Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

1872–1958 England

Ralph Vaughan Williams (12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958) was a British composer and folksong-collector who, in the early 20th century, played a key part in the forming of a distinctively national style of English classical music.

England
Academics
Composers

Also known as: Vaughan Williams

Random Ralph Vaughan Williams quote

10 quotes

Film contains potentialities for the combination of all the arts such as Wagner never dreamt of.

It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

National Music (1934)

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.

The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.

Note in the score to The Poisoned Kiss (1936)

In the next world, I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.

National Music (1934)

Before going any further may we take it that the object of art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means which we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves?

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Ralph Vaughan Williams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.