Tuesday Tones

Today we conclude the exploration of Music Inspired By Water, with a gigantic work by English master Ralph Vaughan Williams. From what I’ve learned, I could keep doing Music Inspired By Water for months! But I think it’s time to move on for now, and we’ve heard a pretty solid selection during this focus period.

So, Vaughan Williams: what a wonderful composer he was! He lived a long life, from 1872 to 1958, dying at age 85. He lived through the end of Romanticism in music and well into the rise of Modernism and the avant garde; he also lived through the height of the British Empire and its fall, and the collapse of the one-time world order through two cataclysmic world wars. All these events played out in Vaughan Williams’s musical life, heavily influencing his development. Vaughan Williams should also be seen as a patron saint for the late-bloomers in life: where many of the greatest composers were prodigies from whom music poured in their earliest years, Vaughan Williams did not really blossom as a composer until he was in his 30s. The work we have today premiered when RVW was 37. It is his first symphony, of an eventual nine. RVW’s first symphony arrived when RVW was older than Mozart had been when he died.

The piece is called simply A Sea Symphony. Is it really a “symphony” in the most formal sense? Maybe not…but I think Hector Berlioz would have heard this work and been proud. It is scored for large orchestra, full chorus, and soprano and baritone soloists. The text is various poems by Walt Whitman (whose work was apparently quite popular with this generation of British composers), each about the sea or some aspect of it. The work’s four movements are titled A Song for All Seas, All Ships; On the Beach At Night, Alone; Scherzo: The Waves; The Explorers.

A Sea Symphony is captivating right from the opening bars. Just listen to the intro! For sheer power, that’s a hugely grand and vast a start to a work as any I know; it’s even more direct and to-the-point than Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. I, for one, can’t hear that opening fanfare, followed by the chorus declaiming “Behold the SEA!”, with the full orchestra crashing in on the word “sea”…as much as I try to avoid visual parallels when writing about music, it’s virtually impossible not to hear this as RVW’s depiction of a wave crashing against the rocks. The remainder of the work is often every bit as grand as that again, though there are also moments of intimate introspection…like the sea.

I’ve always had a fascination not just with waters around the world in all forms–lakes, rivers, streams, forest pools, and the oceans–but hanging above all that is the concept of the sea, which is somehow a larger concept, isn’t it? The sea seems a characterization of a vast part of the entire world and how it all comes together. When we think of the sea, I’m not sure that we’re envisioning a specific part of a specific ocean. The sea is a larger thing, a vaster thing. It’s a concept, an idea, a feeling, as much as it is a place. And that, for now, is where I’ll leave things.

Here is A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

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