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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2011
To begin with two observations: (1) of the nine songs that eventually came to comprise Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, two – Nos 4 (‘Youth and Love’) and 9 (‘I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope’) – quote material from earlier songs; and (2) in an article published in 1897, Vaughan Williams criticized some of his predecessors for lacking a ‘nice sense of proportion’ in their music, surely implying, therefore, that he valued it in his own music. And it is with the interaction of those recollections and that ‘nice sense of proportion’ in songs 4 and 9 that we will be concerned.
1 Vaughan Williams set nine of the 44 poems in Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel and Other Verses (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896).Google Scholar For a ‘concordance’ that compares the order of the poems in the song cycle with that in Stevenson's collection, see the important article by Hallmark, Rufus, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Williams and their Songs of Travel’, in Vaughan Williams Essays, ed. Adams, Byron and Wells, Robin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 123Google Scholar.
2 ‘The Romantic Movement and its Results’, The Musician 1/23 (1897): 430–31;Google Scholar reprinted in Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, David (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 13–16,Google Scholar the quotation on 14.
3 What follows is based on Hallmark, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Williams and their Songs of Travel’, passim, surely the most penetrating study of the work's genesis; see also, Kennedy, Michael, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 16, 25–6Google Scholar.
4 See Hallmark, , ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Williams and their Songs of Travel’, 39–41.Google Scholar
5 Songs of Travel: Complete Edition (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1960).Google Scholar
6 Hallmark, , ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Williams and their Songs of Travel’, 134.Google Scholar
7 See for example: Dickinson, A.E.F., Vaughan Williams (London: Faber & Faber, 1963): 152Google Scholar; Kennedy, Michael, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1980): 81Google Scholar; Banfield, Stephen, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early 20th Century, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): vol. 1, 85Google Scholar; Larson, Matthew, ‘Text/Music Relations in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel: An Interpretive Guide’ (DMA diss., Arizona State University, 2001): 56–60;Google ScholarAdams, William M., ‘Elements of Form and Unity in Songs of Travel’, Journal of the RVW Society 25 (Oct. 2002): 6-11, 10.Google Scholar Finally, as Mr Jordan Stokes, a doctoral candidate in musicology at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, has noted in an unpublished seminar paper, ‘Narrative vs. the Narrated in Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel’, there are similarities (short of literal quotation) between the lyrical E-major melody in the B section of song 3 (bars 41ff.) and the setting of ‘Let Beauty awake/For Beauty's sake’ in song 2 (bars 5ff.), a relationship reinforced by their shared E major and similar figuration in the piano; my thanks to Mr Stokes for permitting me to include that observation here. On the crucial role of E major in songs 1-4, see below.
8 References to music not included in Ex. 1 are to the 1960 edition issued by Boosey & Hawkes (see n. 5 above).
9 The operatic nature - that is, the extroverted, spotlight-grabbing ‘staginess’ - of the passage is noted in both Kennedy, , The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 81, andGoogle ScholarJackson, Frank Arden, ‘Concepts and Procedures in Acquiring Essences in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Songs of Travel”’ (MA diss., The Ohio State University, 1956): 52.Google Scholar It was Vaughan Williams who created the drama; not only did he pick and choose his nine poems from Stevenson's collection of 44, but he then scrambled the order in which they appear (see n. 1 above).
10 There are ff indications in song 1, bars 60 (piano only) and 75, and in song 7, bars 15, 30 and 53, which three occurrences I count as a single instance on the grounds that the music is the same each time. Moreover, since song 7 was seemingly conceived independently of the cycle (see above), perhaps one can argue that its ffs should not be counted at all, thus leaving songs 1 and 4 as the only ones in which ff occurs (see below on the possible significance of this).
11 On Vaughan Williams's use of E major throughout his career, see Mellers, Wilfrid, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989): 264–5,Google Scholar who refers to the key as ‘celestial’ and imbued with ‘bliss’, a fair enough description, I think, of its appearances in songs 3 and 4.
12 Banfield, , Sensibility and English Song, 84,Google Scholar notes that mediant relationships permeate the cycle as a whole.
13 Analysis of proportions in music is methodologically problematical. Briefly, there are two ways to compute proportions when, as in Songs of Travel, the composer has failed to include metronome indications: (1) we can try to find a constant metrical unit (and we cannot always do so), though this, of course, fails to account for the ebbs and flows of tempo either called for by the composer or introduced by the performer; or (2) we can use clock/performance time, though here too there are problems: first, performances may differ from one another in terms of both total duration and individual sections (so whose timings are they?), and, second, we do not generally listen to music with a stopwatch ticking in our ears (or with the blinking LEDs of the CD player popping up in the score). In the end, both methods have their problems. See Kramer, Jonathan, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988): 369,Google Scholar who, however, justifies his own use of clock/performance time on the basis of musical stasis: ‘In the absence of large-scale changes in any parameter, there is little to make subjective time seem faster or slower than clock time’ (ibid., 327). For a review of the various methods that have been used in the analysis of proportions, see Howat, Roy, ‘Review-Article: Bartók, Lendvai and the Principles of Proportional Analysis’, Music Analysis 2 (1983): 69–85Google Scholar.
14 Discography: Benjamin Luxon and David Willison, Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel, Four Poems by Fredegond Shove, House of Life (Chandos, CHAN 8475, 1986); Maltman, Christopher and Vignoles, Roger, Vaughan Williams … Butterworth … Somervell (Hyperion, CDA 67378, 2003)Google Scholar; Terfel, Bryn and Martineau, Malcom, The Vagabond (Deutsche Grammophon, 445 946-2, 1995)Google Scholar; Williams, Roderick and Burnside, Iain, Vaughan Williams, Songs of Travel (English Song Series 14, Naxos 8.557643, 2005)Google Scholar.
15 Hallmark, , ‘Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Williams and their Songs of Travel’, 134Google Scholar and n. 20, who remarks that songs 1 and 4 unfold in the present, songs 2 and 3, in the past; Dickinson, , Vaughan Williams, 151,Google Scholar also posits a narrative connection - in the form of the ‘highway’ - between songs 1 and 4. Larson, , ‘Text/Music Relations’, 44,Google Scholar offers another interpretation, one that equates sharp keys with nature, flat keys with ‘civilized society’.
16 As noted above, there are already questions about the integrity of the cycle in connection with songs 7 and 9. Yet even assuming that this early stage might have existed, it had certainly passed by 2 December 1904, when Walter Creighton performed the cycle in its eight-song version (see above). Note that as a four-song cycle, the few instances of ff would occur only in the outer songs, 1 and 4.
17 The motif is so dubbed in both Larson, , ‘Text/Music Relations’, 20, andGoogle ScholarAdams, , ‘Elements of Form and Unity’, 10.Google ScholarLarson, (‘Text/Music Relations’, 58)Google Scholar posits still another motivic relationship between the two songs, claiming that the piano's semiquaver octaves at bars 40-41 of ‘Youth and Love’ grow out of the motif to which the vagabond sings ‘Let the lave go by me’ in song 1, bars 8-9; I am not convinced.
18 We can determine the Golden Section of a span by multiplying its total length by 0.618. The literature on the Golden Section and the related Fibonacci sequence is immense. Four good starting points: Livio, Mario, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, The World's Most Astonishing Number (New York: Broadway Books, 2002)Google Scholar; Padovan, Richard, Proportion: Science, Philosophy, Architecture (London/New York: Spon Press/Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar; Herz-Fischler, Roger, A Mathematical History of the Golden Number (New York: Dover, 1999Google Scholar; originally published as A Mathematical History of Division in Extreme and Mean Ratio (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1987)); andGoogle ScholarJoseph, and Gies, Frances, Leonard of Pisa and the New Mathematics of the Middle Ages (New York: Crowell, 1969).Google Scholar There is also a large literature on the Golden Section and music, with a quartet of responsible starting points consisting of Kramer, , The Time of Music, 303–21Google Scholar (with an extensive bibliography that includes a number of important psychological studies); Howat, Roy, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Atlas, Allan W., ‘Stealing a Kiss at the Golden Section: Pacing and Proportion in the Act I Love Duet of La Bohème’, Acta musicologica 75 (2003): 269–91;Google Scholar and the probing article by Tatlow, Ruth, ‘The Use and Abuse of Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Section in Musicology Today’, Understanding Bach 1 (2006),Google Scholar www.bachnetwork.co.uk/understandingbach (accessed 12 Jul. 2009).
19 The arithmetic: 44 × .618 = 27.192, rounded up to 28 (in order to include the 28th crotchet in its entirety).
20 Although Ursula Vaughan Williams (the composer's second wife and biographer) tells us that her husband had an ‘early love for architecture’ and a deep ‘historical knowledge’ of it, this does not necessarily translate into familiarity with Golden Sections, much less their conscious application as a guide to laying out the structure of a work; see Williams, Ursula Vaughan, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1964): 88.Google Scholar On Vaughan Williams's compositional process, see especially, Frogley, Alain, Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); andGoogle ScholarAdams, Byron, ‘The Stages of Revision of Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony’, The Musical Quarterly 73 (1989): 382–400Google Scholar.
21 Clearly, what constitutes the perceptible vs. the imperceptible will vary from one person to another. For instance, Kramer, , The Time of Music, 332,Google Scholar cites studies that permit deviations of as much as 8-16 per cent; on the other hand, Epstein, David, Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1995): 498–9,Google Scholar draws the line at 5 per cent. Writing about the 2 per cent discrepancy in the west façade of the Parthenon, Anne Bulckens notes that visitors ‘would not perceive the difference between a precise golden rectangle [the proportion of width to height being such as to define the Golden Section] of such size or an approximation of it’ (communication of 1 Mar. 2003 - Bulckens is the author of the important study ‘The Parthenon's Main Design Proportion and its Meaning’ (PhD diss., Deakin University, Goolong, Australia, 2000)), whereas the astrophysicistGoogle ScholarLivio, , The Golden Ratio, 159-94,Google Scholar takes a hard-line approach and permits no deviation at all. Finally, no matter where one lands along the perceptibility-imperceptibility continuum, we must, I think, allow for greater flexibility in connection with a piece of music that is moving in time than we might permit a spatial proportion that is standing still.
22 For example, Livio, , The Golden Ratio, 159–94,Google Scholar would deny this particular LGS any significance at all on two grounds: (1) there is no evidence that Vaughan Williams consciously intended it, something upon which Livio would insist; and (2) there are deviations from one recording to the other in terms of both total duration and in the distance between the precise LGS and the arrival at C29, though to invoke these deviations is to misunderstand music as a performing art.
23 Banfield, , Sensibility and English Song, 85,Google Scholar
24 On this characterization of symmetry and Golden Sections, see the classic study by Hambidge, Jay, Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (New York: Brentano's, 1926; reprint: New York: Dover, 1967).Google Scholar On the works cited, see my articles, ‘Vaughan Williams's “Silent Noon”: Structure and Proportions’, The Musical Times 150 (summer 2009), 71–82;Google Scholar‘On the Structure and Proportions of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135/1 (2010): 115–43;Google Scholar and a forthcoming essay on The House of Life.