Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, England, on October 12,
1872. After attending the Royal College of Music, he studied composition
privately with Max Bruch in Berlin. In 1901 he was appointed organist of
the St. Barnabas Church in London. For the next few years he devoted
himself mainly to church music. His interest in the English folk songs
of the Tudor period, first stimulated in 1904, proved for him a decisive
turning point. Besides dedicating himself henceforth to intensive
research in English folk music (much of which he helped to revive from
neglect and obscurity through his editions and adaptations) he found a
new direction as composer: in the writing of music with a national
identity, music absorbing the melodic, harmonic and modal techniques—at
times even the actual material—of these old songs and dances. This new
trend first became evident in 1907 with his _Norfolk Rhapsodies_. After
an additional period of study with Maurice Ravel in Paris, Vaughan
Williams embarked upon the writing of his first major works which
included the famous _Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis_, _London
Symphony_, and the opera _Hugh the Drover_. Subsequent works in all
fields of composition placed him with the masters of 20th-century music.
These compositions included symphonies, operas, concertos, fantasias,
choral and chamber music. For more than thirty years, Vaughan Williams
taught composition at the Royal College of Music in London; from 1920 to
1928 he was the conductor of the Bach Choir, also in that city. He paid
two visits to the United States, the first time in 1922 to direct some
of his works at a music festival in Connecticut, and the second time a
decade later to lecture at Bryn Mawr College. He received the Order of
Merit in 1935 and the Albert medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1955.
He died in London on August 26, 1958.
Only a meagre number of Vaughan Williams’ compositions have popular
appeal. One of these is the _Fantasia on Greensleeves_, for orchestra.
“Greensleeves” is an old English folk song dating from the early 16th
century, and mentioned in Shakespeare’s _The Merry Wives of_ _Windsor_.
In the 17th century it became the party song of the Cavaliers. Americans
know it best through a popular-song adaptation in 1957. Vaughan
Williams’ delightful fantasia appears as an orchestral interlude in his
opera _Sir John in Love_ (1929), based on _The Merry Wives of Windsor_.
A brief episode for flute leads to “Greensleeves,” which is harmonized
opulently for strings. Two brief variations follow. Then the opening
flute episode is recalled as is the folk song itself—the main melody in
lower strings with embellishments in the upper ones.
_The March of the Kitchen Utensils_ is an amusing little episode for
orchestra, part of the incidental music prepared by the composer for a
production of Aristophanes’ _The Wasps_ in Cambridge in 1909. This march
opens with a humorous little theme for the wind instruments in the
impish style of Prokofiev. The theme is taken over by the strings. The
middle section is much more in the identifiable national style of
Vaughan Williams with a melody that resembles an old English folk dance.