Joyful Noise
By Tony Antolini

      Who is the atheist English composer with the greatest number of tunes in the Hymnal 1982 who is buried in Westminster Abbey and who was singlehandedly responsible for bringing Anglican hymnody to the high level it occupies today? His most popular hymn tune is Sine Nomine (Without a Name) and goes with “For all the saints.” Have you guessed yet? Here’s one more hint: His first name is Ralph but he insisted that it be pronounced “Rafe,” (because the original name was Radulph, pronounced Ray-dulph, from the Anglo-Saxon/German "Raed wulf" meaning "wise counsel of wolf".)
      It’s Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was born in Down Ampney, Glouchestershire, England on October 12, 1872. His mother was a Wedgwood and a niece of Charles Darwin. He sometimes confessed that he was born “with a very small spoon in my mouth.” As a member of upper class society he was encouraged to pursue his musical interests although his own family was not particularly musical. He entered the Royal College of Music in 1890. He then enrolled at Cambridge University in 1892 to study history while continuing his studies at the Royal College of Music. He went to Berlin in 1897 and studied composition with Max Bruch and later to Paris where he studied with Maurice Ravel.
      Vaughan Williams felt that the root of true English music lay in folk song. In 1903 he was invited to tea in a village where an old man offered to sing for him. The song held just the charm that Vaughan Williams had been looking for and this became the beginning of a lifelong quest for English folk tunes. He began to travel through the countryside collecting these tunes and eventually amassed over 800 of them. These would inform not only his large-scale works but also many hymns that he harmonized for the Church of England hymnal. Many of these hymns were listed as “anonymous” but were actually tunes Vaughan Williams composed in the style of anonymous folk songs.
      We have remarkably detailed information not only about Vaughan Williams the composer but Vaughan Williams the man owing to his unusual marital history. His first marriage to Adeline Vaughan Williams was by all accounts a very good one. But she became chronically ill and became less and less able to share his life as a composer and conductor. In 1937, Vaughan Williams met a talented writer named Ursula Wood, then 27 and the wife of a soldier. Ursula was a devoted fan of Vaughan Williams and had written a scenario for a masque that he had agreed to set to music. She became a close friend of the family. When Ursula’s husband was killed in World War II, Ralph and Adeline took her into their home. After Adeline’s death, Ursula took over the management of the household and eventually married Vaughan Williams in 1953. She was 41 and he was 80. Ursula went on to write the definitive biography of her husband, covering not only the time that she knew him but the earlier years of his life. It’s entitled R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1964.)
      Vaughan Williams died on August 26, 1958 at the age of 86.
      It is my hope that one of our movie nights might be devoted to viewing O Thou Transcendent: The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams by Tony Palmer. It shows the span of his career with unforgettable musical illustrations and includes a very thoughtful interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the subject of giving a Christian burial to an atheist.