Tone Poem Tuesday

An old favorite returns. This work is the kind of thing I return to when I need the world to slow down, when I need to recall that there is room in this world we’ve built for quiet moments and serene thoughts.

Here is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. Vaughan Williams called the work a “romance”, and that fits. What always captivates me about this piece is the way it doesn’t so much begin as arise. A sequence of soft chords sounds in the orchestra before the solo violin begins to emerge with a series of figures that seem almost to flutter. The Lark Ascending is a meditative song that returns the world to a better speed.

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