Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
I am exceedingly grateful to the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust for granting me a scholarship to attend IRCAM and research there for a year in 1992. I learned a great deal which influenced my composition radically and appropriately and which changed mine and others’ lives for the better in many ways.
Vaughan William’s music is gentle, inwardly sophisticated and in touch with Englishness. I am fascinated by the way he uses modes. His Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910) uses space and time in magical ways. Vaughan Williams’s late symphonies transcend sound and time.
