN: ON WENLOCK EDGE 2
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in a small village in Gloucestershire, England, and
then moved to a small village in Surrey after his father passed away. These villages were in the
Williams studied music at the Royal College of Music as well as at Cambridge, furthering his
appreciation for the English style of writing by studying under Hubert Parry and Charles
Stanford.
It wasn’t until 1908 that Vaughan Williams went to Paris to study with Maurice Ravel for
several months. Ravel’s influence on Vaughan Williams has been long debated; Vaughan
Williams felt as though Ravel helped to free and liberate his writing, while Ravel himself and
some musicologists believe that the influence was “grossly overrated.” As Hubert Foss said in
his study of Vaughan Williams, “It should be added that Rave;’s French influence was grossly
overrated in judgements passed by certain critics on the subsequent music.” (Foss p.14) While
some critics may feel this way, it is undeniable that Vaughan Williams himself claimed that
Ravel helped relieve him from “the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner.” (Nichols p.67)
An analysis of Vaughan Williams’ music after studying with Ravel could also show “a
new, lighter, more colorful kind of instrumentation” which is observed in compositions like “The
Wasps”, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”, and the subject of this paper, “On Wenlock
Edge.” Vaughan Williams gave another statement regarding his music post-Ravel, “After three
months I came home with a bad attack of French fever and wrote a string quartet which caused a
friend to say that I must have been having tea with Debussy, and a song cycle with several
Vaughan Williams also had a large passion for the folk music of England, spending time
traveling around to collect songs from all over the country. Most of the music he recorded was
written by hand, while some of it was done by recording on a phonograph. He served on the
committee of the Folk Song Society for 42 years and regularly contributed music to the society.
While he recorded a great deal of folk music and songs, he often would not record the text, or
would only record the first verse. Because of this, much of the music lost its text and only the
tunes remain. These folk songs had a large influence on his writings, some instances more direct
than others. For example, he wrote two large anthologies, one of which entitled “Folk Songs of
the Four Seasons.” In other compositions, you can hear tunes that resemble a folk song, although
A.E. Housman was also an Englishman, living around the same time as Vaughan
Williams. Housman grew up a religious boy, but later turned into a “devout” atheist while
studying at St. John’s College, Oxford. He fell in love with his roommate, Moses Jackson;
Moses was a heterosexual and therefore did not share the same feelings with Housman. His love
interest in Moses lasted for many years, and is thought to be reason as to why his poetry is often
very dark and pessimistic. His atheism also plays a role in his pessimism because of his lack in
Housman’s largest and most famous work was A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems
written about the soldiers of Shropshire. Although the cycle does not have a clear through line,
there are many recurring themes throughout. These themes include nature, love lost,
reminiscence, homeland, and others. The poems were also not written in order, which can
explain the lack in narrative. Housman, similar to Vaughan Williams, had a strong connection to
ECOLOGY IN R.V. WILLIAMS AND A.E. HOUSMAN: ON WENLOCK EDGE 4
nature. Many of his poems use nature as a metaphor to the inner feelings of man. The turmoil,
troubles, love, and death of man can all be seen as nature in Housman’s poetry. Many of the
poems in A Shropshire Lad came to Housman when he was walking along Hampstead Heath.
The poet is said to have “waited for the verses to come to him.” (NYTIMES) This is another
clear reasoning of how Housman related to nature and his own natural surroundings.
The song cycle On Wenlock Edge offers a great deal of nature and inner turmoil of man,
making some clear, and some less clear references to nature. In the first movement of the work,
On Wenlock Edge, t he opening statement in the piano and strings is a clear foreshadowing of the
This stanza provides a vivid image of a hillside, covered in trees, getting thrashed about
by the wind. The saplings, being young and able to be bent, are thrown so powerfully that they
are bent down all the way. Wind gets thrown back and forth, gusting in multiple directions all
while keeping this constant feeling of excitement or urgency. This experience is put into sound in
the opening two bars of the piece. The strings and right hand of the piano move in parallels up
and down, swelling in dynamic. The left hand of the piano keeps sextuplets going through the
ECOLOGY IN R.V. WILLIAMS AND A.E. HOUSMAN: ON WENLOCK EDGE 5
held notes of the strings to provide for the constant energy of the wind. The strings also are using
tremolo the entire time, which provides an even clearer representation of the wind.
In the next song of the cycle, From Far, From Eve and Morning, there are a few mentions
of nature. The most distinctive mention would be the term “twelve winded sky”. Clearly, this is
about wind, but it is not just any reference to wind. This is a reference to the classical Greek and
Roman world, where direction was measured by twelve different directions. Housman is trying
to say here that the wind comes from many directions, while also making reference to his
In the music, there is a clear depiction of this urgency in the man’s words. There is only an
eighth rest in between the previous word and “speak now” which creates this sense of
hurriedness. In the rest of the song, most of the rests between phrases are either quarter rests or
half rests, so clearly the eighth rest was intentional for the sake of depicting urgency.
In the fifth song of the cycle, Bredon Hill, the speaker tells the story of hearing the bells
on Bredon. He can hear them ring through the valleys while sitting with his love, they lead to his
wedding, and eventually ring at the funeral of his beloved. There are clear representations of the
bells in the score, the first of which beginning at the third stanza.
The triplet descending motive in parallels sounds very similar to a carillon ringing to call people
to a church service on a Sunday. The next example of the bells is toward the end when the
speaker is talking about his wife going to her funeral. He says “They tolled the one bell only.”
The piano and first violin parts have a note to play the octave Gs at a much louder dynamic than
ECOLOGY IN R.V. WILLIAMS AND A.E. HOUSMAN: ON WENLOCK EDGE 7
the rest of the music playing at that time. These octaves are the bells tolling. While the first
violin play with pizz to replicate the attack of a bell, the second violin plays a sustained note that
carries over the bar line, giving the sustain and decay of the bell. The piano is able to do both of
these effects on its on own because of the natural decay of a note. These effects combine to give
In the final song of this cycle, Clun, there are references to many different rivers in England. The
rivers mentioned are Ony, Teme, Clun, and Thames. These rivers are all well represented by the
piano accompaniment. The piano has this running eighth note uprising, sounding just like
flowing water down a river. The piano is also using the damper pedal to wash the notes together.
ECOLOGY IN R.V. WILLIAMS AND A.E. HOUSMAN: ON WENLOCK EDGE 8
There is also a mark in the score for “poco piu mosso” when the piano begins its “river music.”
This must be because the rivers are rushing around and Vaughan Williams wanted to portray the
quickness or the rivers. This theme of the running eighth notes carries through the first five
verses, only sometimes switching to sixteenth notes, but still with the same ascending motive. At
the beginning of the sixth verse, Ravel’s impact on Vaughan Williams is clearly seen. The piano
goes between an A major and B major chord with no leading tones or pivots, just a direct motion.
This is so very clearly a French Impressionist motion, something that is seen in Debussy and
When thinking about the study of folk song by Vaughan Williams, there are clearly some
influences in his music. Bredon Hill most certainly sounds like it could be a folk song, although
there does not appear to be any clear examples of traditional English folk songs in this entire
work. The opening melody is written on a pentatonic scale, only broken by the F natural that
follows on the word “shires.” “The pentatonic scale know also to the old Greeks can be found in
ECOLOGY IN R.V. WILLIAMS AND A.E. HOUSMAN: ON WENLOCK EDGE 9
Scotch, Irish, and occasionally in English folk song.” (Keith p.30) Vaughan Williams was also
clearly drawn to the text of Housman because of his emphasis on England and English nature.
Works Cited
Dickinson, A. E. (1945). An introduction to the music of R. Vaughan Williams. London: Oxford
University Press.
DUST IN THE WIND: HOUSMAN’S “FROM FAR, FROM EVE AND MORNING”. (2017,
May 14). Retrieved December 18, 2017.
Foss, H. J., & Williams, R. V. (1981). Ralph Vaughan Williams: a study. Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International.
Housman, A. E. (2006). The name and nature of poetry. Bromsgrove, Worcestershire: Housman
Society.
Ricks, C. (1973). A. E. Housman: a collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Riding, A. (2017, July 27). England’s Poet of Melancholy, and Why He Never Went Out of
Print. Retrieved December 18, 2017.