The Lark Ascending: Confused Origins and Contexts

The current disagreement over how to frame and interpret The Lark begins with its unclear chronology and creative process. Conclusive primary evidence indicating the precise date of its initial completion is missing, but a number of strong indicators point to 1914 and, specifically, before the start of World War I. The earliest available manuscript is a holograph score of the work for violin and piano scoring, the ‘special arrangement’ in which Michael Kennedy claims the music was first performed for a concert of the Avonmouth and Shirehampton Choral Society in 1920. (Kennedy writes that the composition's original manuscript ‘must be presumed lost’.)Footnote ⁷ This score of The Lark, showing multiple revisions, is held at The British Library in London (Add. MS 52385), portions of which are as of this writing available to view online. While no date appears on any of its folios, the library's descriptive captions claim that the work was originally composed for violin and piano (which Kennedy seems to contradict), and place its initial completion in 1914.Footnote ⁸ Both Kennedy's Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams also offer a 1914 completion date (apparently for an original, pre-revised, and now-lost scoring for violin and orchestra) with no explanation of how it was arrived at.Footnote ⁹ Kennedy treats the composition in his catalogue as a ‘post-war’ work only because the composer revised the final orchestral version in 1920 and again before publication in 1926 (with a copyright date of 1925). He also points out that the musical revisions (as opposed to the extra Meredith poem lines in the manuscript that do not appear in the published score – more on this later) shown in Add. MS 52385 are mainly for ‘tautening’ the music, implying that they do not alter it beyond immediate recognition.Footnote ¹⁰

Whatever the original scoring, three circumstantial bits of evidence are worth considering for The Lark's initial completion date. First, Hubert Foss offers the year of 1914 in his monograph on Vaughan Williams.Footnote ¹¹ This is noteworthy because the composer sent Foss a list of corrections of mistakes he found in the book's text, some of which involve composition completion and premiere dates. He provides each date as a year with no more specific information. Vaughan Williams did not correct the 1914 date Foss had already supplied, and therefore ostensibly accepted it.Footnote ¹² Second, according to Andrew Green, this generic 1914 date is confirmed by a programme note that Vaughan Williams himself wrote for a 1926 performance.Footnote ¹³ Third, and even more significantly, Green points out that A.H. Fox-Strangways's April 1920 Music & Letters article surveying Vaughan Williams's musical output affirms 1914 and adds the specific time of ‘just before the war’.Footnote ¹⁴ Green is probably correct that, since Vaughan Williams contributed an article to this same issue of the journal (‘The Letter and the Spirit’), and given that Fox-Strangways undoubtedly had close access to the composer, his information is very likely accurate.Footnote ¹⁵

Others, however, have claimed (without apparent basis) that The Lark's composition overlapped with the war. Some do this by means of loose chronology, as when Michael Jameson writes that ‘the score had been sketched as early as 1914, but the ensuing European conflict set back both its completion and revision’.Footnote ¹⁶ There is also Richard King's claim that it was begun ‘at the outbreak of the Great War and completed in 1920’.Footnote ¹⁷ Others more explicitly (and imaginatively) link The Lark directly with the war. Betsy Schwarm's Encyclopedia Britannica article states that ‘Vaughan Williams composed The Lark Ascending in 1914, in the early days of World War I, when a pastoral scene of a singing bird on the wing seemed far removed from reality’.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, the BBC's ‘Teach’ web page devoted to the work includes the following:

The story cited here regarding the Margate holiday incident repeats a persistent myth tying The Lark directly (and colourfully) to World War I. Vanessa Thorpe, after providing the Roger Wright quote cited above, gives this account:

Or consider this excerpt from an online Classic FM composer guide ironically aimed at ‘[breaking] down some of the popular myths’ about Vaughan Williams:

The source of this ‘Margate Myth’ appears to be a short passage from Ursula Vaughan Williams's 1964 biography of her late husband. She briefly mentions Ralph's and his then-wife Adeline's trip there to stay with his mother just as the First World War was starting and young men began enlisting for service. She also describes the writing episode at the cliffs, including the ‘citizen's arrest’ by the boy scout, but nowhere is The Lark Ascending named as the work he was composing. Here is the main part of the account:

Ursula adds an important footnote: ‘This was Ralph's own version of the story. [George] Butterworth, in a letter written after a visit to Cheyne Walk, says that he was writing a lecture on Purcell’.Footnote ²² This detail is noteworthy not only because it suggests that Vaughan Williams may not even have been composing music at this scene at all, but also because it shows that his memory of this event, as with other events he recalled many years later (for instance his account of the circumstances surrounding his collection of the folk song ‘Bushes and Briars’ in 1903) may have been uncertain so long after the fact.Footnote ²³ (Direct and indirect recollections of the 1914 completion date for The Lark collectively do not quite have this problem because of their number and agreement across a wide chronological span.) In any case, the multiple mis-renderings of this episode are unfortunate examples of seizing upon a story uncarefully in service of a desired correlation.

Related to questions of The Lark's precise chronology and direct involvement with World War I is the notion that it recalls (and maybe even mourns) a lost pre-war or even pre-industrial England. A common thread here is troubled historical events being deployed to be as consequential for the work as possible, even occasionally seeming to explain away its uncomfortably ‘escapist’ associations.. Richard King, for example, states: ‘We might remind ourselves that however forcefully the music stirs in us nostalgia or wistfulness of our own, Vaughan Williams was, with good reason, himself nostalgic for a prelapsarian landscape, an idea of pastoral idyll of Albion which the Great War had nullified permanently’. A few pages later he writes: ‘The Lark Ascending is imbued with nostalgia, it is nostalgia that recognizes the depth of this rupture [World War I], and the landscape it evokes is one of a more innocent age’.Footnote ²⁴ Despite his skilled marshalling of evidence showing The Lark to predate the Great War and having little (if anything) to do with it, Andrew Green still wants the music to be an elegy in response to real-world events. He hypothesizes that the British agricultural depression starting in the middle 1870s, the effects of which were ongoing while Meredith wrote his poem (‘Meredith wrote his Lark Ascending as the depression bit deep’, he writes) and for long after, may also have contributed to the sense of loss he and others perceive in Vaughan Williams's own Lark.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, David Gutman wishes to separate The Lark from associations he and other critics do not like. After writing that ‘Vaughan Williams was no escapist’, and speaking of his mature idiom's ‘determination to articulate shared feelings, particular in time of war’, he asks: ‘is this straightforward nostalgia or did the composer hard-wire something else into the piece from the start?’ As with others we have seen here, Gutman cannot abide The Lark as just a ‘nice piece to listen to’: ‘but in creating that potent sense of loss Vaughan Williams must be doing something more than contrasting whimsical bird music with a folksier ground-level middle section’.Footnote ²⁶

Two Scholarly Interpretations and a Response

Two brief treatments of The Lark in the scholarly literature, both published in roughly the last decade within volumes of broader focus, make deeper, music-driven arguments for understanding the work as something beyond the idyllic. Neither writing connects the music with outside events, and both are more effective than the thus-far-sampled, slender speculations in their shared aims. But both also neglect to consider significant mitigating factors (as we shall see). The first appears in Christopher Mark's survey of chamber music and works for soloist with orchestra in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams.Footnote ²⁷ Mark duly notes that the work's designation as a ‘Romance’ signals lyricism, but he cannot keep from deriding the Meredith poem from which Vaughan Williams's epigraph is extracted, calling it ‘sentimental (and, at best, third-rate)’. He wants to distance the work from this association, however, also noting that The Lark seems to have been one of the factors which prompted the ‘cowpat music’ jibes. Hence, he resists the characterization of it in Grove Music Online as ‘wholly idyllic and therefore different in feeling from the post-war pastoral works’, asking if it is even possible to have a wholly idyllic work.Footnote ²⁸

Mark essentially casts The Lark in terms of a process of undermining an idyllic scene depicted at the outset and recalled later. The music opens quietly with an unstable ninth chord (E-G-B-D-F#) in the strings, horns, and clarinets, from which the soloist launches into a pentatonic cadenza containing the music's initial melodic gestures. Mark sees this in terms of a ‘representational’ world of time suspended. The orchestra takes on what he calls a ‘commentating’ role as accompaniment directly preceding Rehearsal A, with the soloist likewise moving from representation into commentary when it joins the orchestra in the first climax shortly after Rehearsal D. According to Mark, the return to the initial material (the cadenza) at four bars after Rehearsal F sounds more like reminiscence than a convincing recapturing of that opening state, with its truncation supporting this impression. Like Gutman and others, Mark views the middle section, beginning from two bars before Rehearsal G, with its new, ‘folk-like’ melody stated by the flute, in terms of moving ‘from the sky to ground-level and human activity’, and ‘community’. He correctly notes in this section the loss of the D–B motive heard throughout much of the prior music, and he characterizes the violin's role as ‘decorative’ once this has happened. Mark identifies a sense of nostalgia with, among other elements, the violin resumption of the middle section's initial flute melody at Rehearsal R. He sees the final, modally ambivalent restatement of the opening cadenza as embodying the work's greatest feeling of loss and melancholy.

In his book on twentieth-century English pastoral music, Eric Saylor also devotes some paragraphs to advocating for a non-idyllic Lark. Like Mark, he notes the work's ‘Romance’ designation. While he actually reprints the stanzas of the poem that form its epigraph (something that Mark does not do), he also largely ignores questions of how it might specifically relate to the music, only suggesting that the solo violin's trills may reference the bird's song. Saylor's primary interest is the music's modal complexity. He notes that ‘throughout the piece, Vaughan Williams masks the identity of the specific scale or mode that he has chosen to employ, often by pitting two collections of similar scalar content against each other in ways that suggest conflicting central pitches’. As a major example of this, he points to how the work opens with a focus on the pitches of E-B-D-F#, drawn from the E Dorian collection, but that the return of the opening material in the cadenza finds itself favouring slightly different pitches from this collection: E-G-B-D, with the violin seeming to favour D as a central pitch instead of E. Saylor then points out instances where ‘Vaughan Williams deliberately obscures the central pitch of a given theme’, identifying passages that sound ‘conventionally “folkish”’ from the middle portions of the work: starting at two measures before Rehearsal G (the flute theme), and the passage where the oboe enters over the solo violin's repeated figures and trills at Rehearsal M. For Saylor, these elements suggest that ‘instability is the order of the day in this work: it abounds with long passages of unbarred violin solos, simultaneous scalar collections of competing quality, and unresolved seventh and ninth chords’. In his view, ‘this sort of technical sophistication deviates from the popular portrayal of The Lark Ascending as a dreamy, tranquil little work, particularly since it also eschews conventional displays of virtuosity’. In the following sentences, Saylor downplays the extent to which The Lark directly invokes nature:

Both Mark and Saylor make valuable observations regarding The Lark, especially relating to its modal fabric. But the implications that they draw from them are limited both by their near-avoidance of examining the poem's relationship with the music (and in Mark's case his explicit disdain for this text), as well as their need to avoid unwelcome associations. While neither Mark nor Saylor make the same mistake as non-scholarly press commentators in baselessly connecting The Lark to actual historical events, there are nonetheless reasons for conceiving the composition quite differently from how they do. To begin, it happens that Vaughan Williams himself expressed thoughts about attaching poetry to instrumental works, and also about the term ‘romance’ as it has to do with music, across multiple writings which with The Lark predate the First World War. Admittedly, the matter is complicated by the fact that Vaughan Williams wrote an article very early on that he appeared to contradict to some extent in subsequent publications. In ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’, he declares the Romantic epoch at an end (with Wagner having been the culminating figure), casts aspersion on the symphonic poem as a viable genre, and he suggests that truly progressive composers will re-establish Classical tendencies in a break with the period just ended.Footnote ³⁰ But in subsequent articles for The Vocalist and The Music Student, we find Vaughan Williams treating the subject of romanticism with much more nuance and positivity, applying the term to a cherished model, Johann Sebastian Bach. In ‘Bach and Schumann’, Vaughan Williams identifies romanticism, and explicitly ‘romance’, with a concern for expressing emotion and with uniformity of mood in music at the expense of predetermined, Classically oriented forms. He points to the examples of Bach's fugues and Schumann's Op. 17 Fantasy as music preserving ‘the unity of mood by means of a poetical idea which recurs again and again in varied surroundings’. Speaking of Bach's harmonies, he makes this statement: ‘His amazing harmonic progressions, which sound new and strange even now, are not the result of any conscious constructive aim, but are the direct outcome of the emotional intensity of the moment’. Later in the same article, he distinguishes between types of Romanticism, expounding upon the kind he had just applied to Bach and Schumann:

Finally, in a 1910 article entitled ‘The Romantic in Music: Some Thoughts on Brahms’, Vaughan Williams favourably revisits the subject of the symphonic poem genre, suggesting that Brahms may have found it more congenial to his Romantically inspired materials than the Classical models he preferred. In describing the advantages of this genre and other programmatic music, Vaughan Williams makes several remarks which would seem to have direct bearing upon a work such as The Lark Ascending. He proceeds from the principle that ‘the business of the composer is to make his visions intelligible to others … in such a way that they will be able to correlate them with what they already know’. In music along ‘Classical’ lines, he argues, this is done primarily through form, with structures adhering to expected benchmarks of symmetry and unity to aid general recognition. But a composer has other means of helping listeners relate to his compositions, he continues, ‘by ranging his ideas so that they are analogous to the events of some story, some poem, some historical or ideal person or some natural phenomenon’. Vaughan Williams further writes that ‘the true symphonic poem does not try to take the place of words or sights. The extraneous idea, the ‘programme’, is simply a common ground where the composer can meet the hearer before they start together on the voyage to unknown regions whither he is taking them’. Almost at the end of the article, he makes a statement consistent with his stated feelings in later writings: ‘they should remember that form is a means and not an end’.Footnote ³²

Mark notes that The Lark Ascending was far from the last Vaughan Williams work to use the ‘Romance’ designation, as the latter's 1951 Romance for harmonica and orchestra notably indicates. The slow movements in several multi-sectioned compositions, and perhaps most notably the overtly romantic third movement of the Fifth Symphony (1943), are titled likewise (or similarly, with ‘Romanza’ being the designation for this particular section). He seems to have reserved the appellation for stretches or entire works of special emotional import. Accordingly, one further writing briefly reaffirms his convictions stated above. This is a brief letter penned to his former pupil Grace Williams in 1930 or 1931. Revealingly, Vaughan Williams shows concern in it over the direction her music is taking under the guidance of her current teacher, Egon Wellesz:

Thus, if we choose to privilege the few surviving occasions where Vaughan Williams expounded upon the ‘romance’ idea in his writings, we would be left with the following impression: in his music it refers to emotional intensity and/or consistency, and would seem to fly in the face of the cerebralism as an end in itself. Furthermore, for Vaughan Williams, the deep feeling suggested by ‘Romance’ (or ‘Romanza’) would not preclude the sadder emotions (witness the epigraph atop the Pilgrim's Progress-derived third movement of the Fifth Symphony in that work's manuscript), but this question would depend upon context for each work.

Given the reasonable proposition that the principles stated above have some bearing upon The Lark Ascending, an evidenced-based interpretation of the work should assign due weight to Vaughan Williams's apparent notion of ‘romance’, to the poetry he chose to head the score, and to structural principles relevant to both. If we begin from the premise that The Lark Ascending is not related to external events, according to his conception of the term ‘romance’ cited above, we are left with another of the composer's strong indications: that the work closely relates to the poem excerpt, which serves to aid the listener in grasping the music's form and emotional makeup. This means that, however much the analyst may dislike this poetry, it is nonetheless important for any source-rooted reading of the music. With these factors in mind, it is worth briefly revisiting the lines Vaughan Williams chose to head his score:

As Michael Kennedy points out, British Library Add. MS 52385 shows additional but crossed-out lines:

Before discussing what these lines might mean for the music, we might briefly address Vaughan Williams's text-deployment practices. As Byron Adams has explained on multiple occasions, he often patched together and even modified parts of his source materials, sometimes in ways that depart from the specific context of the originals.Footnote ³⁵ In this instance, however, George Meredith's poem has mainly been understood in a decidedly ‘soft’ pastoral vein, indeed as a ‘joyous’ nature poem according to one author writing perhaps not far from the time Vaughan Williams may have come to know it.Footnote ³⁶ The entire poem concerns rapt outdoor celebration, whether or not one wishes to give credence to the composer's crossed-out lines (indeed, they only underline this impression). There is no evidence currently available that Vaughan Williams saw the text otherwise, or employed it at all subversively in his composition. Any possible effort to cite his inconsistent fidelity to literary sources in order to cast the composition in ‘hard’ pastoral terms would therefore be forced at best. A plain reading of Vaughan Williams's chosen lines (both those included and those crossed out) suggests the lark's song and flight as parts of a beautiful natural scene, with human onlookers transfixed by them. Ursula Vaughan Williams offers the following about her husband's thinking regarding this work: ‘He had taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought in The Lark Ascending and had made the violin become both the bird's song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating, the poem from which the title was taken’.Footnote ³⁷ The kind of ‘paradise lost’ that Mark and others associate with the work's series of musical events may be their personal response to the music, to which they are certainly entitled, but nothing in the chosen lines (including the word ‘lost’, which rather more ostensibly refers to the conclusion of the depicted vision) betrays an angst devastating enough to undercut the words’ explicit message. There is no imperative in the poem excerpt, and correspondingly in the music, that an idyllic vision is ever lost for the duration of both.

Considering such an interpretation of the poem as something aiding the experience of The Lark has consequences for how we might approach its form and other musical elements. This is all the more true if we apply not only Vaughan Williams's thoughts about the roles of ‘amazing’ harmonic progressions and form quoted above, but also his melody-centric conception of the listening experience. In multiple writings, he expressed his belief in the primary importance of melody. For example, he echoed Wagner's remark that ‘the business of a conductor is to find out where the melody lies’.Footnote ³⁸ In one letter, he wrote that ‘all musical invention ultimately comes from melody’.Footnote ³⁹ At other times he was harsh with composers he perceived to have been unable to create convincing tunes.Footnote ⁴⁰ This emphasis on melody has profound implications for Vaughan Williams's approach to form and texture. As early as 1954, Elsie Payne remarked on how folksong influenced not only the character of Vaughan Williams's melodies, but also the essentially melody-centric fabric of his compositions. She writes that ‘melody is the epitome of Vaughan Williams's whole expression’, and that ‘his most characteristic and contemplative expression is a fundamentally melodic one. The separate constituents of his style are all dependent upon melodic ideas’. Earlier, she speaks of ‘the melody maintaining its integrity against the total effect’ in his music.Footnote ⁴¹ In a related vein, Edward Macan writes about ‘block juxtapositions’ of different modal collections within single works by Vaughan Williams and Holst. Significantly, he identifies melody, or thematic transformation, as a unifying component across these different areas.Footnote ⁴²

Such observations carry much relevance for The Lark if we view the work as melody-driven, and accept that a listener unskilled in, or unconcerned with, music analysis (say, an untrained Classic FM poll voter) may not hear the music primarily according to its modal intricacies. (Such intricacies would be impossible for all but the most rarefied listeners to hear and navigate without a score in any case!) Also, while the principal melodies can be difficult to demarcate with precision, given both occasional linking elements and the significant elaboration (or variation) to which they are sometimes subjected, there are essentially three main, aurally recognizable thematic groups across four areas. These include the opening theme group that dominates the first section (including both the ‘bird-song’, ornament-like figures with which the violin opens in the cadenza, seen in Exx. 1a and 1b, and the theme that ‘materializes’ from them just prior to Rehearsal A, seen in Ex. 2b); the ‘folk-like’ theme certain commentators have associated with ‘ground-level’ human activity occupying the second, ‘Allegretto tranquillo’ section from just before Rehearsal G to one measure before Rehearsal L; the short, repetitive ideas comprising a brief interlude section following this and lasting up until Rehearsal R (seen in Ex. 1c); and the resumption of the initial material in reverse order (albeit with new interpolations) to close. With the exception of the interlude section, each of these areas shifts its modal pitch support as its melodic content is stated, elaborated, and restated. These changing modal areas can best be apprehended using David Manning's fine chart (also reproduced by Christopher Mark in his analysis) of the work's form.Footnote ⁴³

Ex. 1a

Beginning of Bar 3 cadenza, solo violin (First theme group)

Ex. 1b

Later in Bar 3 cadenza, undulating figure in the solo violin (First theme group)

Ex. 1c

6–11 bars after Rehearsal L, solo violin part (Third theme group)

Table 1

The Lark Ascending – Formal Plan (created by David Manning)

An important consideration, however, is that multiple melodic gestures persist across different theme groups, so that there are nevertheless points of aural connection even across contrasting areas with considerable harmonic complexity accompanying them. The most prominent example of this is the D–B motive (mentioned by Mark, as we will recall) that melodically saturates the composition and unites different themes and areas. As we see in Example 1a, this motive establishes itself almost immediately. It represents a point of pitch invariance across every full and discernible modal collection presented in the work: E Dorian, D Pentatonic, D Dorian, E Aeolian, B (minor) Pentatonic, and E (minor) Pentatonic. The way in which Vaughan Williams insistently repeats it suggests such an intent: a motivic anchor given to the listener to forestall possible tonal and variational discombobulation. Beyond the figure in Example 1a, some other prominent examples are illustrated in Example 2, along with the pitch collections accompanying them.

Ex. 2a

Bar 3, approximately midway through the opening solo violin cadenza (D Pentatonic)

Ex. 2b

Bar 5, beginning of the first A section theme, solo violin (E Dorian)

Ex. 2c

10 bars after Rehearsal D through one bar after Rehearsal E, beginning of the second A section, flute melody (E Aeolian):

Ex. 2d

3–6 bars after S, transition to the return of the A section, solo violin (E Aeolian)

Ex. 2e

Closing cadenza, as string accompaniment fades, solo violin and strings (E Pentatonic)

Ex. 2f

Closing cadenza, final notes in the solo violin (E Pentatonic)

Almost the only place in the composition where this motive is not heard is in the D Dorian area of the second part of the B section. However, this area still includes the D and B pitches, and they are fleetingly present in some of the violin figures directly leading up to Rehearsal L. Furthermore, the motive of the descending minor third is heard in other pitches almost as soon as the section starts, recalling the D–B motive indelibly despite a temporarily shifting modal ground (see Ex. 3). Indeed, the importance of this gesture, which quite transcends precise pitch, is driven home in the work's final bars, as Vaughan Williams thrice gives us a descending minor third on G–E in the solo violin before lingering one last time on the unifying D–B to conclude (see Ex. 2f). It hardly matters that a tonic pitch here is ambiguous, as Saylor points out, because both this intervallic gesture and the importance of its chief, pitch-specific D–B iteration have by now so ingrained themselves as focal points in the musical consciousness of even the passive listener.

Ex. 3

1–4 bars starting at M, solo oboe

Another noteworthy melodic constant are the undulating figures in the solo violin part that highly recall one another even when they do not share exact pitches. Although they are often similar in their contours of pitch sequences, it is perhaps their rhythmic profiles that register the closest kinship. The clearest point of comparison is between the figures presented in Examples 1b and 1c. In different parts of the work (prominently the bars proceeding from Rehearsal M), similar undulating figures appear, and while their groupings may comprise 8, 9, 10, or another number of notes, and despite the fact that these figures can appear in semiquaver-, demisemiquaver-, or hemidemisemiquaver-note rhythms, they are closely enough related in gesture and profile to recall each other from different areas of the work. And as with the recurring D–B motive, the changing and sometimes elusive modal dressings of these figures may give them divergent contexts, but they are recognizably linked despite this.

There is, then, a great deal of melodic cohesion in The Lark, the modal underpinnings of which are rightly characterized by both Mark and Saylor as complex and at times equivocal. But, with respect to Saylor's analysis in particular, it is a kind of cohesion that does not require sophisticated listening to apprehend. It aligns with Vaughan Williams's own words (from the ‘Bach and Schumann’ article cited above) regarding the use of imaginative harmonic progressions, which in this case alter the conditions under which melodies can be heard over the duration of a composition. Melodic cohesion also relates to why one might object to Mark's interpretation of the work. To associate the truncated return of the solo violin's opening material (cadenza 2) just prior to the start of the second section with reminiscence seems reasonable on face, but does this have to amount to a sense of loss (which this seems to imply) while looking back on an initial state? As we have already seen, there is enough melodic commonality (and particularly Example 1a material) during the intervening bars to ask whether the initial state was ever really missing up to that point. Furthermore, cadenza 2's placement and truncation would by another perspective simply be a formal buffer between two large areas of the work, an economic means of capping one section, preparing the next, and ensuring cohesion and continuity along the way. (These are goals that may be ill served structurally by having either no restatement or a full restatement of the opening cadenza at this point.) Likewise, Mark's ‘linchpin’ of the work at Rehearsal R, where the solo violin takes up the main melody of Section B instead of the flute, (and where it later plays double-stopped, ‘languorous’ descending figurations), does indeed sound emotionally intense, perhaps even nostalgic as he claims (though the passage of time since the theme's first statement has by this point not been very great). But once again this whole passage corresponds with a need for thematic restatement and timbral variety, not to mention another imminent shift of sections (in this instance a return to A section material). Last, the final solo violin cadenza (cadenza 3) that Mark associates with the work's greatest sense of loss, coming as it does amidst a modally ambivalent conclusion, is comparable in length to cadenza 1, upon which it is based. If this is another loss-fuelled reminiscence, why is it not also truncated like cadenza 2? Moreover, if modal ambivalence here partially contributes to the sense of loss, what of the knotty modality presented with the work's opening sequence of events prior to Rehearsal A, before any such ‘loss’ can have occurred? Perhaps Vaughan Williams simply calculated that a second full cadenza (the third total), the very last solo violin pitches of D–B, and a new variety (though not necessarily severity) of modal ambiguity to conclude the work, together amount to the most concentrated, effective ways of rounding off a consistent vision. In short, the places where Mark identifies representation, commentary, and nostalgia all turn out to implicate practical issues of structure and compositional craft. A ‘wholly idyllic’ piece might indeed be impossible if it were in practice to avoid any significant contrasts, or if deeper meanings were too often read into thematic recurrences. And while an argument could be made that an idyllic vision might not necessarily exclude moments of nostalgia or melancholy, the moments of intense expression Mark identifies could as easily be attributed to fervent points of beauty and mystery in the total scene created by the violin and orchestra.Footnote ⁴⁴

If we are to use the poem as a guide to apprehend the aesthetic content of the composition, in the spirit of Vaughan Williams's written comments above, we should be looking for ways to relate musical elements to the text's coherent imagery of an ascendant lark, its onlookers, and the backdrop described for both. Indeed such elements are not difficult to find. A kaleidoscopic modal fabric throughout provides a suitably blurred undercurrent for a richly melodic narrative enacted by the solo violin and occasionally the tutti orchestra and other single instruments. Seen in this light, The Lark Ascending is not a ‘difficult’ work that must be defined by its complexities. Nor are there firm objective grounds to necessarily see it as some expression of loss beyond what Vaughan Williams's chosen poetic lines state, though of course one may freely do so on a personal level. The historical and contextual evidence shared here supports enjoyment of the work as a beautiful piece of music evoking a pleasant, and perhaps even ‘escapist’ natural scene without needing to be something more. Listeners may not be required to experience it as such, but they should certainly feel no shame in doing so. Nor should they be cowed by critical arguments that would downplay the reasons they enjoy it, but which ultimately lack obligatory interpretive basis. Until a primary source for such a basis is unmistakably discovered, we should cheerfully accept (and perhaps privilege) any listener preference for a peaceful, even idyllic Lark.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Revisionist Context

The notion of The Lark Ascending as a primarily complex or angst-associated piece is a recent development in its reception history. Earlier commentators, untrammelled by contemporary revisionist priorities, did not connect the work with the war, nor indeed did they find much that is subversive about it. Simona Pakenham associates The Lark with ‘morning freshness’ and the ‘friendly’ manner of his earlier works.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hubert Foss sees it much in terms of its pictorial qualities, and claims that ‘the whole piece is as full of the sounds and scents of the English countryside as Keats's line “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves”’.Footnote ⁴⁷ James Day, Frank Howes, Percy Young, and even Michael Kennedy variously cast it in similar terms, or associate it with changing moods of the eponymous scene.Footnote ⁴⁸ The desire to read The Lark otherwise did not manifest itself in earnest until decades after Vaughan Williams died. At the early end of this tendency is Wilfrid Mellers's treatment of the work in his fascinating yet controversial monograph on the composer's music.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dubbing it ‘very far from being an escapist piece’, he argues for it representing both nature and human perception and activity. Furthermore, he sees symphonic qualities in it and finds significance in the fact that it was first performed after the war.Footnote ⁵⁰ George Revill frames The Lark in terms of a ‘modernist’ pastoralism and the composer's radical politics.Footnote ⁵¹

But The Lark's problematic status began in earnest when contemporary Vaughan Williams revisionism did, primarily in academic scholarship. The first stage of this coincided with Alain Frogley's edited essay collection, Vaughan Williams Studies, published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press. His opening chapter effectively summarizes multiple longstanding problems and misconceptions that had long plagued the composer's reception: his parochial image, his alleged technical clumsiness, and his oversimplified relationships with folksong and pastoralism, among other issues. While neither Frogley nor his contributors give sustained attention to The Lark in this volume's essays, he does mention it as a work that ostensibly fuelled the ‘cowpat’ and other epithets lending to Vaughan Williams's unflattering image, and especially his poor standing among critics, academics, and concert programmers. Frogley's essay also discusses (albeit briefly) the Pastoral Symphony in light of Ursula Vaughan Williams's revelation of her husband's private letter explaining that the work is connected with his World War I service in France rather than being ‘lambkins frisking’ as most people take for granted.Footnote ⁵² While Frogley was not the first to do so, this kind of reference to a work once considered a cornerstone of Vaughan Williams's parochial ruralism is significant as a part of a larger, seminal call to reassessment.Footnote ⁵³ As we have begun to see already, this revelation would be a cornerstone of revisionist scholarship for years to come.

To be sure, Frogley's volume was a measured, necessary corrective to decades of neglect and poor understanding concerning Vaughan Williams. However, with a second phase of academic revisionism, traceable to a group of Musical Quarterly articles published in the spring–summer 2008 issue, we begin to see revisionists ‘go on the offense’. Introduced by Byron Adams, this slate of scholarship collectively calls for recognition of an additional variety of twentieth-century musical modernism.Footnote ⁵⁴ It finds conventional applications of the term inadequate to account for British composers traditionally considered conservative, but who responded to their milieus in ways perhaps less hard-edged than Continental modernists while still modern by other measures.Footnote ⁵⁵ Hence, the term ‘British Modernism’ that heads the issue. Three of the five writings centrally concern Vaughan Williams. In an article already cited above, Eric Saylor discusses the Pastoral Symphony as a war work in the context of historical-literary theory that recognizes a ‘hard’, unidealized category of the pastoral trope – one amenable to uniquely modernist concerns.Footnote ⁵⁶ Anthony Barone examines manuscripts of the Fourth Symphony and finds modernism in its juxtaposition of fragmentation and cohesion.Footnote ⁵⁷ Finally, Daniel M. Grimley's reading of the Sinfonia antartica identifies modernism in the work's inversion of conventionally symphonic kinds of development and structure, as well as in its evocation of a post-war climate of fear.Footnote ⁵⁸ In just one of these articles (Saylor's) is The Lark Ascending even mentioned, and then only in passing. But together they are significant both for their appropriation of a term for Vaughan Williams that had usually been understood to apply to other types of composers and music, and also as a part of a broader revisionist context for latter-day readings of The Lark critiqued here.Footnote ⁵⁹

By 2013 Alain Frogley had produced another multi-author volume of Vaughan Williams essays, this time in co-editorship with Aidan J. Thomson: The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams. This collection is yet another landmark in the ongoing academic Vaughan Williams revisionism, and one in which Christopher Mark's afore-mentioned chapter expressing discomfort with The Lark's ‘idyllic’ associations finds a natural home.Footnote ⁶⁰ Admittedly, not all of the essays in this collection take the same revisionist bent, and even some that do are quite informative and even-handed. Julian Onderdonk's chapter, for instance, admits the conservative and even ‘idealizing tendencies’ in Vaughan Williams's nationalist vision, while strongly emphasizing the progressive socio-political aspects of his outlook. Onderdonk's conclusion is typical of his circumspection: ‘we can recognize in Vaughan Williams's music an independent voice poised between modernism and conservatism, innovation and tradition, that has its roots in his personal history and his family's heritage of commitment to society and nation’.Footnote ⁶¹ Similar to Grimley's 2008 article cited above, however, Julian Horton's chapter searches for traditional symphonic credibility in Vaughan Williams's later symphonies while also identifying their ‘modernist’ or ‘progressive’ qualities.Footnote ⁶² To the extent that he cannot connect Symphonies Nos. 7–9 to the former, like he can with the (or his) modernism-associated Symphonies Nos. 4–6, he critiques them. To the extent that he associates these works with technical progressivism Horton makes eager comparisons: ‘Even cursory engagement reveals a post-tonal vocabulary, which is no less progressive than that employed by Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, or Shostakovich’. Even more boldly: ‘The collection-based textures of the Sinfonia Antartica's nature music, for instance, prefigure heterophonic techniques exploited by the second generation of the post-war avant-garde, most obviously in the spatial works of Ligeti's first maturity (Lontano, for example)’.Footnote ⁶³ Aidan J. Thomson repeatedly emphasizes what he considers to be Vaughan Williams's ‘progressive’ characteristics, even admitting that he considers a theme of the volume to be ‘Vaughan Williams the Progressive’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thomson claims that Vaughan Williams ‘began in the Parry tradition, and ended with works that perhaps anticipated the modernism of the generation that came to the fore in the late ’50s: that's a huge transformation within a single lifetime’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Both Horton and Thomson, then, seek to show links between Vaughan Williams and composers more conventionally categorized as ‘modernist’ or ‘progressive’ despite these composers’ vastly different musical outlooks and aesthetic orientations. (For instance, Vaughan Williams ridiculed what he called ‘The Wrong Note School’.)Footnote ⁶⁶ It is thus hardly surprising to find Thomson expressing preference for ‘hard’ pastoralism in response to one of his interviewees, Piers Hellawell. Thomson offers this in a conversation where the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending are mentioned: ‘whereas one might say that some of Vaughan Williams's work doesn't recover that [pastoralist] ideal, or it does so only very fleetingly, before turning away again’. Another of Thomson's interviewees, Anthony Payne, refers to The Lark as ‘really haunting’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Even in this modest sampling of literature we can begin to see wide application of terms such as ‘modernist’ and ‘progressive’ according to the needs and inclinations of their different users. Indeed, in his introduction to the Musical Quarterly articles cited above, Byron Adams himself calls attention to this regarding the issue's authors: ‘Happily, none of them agree exactly on a definitive meaning of “British modernism.” Surely, however, all would concur that British modernism can be best understood as one of a plethora of equally valid and exciting “modernisms” that coexisted during the last century.’Footnote ⁶⁸ The trouble with this approach is that when terms can signify virtually whatever their users wish, whenever they wish it, they become unwieldy. And insofar as this specific one is deployed to combat the much more stable (if otherwise problematic) terms of Vaughan Williams's long-standing parochial image, revisionism can easily haemorrhage effectiveness. This problem is already starting to receive attention, notably in the growing literature about music and middlebrow taste. A paragraph about these tendencies in Kate Guthrie's recent book is worth quoting at length:

This gets to the heart of the matter. Resentful of a slanted postwar historiography, in which early twentieth-century British music at large (and Vaughan Williams in particular) have been considered much less essential to the Western Classical Tradition's development than Continental modernists such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók, revisionists understandably wish to advocate vigorously for the importance of this repertoire and its creators.Footnote ⁷⁰ But some are doing so in a way that implicitly validates the historiographical wrongs they seek to redress. Like those who short-shrifted Vaughan Williams and Company in the first place, they hold ‘modernism’ to be convenient nomenclature, well cognizant of the privilege it bestows amongst those for whom the slightest whiff of conservatism is anathema. And so we are witnessing its scattershot application to composers and works outside of any circumscribed set of styles, values, and motivations, hardly relieved by qualifiers like ‘British’, and done much in the interest of rescuing these creators and their music from political disfavour. (Taken to extreme, the label always fits because of the argument that every twentieth-century composer was inevitably touched by modernity in some way.)Footnote ⁷¹ In other words, whereas before there was an In-Crowd and everyone else, now there is just a poorly-defined In-Crowd. But to quote Richard Taruskin, writing about the appropriation of Rachmaninoff (another early twentieth-century composer treated unkindly by postwar music historiography) to the label, ‘efforts to find the modernist in Rachmaninoff can only reinforce invidious preconceptions. Me-tooism, which tacitly accepts the bias, is always futile’.Footnote ⁷² Why not strive to account for specific crowds and individuals, and argue for their importance, by bringing appropriate (and more delicate) tools to each task while avoiding politically opportunist catchwords and other reckless terminology? Such a resolution might acknowledge Vaughan Williams's debts to Continental trends and techniques, while unashamedly maintaining that his contributions were rooted in national community; that his musical language is fresh, substantial, and (yes) innovative in some ways, but in the end much more approachable than those more of the uncompromising autonomist types who used to be (still are?) more recognizably understood as ‘modernist’; that his leftist political beliefs were real, but were checked by a strongly moderate sensibility; and that history and its subjects should be more than merely a sandbox for the preoccupations of historians, though these preoccupations will inevitably be present. In the words of Ian Pace, ‘Beyond attempts to nuance and enrich the concept of modernism, some fearless scholars might consider whether the concept itself is necessarily worth preserving in such a [broad] form or whether some modified terminology … might prove more enlightening’.Footnote ⁷³ While this is not the place to launch an extensive critique of the emergent Modernism Problem in twentieth-century music historiography, the issue looms ever larger in our evolving understanding of Vaughan Williams and his oeuvre, and tinges the discourse surrounding his ‘most popular work’.