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ABSTRACT
The article examines Ralph Vaughan Williams’ first symphony, ‘A Sea Symphony’, from 1912, in the context of the British contemporary relationship to the sea as of defining national importance. It specifically looks for ways in which the symphony engages with narratives around the sea as a national landscape and a nationally defining geography. The article’s aim is to situate the symphonic output and text in a nationally embedded, articulated and traceable discourse around the seascape, and interrogate the ways in which it relates to and contributes to such discourse. It finds that the music resonates against historical, cultural and political engagements with the seascape, and puts forward ways in which these engagements can be heard through textures, expression and sonorities, as well as being seen in inspirations and interpretations of the relational sea-scape and its geographical situatedness.
Notes
1 For more on Leith Hill Place, see The National Trust’s own website. I am immensely grateful to the NT and the Leith Hill team, who allowed me to write portions of this article in their Darwin room (named after one of the Wedgewood’s frequent visitors), in I have not been able to find many details about this interim name or reasons for any changes — VW mentions scoring ‘the ocean’ in a letter to Holst in 1906 (Cobbe Citation2008, p. 51), but few other mentions are extant. Nov/Dec 2019.
2 See for example Ottaway (Citation1972, p. 12) or for a fuller account of sketches and notes in existence (BL holdings), Stephen Town (Citation2003, particularly p. 83ff).
3 Its compositional timespan starts however in 1902/03, and Ottoway argues that the ‘crucial years’ for its composition are 1906–08 (1972, p. 19).
4 See for example Foss (Citation1950): ‘as a song, it is huge. As a symphony it shrinks in dimensions, belittled by its musical and technical immaturities’ (p. 91). RVW himself remained ambiguous about its symphonic character, see for example his letter to Herbert Thompson (Cobbe Citation2008, p. 74).
5 Dickinson, for example, draws attention to it as ‘the first completely choral symphony ever written’ and notes how it expands on an ‘elaborate scale’ (Dickinson Citation1928, p. 14).
6 See for example Mellers (Citation1989/1991): ‘Music’s central manifestation in [Edwardian Society] English life was what came to be called the English Choral Tradition, in which “masses” of people banded “democratically” together to hymn the might of Edwardian affluence and of the imperial dream which was the worldwide consequence of commercial aggrandizement at home.’ (p. 3).
7 See for example Ch. McGuire, in Adams & Wells 2003, pp. 235–68: ‘Vaughan Williams and the English musical festival: 1910’. Kennedy (1980) refers to the period around the Sea Symphony as ‘the zenith of English choral singing’ (p. 131).
8 It is also worth noting that the late nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion in all aspects of musical life, with a process of musical nationalisation underway and music making ‘everywhere’; performed in the home, in church, in school, at the seaside, in the parks. There were music festivals in many towns and cities, symphony orchestras in most large cities, travelling opera companies, choral societies, brass bands, songs in music halls, musical comedies in theatres, and promenade concerts (Richards Citation2001, p. 9). The number of pro musicians rose from 19,000 in 1871 to 47,000 in 1911; the piano was a luxury item in 1840 while by 1910 an estimate suggests one piano per twenty people, and by 1900 there were more instruments, journals and societies generally than ever before in the national history (ibid.). Much of this expanded music making was enabled by the railways and their capacity for transporting and connecting, and their import is hugely relevant for this development. 9. See for example J. Dibble, ‘Parry, Stanford and Vaughan Williams: the creation of tradition’, in Foreman (Citation1998).
10 Vaughan Williams’ own earlier Toward the unknown region was also uses Whitman’s texts, and Frederick Delius set texts from the same collection of poems, Sea-Drift, that Vaughan Williams used in A Sea Symphony — to take but two examples. See also for example Butcher Citation1947 and Thomas Citation1998.
11 The initial phrases are seminal and contain musical gestures that will recur at other points in the symphony: the leap the chorus makes from Bbminor to D-major (a major third up) on ‘sea’ is a very singular harmonic shift which can be seen as one of the motifs of the symphony, and the fanfare will recur in different shapes at various points.
12 Br Libr Add. MS 57278(E). ‘The Solent’ is here clearly labelled as no. II of ‘Four impressions for orchestra. In the New Forest.’ (and confirmation of withdrawal/intended destruction noted by UVW).
13 Kuykendall (Citation2015) notes that the manuscripts of ‘Burley Heath’, ‘The Solent’, and ‘Harnham Down’ are bound together and that the ‘undated title page preceding BH indicates that it was at some point considered the first movement of In the New Forest: Four Impressions for Orchestra’, but that The Solent does not quite seem to fit either this group or other potential collections of works (p. 575). These, and other early orchestral works have since been published as edited study scores by the OUP; The Solent in 2013, edited by James Francis Brown (to which Kuykendall’s review refers).
14 See Herbert (Citation1998), p. 69. Kuykendall (Citation2015) notes markings in MS in blue pencil from other conductors, though unestablished by whom.
15 ‘Themes closely related to the melodic line [..] play a prominent role in A Sea Symphony, on which VW began work in 1903’ (Vaillancourt Citation1996, p. 41). See also Kuykendall Citation2015, p. 575, and Herbert Citation1998, p. 69 to confer this ‘transfer’ of material. Similar musical gestures also generally occur in Solent as in Sea: rushing string arpeggios, imitative swelling motions, use of triplet figures (both shorter and longer), tremolo strings, a figure with a repeated single note which moves the rhythmical emphasis, the suggestion of a fanfare. As a main theme, its significance here is well embedded throughout. In the MS, The Solent appears completed, though this is not unanimously agreed upon (ref Br Libr Add. MS 57278(E).
16 Taken from a contemporary report on trove.nla.gov. au.
17 Although it was included in one of the editions of Leaves of Grass (1872) as an appendix, as well as appearing in other collections, under different titles, and in the 1881 edition of LG heavily altered. See Karen Wolfe Citation1998.
18 ‘Away with old romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts’, ‘raise a voice for far superber themes for poets and for art / To exalt the present and the real’ [7th section].
19 Lambert’s introduction particularly praises Gray’s text as having made a major contribution to ‘putting the sea back into British and Commonwealth history’ (p. vi), possibly indicating that the relationship between nation and sea might not yet have received as much critical attention as it might warrant. By 1870, British power and prosperity depended on coal, while coal was also ‘re-shaping the empire’ with new harbours and technology centres developing. British coal and the machinery it powered was a major export, and British coal was ‘in constant motion’ on the shipping lanes globally (ibid.).
20 See for example Alan J. S. Paterson Citation1969, The Golden Age of the Clyde Steamers, or Ian McCrorie, Citation1986. Clyde Pleasure Steamers: an illustrated history, for an example of the role steam engines and steamers played also as part of socio-cultural patterns and environments, enabled and enhanced by the technological developments.
21 See Blodgett & Bradley (1956), notes to “Sea-Drift” (pp. 246–7).
22 This motif is identified as an important ‘melodic contour’ by Dickinson (Citation1928, p. 16), recurring also in the second and fourth movements. Such recurring usage serves, beside underpinning the compositional structure, to heighten the thematic and narrative interconnectedness between the movements.
23 It could also be noted that both the first movement and the ‘Token’ passage starts in ‘glorious’ D-major’, a tonality according to Mellers often ‘indicative of human heroism’ (1989, 19). The opening phrase of the ‘Token’ passage is a more or less a stepwise ascending of that scale, underpinning the articulation of the (rather sorrowful) text with a strong major tonality. In early sketches, this first phrase turned downwards on its final syllable (‘cap-tains’) to land on a harmonically ‘expected’ dominant. In the final version, as we hear it now, ‘captains’ continues upwards, however, ending the phrase on a c-sharp, and harmonically ‘unresolved’. This leads the phrase further onwards while also connecting the continuous upward motion of the phrase to notions of endeavour and strength, and is another example of how the symphony combines textual and musical expressions to create multi-layered interactions.
24 “similitude”: the concept is Hegelian, that the great macrocosm contains all microcosms, perhaps is the sum of them (Blodgett & Bradley Citation1965, p. 261)
25 Whitman’s earlier titles also include “In the wake following” (1874) and “Waves in the vessel’s wake” (no year given) (Blodgett & Bradley Citation1965, p. 263).
26 The terminology of shanty, of any spelling, is ambiguous and contested. See for example W. B. Whall, an early, and prolific, collector and publisher of sea songs and sea shanties (Ships, Sea Songs and Shanties, 1910 and subsequent editions), who had strong views on these denominations. See also Roy Palmer in The Oxford Book of Sea Songs, 1986, p. xiii.
27 This inclusion is well established, identified by, among others, Dickinson (Citation1928) and Kennedy (Citation1964). The second folk song discussed below is less often acknowledged, but see for example Howes (Citation1954). Online score of ‘The Golden Vanity’ here: www.8notes.com/scores/6765.asp. The ballad was included in the anthologies published by Francis James Child in the late 19C (English and Scottish Ballads/ The English and Scottish popular ballads), and is also sometimes referred to as ‘The Sweet Trinity’.
28 From the liner notes for Paddy Bell’s recording of 1965 (Paddie Herself): ‘The cabin boy of The Golden Vanity ranks alongside John Henry as one of the indestructible folk heroes. This is a very early ballad, known originally as Sir Walter Raleigh Sailing in the Lowlands, and, as such it was collected by Samuel Pepys.’ (https://mainlynorfolk.info/lloyd/songs/ thegoldenvanity.html).
29 See for example Pike (Citation2003) ‘a big flowing tune of the public-school-hymn type. [A] kind of grandiose melody’ (39); Howes (Citation1954) ‘a fine diatonic tune’ (8); Foss (Citation1950) ‘A spacious tune provides the fine dignity of a seafaring history: everyone ought to join in, in unison […] standing up to raise voices to the sky.’ (97); Town (Citation2003) ‘the refulgent nobility [of these passages] strongly influenced by Parry’s music’ [others have noted] (87); Dickinson (Citation1928) ‘It has the bracing character of Parry’s best subjects.’ (21); Ottaway (Citation1972) ‘The tune itself both invites and defies comparison with Parry or with Elgar [and] has the same broad unison quality.’ (17)
30 Recently recorded (2022) with a reconstructed orchestration by Martyn Brabbins, as part of his series of recordings of all RVW symphonies with Hyperion.
31 In foreword to The Island Race, a follow-up volume published in 1898, re-print 1995, editorial authorship unknown.
32 Allegedly they were ‘triumphantly received’ at Leeds (Jonathan Blumhofer, on artfuse.org, 9 June 2018: https://artsfuse.org/171162/rethinking-the-repertoire-24-charles-villiers-stanfords-songs-of-the-fleet). Stanford had previously written The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet (Op. 24) to a text by Tennyson, which premiered at Leeds in 1886 and remained popular all into the 1930s, underlining both the contemporary commonality and popularity of the topic, as well as recurring musical engagements. ‘Drake’s Drum’, from Newbolt’s first collection, Admirals All, would become his best-known ballad – and Stanford’s most popular song, as it remains today (Dibble Citation2002, p. 359). Herbert Howells’ comment on them in an address at the centenary of Stanford’s birth, notes in particular the song sets’ embeddedness in contemporary moods and attitudes: ‘[Stanford’s] own famous song cycles belonged as much to Edwardian security and optimism as they did to Leeds Town Hall and his own, supreme technique in choral-orchestral works’ (Howells Citation1952, p. 24).
33 Admitted by RVW himself, widely reported in the literature.
34 There is some uncertainty around how crucial the semi-chorus allocation is: there exists a letter to Herbert Bardgett ahead of a performance that may indicate a later reconsideration of the composer in favour of a ‘full and not distant’ passage. (See Br Libr Add MS 65143, Size sequence E (last bundle))
35 Corroborated in the literature, see for example Kennedy (Citation2014): ‘”Away, O soul! [etc]” sets off an outburst of shanty-like rhythms’.
36 ‘Space and place’ to Leyshon et al. (Citation1995), are ‘not simply sites where or about which music happens to be made, or over which music has diffused’ but are rather ‘different spatialities […] formative of the sounding and resounding of music’ (pp. 424–5). To consider the ‘place’ of music, is not, they suggest, to reduce it to a location, or ‘ground it down into some geographical baseline’ but to ‘allow purchase’ on the ‘rich aesthetic, cultural, economic and political geographies of musical language’ (p. 425). Instead of considering music as ostensibly ‘place-less’, we need to be sensitive to ‘mutually generated relations’, and the way in which music can partake in our formative understanding of place.
37 Whitman was in his 50s at the time of writing Passage to India, and it has sometimes been referred to as his ‘midway philosophy’, in a poem that topically seems ‘suspended between past and future’ (Lovell Citation1960, p. 132).
primary sources
Br Libr Add MS: British Library Additional Manuscripts