Ralph Vaughan Williams

Those two activities are the same activity: the collecting produced the harmony, and the harmony is what makes a Vaughan Williams work identifiable in about four bars.

Two matters of naming can be dealt with at once. The surname is Vaughan Williams, both words, unhyphenated: Vaughan is not a middle name and he is never Williams on second mention. Ralph is pronounced Rafe. Separately, the Vaughan Williams classification of antiarrhythmic drugs is named after Miles Vaughan Williams, an Oxford pharmacologist, and has no connection with him.

The Tallis Fantasia and the cathedral that shaped it

The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis of 1910 is scored for double string orchestra and a solo quartet, three separate bodies of players, and was written for Gloucester Cathedral, where the Three Choirs Festival was held that year. The layout is the whole idea. A large string orchestra plays on the platform, a second orchestra of about nine players is placed at a distance, and the quartet sits within the first group, so that the small band answers the large one from across the building.

What that produces is a piece that uses a cathedral acoustic as an instrument rather than merely tolerating it. A long reverberation time, which ruins fast music, is exactly what a work built from slow overlapping string chords needs: each chord is still sounding when the next arrives, and the distant orchestra reaches the listener already blurred. In a dry modern hall it works less well, and conductors separate the two orchestras as widely as the platform allows.

The theme itself is by Thomas Tallis, written around 1567 for Archbishop Parker's Psalter. It is in the Phrygian mode rather than in a major or minor key, and that modal quality is the second reason the Fantasia does not sound like other music of 1910.

What the folk songs did to the harmony

Vaughan Williams collected over 800 folk songs from singers in Essex, Norfolk, Sussex and Herefordshire from 1903 onwards, and edited The English Hymnal in 1906, which put him inside a second body of modal tune. Four consequences follow.

• Modes replace keys. Dorian, Mixolydian and Aeolian scales flatten the leading note, so the music does not pull towards a home chord.
• Parallel chords replace functional progressions. Whole triads move in parallel, which classical harmony forbids, producing the sound most listeners identify as English pastoral.
• Melody comes first. Tunes are shaped like sung tunes, with a limited range and breathing places, not built from instrumental figuration.
• Squareness disappears. Folk singers do not sing in strict four bar phrases, so his phrase lengths are irregular and his metre changes without warning.

He used collected tunes openly. The English Folk Song Suite of 1923 is assembled from named songs including Seventeen Come Sunday, Green Bushes, John Barleycorn and Blow Away the Morning Dew, and Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 of 1906 is built on tunes he took down from fishermen at King's Lynn, among them The Captain's Apprentice.

The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending was written in 1914 for violin and piano and revised in 1920 into the orchestral version now played. It takes its title and its idea from a poem by George Meredith, lines from which Vaughan Williams copied onto the manuscript.

Its construction is unusual in two ways. The solo violin opens and closes with unmeasured cadenzas, written without bar lines, so the soloist decides the pacing while the orchestra holds a quiet chord underneath. And the orchestra never competes: the scoring is thin, the strings muted for long stretches, so the violin sits above the texture rather than in front of it. The piece ends by thinning out, with no final chord in the ordinary sense.

The nine symphonies, and the shorter works beside them

The nine symphonies were written across 47 years, from 1910 to 1957, and they do not form a stylistic sequence. The composer of the Fourth and the composer of the Fifth would not be recognised as the same man if the works were played without attribution. The table adds the shorter works that share the repertoire with them.

The Fourth, and the case against the pastoral label

The Symphony No. 4 in F minor of 1935 is the work to play to anyone who thinks Vaughan Williams wrote gentle music about fields. It is loud, harsh and unrelenting, built from a grinding semitone clash announced in the first bar, and it ends with a fugal epilogue that hammers that dissonance home rather than softening it. Listeners in 1935 heard the politics of the decade in it and said so. He denied any programme and refused to explain further. The Sixth of 1947 is stranger still: three violent movements followed by a finale played quietly throughout, ten minutes and more of moving lines with no climax and no resolution.

He wrote steadily into his eighties, died in 1958, and his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey. The nine are rarely performed as a cycle, because the Sea Symphony needs a chorus and two soloists and the Sinfonia antartica an organ and a wind machine, which makes the set heavier than his reputation for mildness suggests.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Holst and The PlanetsThe Planets, movement by movement
• Karl JenkinsThe most performed living Welsh composer