This chapter indicates some of the changes in the condition of the British composer between the pre–First World War situation that Vaughan Williams had outlined in ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’ and the developments that began to come into place in the 1920s and 1930s. It focusses on aspects of fresh leadership, opportunities, and practical encouragement as evidenced through Hugh Allen and the Royal College of Music, Adrian Boult and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Hubert Foss and the Oxford University Press Music Department. The Royal College of Music became a composers’ resource, its orchestra and the new Parry theatre offering opportunities for composers to try out works in rehearsal or on the stage. Boult’s championship of British composition was evident in his Royal College conducting class and from his assiduous broadcasting of British composers at the BBC. British music publishers were slow to appreciate the opportunities of income deriving from performance and broadcasting rights, clinging to the tradition of revenue meaning copies sold. But these new income streams enabled material change, and Hubert Foss persuaded OUP to publish serious orchestral music by young British talent. In all of this, Vaughan Williams was an essential point of influence and example.

Despite popular perceptions of Vaughan Williams as being focussed primarily on nature and the pastoral, a vivid appreciation of urban environments played an equally crucial role in shaping his artistic vision. A Londoner for most of his adult life, he also spent significant time in Berlin and Paris, and had a special regard for New York. Yet while he relished the bustle and rich social diversity of London, the de facto capital of the world during his lifetime, he was also keenly aware of its deprivation and dark undercurrents. A London Symphony is the most ambitious musical work to thematicize the modern city composed anywhere before 1914, and it evokes psychological and experiential tropes central to modernism’s urban imaginary across the arts, including the collision of multiple social identities, temporalities, and spatial perspectives, and the associated alienation and fragmentation of the unitary self. The composer employs an exceptionally wide range of materials, juxtaposing folk song, ragtime, street noise, and much else, in a multilayered environment of sometimes violent dissonance and rhythmic dislocation. Yet the work strives to integrate such diversity within an overarching symphonic framework – a powerful metaphor for a vision of nation and humanity that underpinned the composer’s later work.

This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

No country outside Britain has embraced Vaughan Williams’s music more warmly and extensively than the USA. The composer first visited in 1922 (extended stays followed in 1932 and 1954), but he had earlier developed a sympathy for American democratic ideals through intense involvement with Walt Whitman’s poetry. Vaughan Williams’s stature in America grew steadily from around 1920, when major works, most notably A London Symphony, began to be performed regularly, and it reached a zenith in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was widely regarded as a major international figure in the same league as Stravinsky or Bartók. While his American reputation echoed the deepening Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ that developed during the alliances of the Second World War and the Cold War, advocacy from a wide range of European émigrés such as Serge Koussevitzky and Bruno Walter indicates a broad appeal reaching well beyond any narrow notion of Anglo-Saxon kinship. Vaughan Williams’s profound engagement with folk song, modality, Whitman, and the symphony aligned particularly closely with prevailing trends in American music c. 1930–60, and his impact can be felt in the work of composers like Samuel Barber and Roy Harris; more recently, the admiration of John Adams, among others, indicates continuing relevance.

Vaughan Williams’s recorded music is a vast subject that has scarcely been studied. This chapter presents a first major step into this research area. It considers early recordings of his works from the 1920s and 1930s, addressing how they were shaped by the technical limitations and market forces of the British industry during this era. Brief playing times and poor sound quality for these recordings meant that art songs and folk-song arrangements dominate the composer’s early catalogue. Early recordings of larger works were often limited primarily to occasions of special advocacy and funding. Later, as demand, technology, and company resources allowed, the number and range of Vaughan Williams’s compositions on record increased. This chapter also shows how reviews of these early recordings reflected overall attitudes about his music, with reviewers expressing mixed reactions to perceived folk and modal aspects of the few works they were able to hear on record. Since a fuller catalogue of Vaughan Williams’s recorded music emerged only over decades, the vicissitudes of the industry cannot be separated from the development of his overall reception during this crucial time.

Though often noted by scholars, Vaughan Williams’s work with amateur musicians has generally been neglected by them, presented as a kind of social or aesthetic backdrop to his more prestigious compositional projects. Such neglect does the composer a disservice, not only because more than half of his catalogue was written with amateur performers in mind but also because he recognized that it was on ‘amateur music’ that the entire edifice of English music stood. This essay charts the ethical significance that working with amateur musicians had for the composer (who was a principled democrat) and examines the economic impact that such music-making had on the emergence of a viable English compositional style. In a country where laissez-faire economics reigned supreme, it was the rise of an enormous amateur music market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that created the modern music profession – the professional performers, teachers, journalists, publishing houses, administrators, and promoters who fed and ultimately grew this market. It was a development that in turn helped ‘make’ the modern English composer.

Is there such a thing as an English compositional tradition in the twentieth century? And if so, what is Britten’s place in it? Harrison Birtwistle thought not, and one can understand why. There is no obvious point of continuity from one generation to another: Parry and Elgar’s reference points are Austro-German, while Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s music is modally based and considerably affected by English folk music. Delius spent most of his life outside England, and his aesthetic and compositional predilections are the most difficult to relate to a tradition. Britten and Tippett both abjured what they saw as the stultifying nationalism of Holst and Vaughan Williams and embraced aspects of international modernism. Despite the fractures, however, there are aspects in common: it is through themes from English landscape and literature that connections between generations are most clearly seen: in pastoralism, for instance, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’; in the role of melancholy; in the preference for particular genres; and in the reworking of aspects of the English musical past.