Symphony No. 6 (Vaughan Williams)
Encyclopedia
Ralph Vaughan Williams
's Symphony in E minor, published as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1946–47, during and immediately after World War II
. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed by Sir Adrian Boult
and the BBC Symphony Orchestra
on April 21, 1948. Within a year it had received some 100 performances, including the U.S. Premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
under Serge Koussevitzky
on August 7, 1948. Leopold Stokowski
gave the first New York performances the following January with the New York Philharmonic
and immediately recorded it, declaring that "this is music that will take its place with the greatest creations of the masters." However, Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his programme note for the first performance took a defiantly flippant tone.
The composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
. In response to these questions, he is widely quoted as having said, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music". In connection with the last movement, the composer did eventually suggest that a quotation from Act IV of Shakespeare
's The Tempest
comes close to the music’s meaning: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."
The Symphony is noteworthy for its unusually discordant harmonic language, reminiscent in approach if not in technique of his F Minor Symphony
from over a decade earlier, and for its inclusion of a tenor saxophone
among the woodwinds
. In several respects this symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s experiments with orchestration that so characterise his late music.
The symphony is in four linked movements (i.e. one movement leads straight into the next, with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure.
and harmony
, there is often no clear sense of meter
or key
. Structurally, the movement falls loosely into the category of sonata form
with its carefully organised contrasting themes and key centres, though this may not be apparent on first hearing. Indeed, the most striking point of contrast may be the reappearance near the end of the movement of one of the main themes in a clear and rich E major
. The first movement ends with a sustained unison E in the low instruments, at which point the second movement begins.
away, in B-flat minor. The main themes are so chromatic
that they eventually have little sense of profile. A central feature of this movement is a "rat-a-tat" rhythmic motive
that recurs through most of the movement, beginning in the second measure. At one point that figure goes away for a while, and the effect of its eventual return is an almost palpable sense of dread. After an enormous battering climax fuelled by that figure (including the single loudest point in the entire symphony), the movement winds down with a lengthy solo played by the cor anglais
, still accompanied by the same three-note ostinato. The sustained last note links via a half-step drop to the Scherzo Movement.
in texture, follows a typical scherzo/trio structure, but the overall feel is hardly one of amusement; the high spirits are decidedly raucous and sardonic. Although the rhythmic style is less disjointed than in the first movement (the listener has little trouble following the meter here), the harmony (heavily dominated by tritones, or lowered fifths) and orchestration both revert to the first movement’s density. The trio section features the tenor saxophone’s only true solo role in the symphony; when the scherzo material recurs the composer turns the fugue subject upside down and eventually combines that form with the original version. With the final climax (the trio theme stated by full orchestra) the music almost collapses, leaving the bass clarinet holding the sustained note that links to the Finale.
The symphony continues to provoke much speculation about its "meaning", and the only clue from Vaughan Williams himself (as quoted by his widow), points us in the direction of an agnostic Nunc dimittis
.
A typical performance takes about 35 minutes.
, who had been a fellow organ student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s and was to give the US Premiere of his 9th Symphony in 1958. The second recording was made by Sir Adrian Boult
two days later with the London Symphony Orchestra. Both used the original version of the third movement; the composer revised that movement in 1950. At the conclusion of the Decca
sessions for Boult's second performance, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra
, the composer personally thanked him and the orchestra for what they had accomplished; this impromptu speech was recorded and later included on the LP and CD releases of the recording. The work has since been recorded by many others including Sir John Barbirolli
, Maurice Abravanel
, André Previn
, Bernard Haitink
, Bryden Thomson
, Leonard Slatkin
, Paavo Berglund
, Vernon Handley
, Richard Hickox
and Sir Andrew Davis
.
Part of the symphony's first movement (Allegro) was used as the theme tune for the ITV
drama A Family at War
.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams OM was an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He was also a collector of English folk music and song: this activity both influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, beginning in 1904, in which he included many...
's Symphony in E minor, published as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1946–47, during and immediately after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed by Sir Adrian Boult
Adrian Boult
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult CH was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was...
and the BBC Symphony Orchestra
BBC Symphony Orchestra
The BBC Symphony Orchestra is the principal broadcast orchestra of the British Broadcasting Corporation and one of the leading orchestras in Britain.-History:...
on April 21, 1948. Within a year it had received some 100 performances, including the U.S. Premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Boston Symphony Orchestra
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is an orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1881, the BSO plays most of its concerts at Boston's Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at the Tanglewood Music Center...
under Serge Koussevitzky
Serge Koussevitzky
Serge Koussevitzky , was a Russian-born Jewish conductor, composer and double-bassist, known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949.-Early career:...
on August 7, 1948. Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
gave the first New York performances the following January with the New York Philharmonic
New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic is a symphony orchestra based in New York City in the United States. It is one of the American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five"...
and immediately recorded it, declaring that "this is music that will take its place with the greatest creations of the masters." However, Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his programme note for the first performance took a defiantly flippant tone.
The composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...
and Nagasaki
Nagasaki
is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. Nagasaki was founded by the Portuguese in the second half of the 16th century on the site of a small fishing village, formerly part of Nishisonogi District...
. In response to these questions, he is widely quoted as having said, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music". In connection with the last movement, the composer did eventually suggest that a quotation from Act IV of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
comes close to the music’s meaning: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."
The Symphony is noteworthy for its unusually discordant harmonic language, reminiscent in approach if not in technique of his F Minor Symphony
Symphony No. 4 (Vaughan Williams)
The Symphony No. 4 in F minor by Ralph Vaughan Williams was dedicated by the composer to Arnold Bax.Unlike Vaughan Williams's first three symphonies it was not given a title, the composer stating that it was to be understood as pure music, without any incidental or external inspiration.In contrast...
from over a decade earlier, and for its inclusion of a tenor saxophone
Tenor saxophone
The tenor saxophone is a medium-sized member of the saxophone family, a group of instruments invented by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s. The tenor, with the alto, are the two most common types of saxophones. The tenor is pitched in the key of B, and written as a transposing instrument in the treble...
among the woodwinds
Woodwind instrument
A woodwind instrument is a musical instrument which produces sound when the player blows air against a sharp edge or through a reed, causing the air within its resonator to vibrate...
. In several respects this symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s experiments with orchestration that so characterise his late music.
The symphony is in four linked movements (i.e. one movement leads straight into the next, with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure.
Allegro
The symphony begins very loudly with the full orchestra playing simultaneously in F minor and E minor. The chaotic rush of notes makes the listener’s job of getting or keeping bearings relatively difficult. Because the composer uses so many disruptive techniques in both rhythmRhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
and harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
, there is often no clear sense of meter
Meter (music)
Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented...
or key
Key (music)
In music theory, the term key is used in many different and sometimes contradictory ways. A common use is to speak of music as being "in" a specific key, such as in the key of C major or in the key of F-sharp. Sometimes the terms "major" or "minor" are appended, as in the key of A minor or in the...
. Structurally, the movement falls loosely into the category of sonata form
Sonata form
Sonata form is a large-scale musical structure used widely since the middle of the 18th century . While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement...
with its carefully organised contrasting themes and key centres, though this may not be apparent on first hearing. Indeed, the most striking point of contrast may be the reappearance near the end of the movement of one of the main themes in a clear and rich E major
E major
E major is a major scale based on E, with the pitches E, F, G, A, B, C, and D. Its key signature has four sharps .Its relative minor is C-sharp minor, and its parallel minor is E minor....
. The first movement ends with a sustained unison E in the low instruments, at which point the second movement begins.
Moderato
The second movement starts a tritoneTritone
In classical music from Western culture, the tritone |tone]]) is traditionally defined as a musical interval composed of three whole tones. In a chromatic scale, each whole tone can be further divided into two semitones...
away, in B-flat minor. The main themes are so chromatic
Diatonic and chromatic
Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony...
that they eventually have little sense of profile. A central feature of this movement is a "rat-a-tat" rhythmic motive
Motif (music)
In music, a motif or motive is a short musical idea, a salient recurring figure, musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance in or is characteristic of a composition....
that recurs through most of the movement, beginning in the second measure. At one point that figure goes away for a while, and the effect of its eventual return is an almost palpable sense of dread. After an enormous battering climax fuelled by that figure (including the single loudest point in the entire symphony), the movement winds down with a lengthy solo played by the cor anglais
Cor anglais
The cor anglais , or English horn , is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family....
, still accompanied by the same three-note ostinato. The sustained last note links via a half-step drop to the Scherzo Movement.
Scherzo: Allegro vivace
This movement, heavily fugalFugue
In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....
in texture, follows a typical scherzo/trio structure, but the overall feel is hardly one of amusement; the high spirits are decidedly raucous and sardonic. Although the rhythmic style is less disjointed than in the first movement (the listener has little trouble following the meter here), the harmony (heavily dominated by tritones, or lowered fifths) and orchestration both revert to the first movement’s density. The trio section features the tenor saxophone’s only true solo role in the symphony; when the scherzo material recurs the composer turns the fugue subject upside down and eventually combines that form with the original version. With the final climax (the trio theme stated by full orchestra) the music almost collapses, leaving the bass clarinet holding the sustained note that links to the Finale.
Epilogue: Moderato
This movement follows a vaguely fugal structure, but that structure is not especially perceptible to the listener because the entire movement is marked pp, meaning played very softly (and at one point senza crescendo, an instruction not to increase the volume), with the further admonishment senza espressivo, meaning without any expression. This makes the movement extremely difficult to play, and the audience must use great concentration to keep from losing track of the composer’s train of thought. Vaughan Williams himself, in his aforementioned programme note, speaks of “drifting” and “whiffs of theme” in characterising the music. This is the movement that sparked so many to see the work as a whole as being a vision of a post-nuclear world. Writers have used such words as “dead”, “barren”, and “ruins” to describe it. Curiously enough, both the second and fourth movements have the same tempo marking but the feel is decidedly slower here.The symphony continues to provoke much speculation about its "meaning", and the only clue from Vaughan Williams himself (as quoted by his widow), points us in the direction of an agnostic Nunc dimittis
Nunc dimittis
The Nunc dimittis is a canticle from a text in the second chapter of Luke named after its first words in Latin, meaning 'Now dismiss...'....
.
A typical performance takes about 35 minutes.
Recordings
The first recording of this symphony was made on 21 February 1949 by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold StokowskiLeopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
, who had been a fellow organ student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s and was to give the US Premiere of his 9th Symphony in 1958. The second recording was made by Sir Adrian Boult
Adrian Boult
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult CH was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was...
two days later with the London Symphony Orchestra. Both used the original version of the third movement; the composer revised that movement in 1950. At the conclusion of the Decca
Decca Records
Decca Records began as a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934; however, owing to World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades....
sessions for Boult's second performance, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The London Philharmonic Orchestra , based in London, is one of the major orchestras of the United Kingdom, and is based in the Royal Festival Hall. In addition, the LPO is the main resident orchestra of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera...
, the composer personally thanked him and the orchestra for what they had accomplished; this impromptu speech was recorded and later included on the LP and CD releases of the recording. The work has since been recorded by many others including Sir John Barbirolli
John Barbirolli
Sir John Barbirolli, CH was an English conductor and cellist. Born in London, of Italian and French parentage, he grew up in a family of professional musicians. His father and grandfather were violinists...
, Maurice Abravanel
Maurice Abravanel
Maurice Abravanel was aSwiss-American Jewish conductor of classical music. He is remembered as the conductor of the Utah Symphony Orchestra for over 30 years.-Life:...
, André Previn
André Previn
André George Previn, KBE is an American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world, and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings. -Early Life:Previn was born in...
, Bernard Haitink
Bernard Haitink
Bernard Johan Herman Haitink, CH, KBE is a Dutch conductor and violinist.- Early life :Haitink was born in Amsterdam, the son of Willem Haitink and Anna Haitink. He studied music at the conservatoire in Amsterdam...
, Bryden Thomson
Bryden Thomson
Bryden Thomson was a Scottish conductor.Bryden Thomson was born in Ayr. He led several British orchestras, including the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra from 1977 to 1985...
, Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Slatkin
Leonard Edward Slatkin is an American conductor and composer.-Early life and education:Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His father Felix Slatkin was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet,...
, Paavo Berglund
Paavo Berglund
Paavo Allan Engelbert Berglund is a Finnish conductor.Born in Helsinki, Berglund studied the violin as a child, and played an instrument made by his grandfather. By age 15, he had decided on music as his career, and by 18 was playing in restaurants...
, Vernon Handley
Vernon Handley
Vernon George "Tod" Handley CBE was a British conductor, known in particular for his support of British composers. He was born of a Welsh father and an Irish mother into a musical family in Enfield, London. He acquired the nickname "Tod" because his feet were turned in at his birth, which his...
, Richard Hickox
Richard Hickox
Richard Sidney Hickox CBE was an English conductor of choral, orchestral and operatic music.-Early life:Hickox was born in Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire into a musical family...
and Sir Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis is the name of:* Andrew Jackson Davis , American spiritualist* Andy Davis , Washington Redskins player* Andrew Davis , American film director* Andrew M...
.
Part of the symphony's first movement (Allegro) was used as the theme tune for the ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...
drama A Family at War
A Family At War
A Family At War is a British drama series that aired on ITV from 1970 to 1972. It was created by John Finch and made by Granada Television for ITV. The director was David Giles....
.