¹ See Classic FM's article announcing the piece as their poll winner in 2022 see www.classicfm.com/radio/hall-of-fame/lark-ascending-vaughan-williams-150th-year/. The work took second place in the 2023 poll: https://halloffame.classicfm.com/2023/.

² See, for instance, see Stephen Moss, ‘A Wing and a Prayer: The Enduring Beauty of The Lark Ascending’, The Guardian, 8 December 2020, www.theguardian.com/music/2020/dec/08/the-lark-ascending-ralph-vaughan-williams-classical-chart-topper-jennifer-pike.

³ For example, see Stephen Moss, ‘I'm Flipping the Bird at The Lark Ascending’, The Guardian music blog, 25 March 2008, www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2008/mar/25/letsgivethebirdtothelark. As seen above, Moss eventually reversed his attitude on the work. Simon Heffer also recently offered this remark: “But in Vaughan Williams's sesquicentenary year, it is time to strip away all the prejudices, and indeed the somewhat superficial reasons for his growing popularity – such as Classic FM's championship of The Lark Ascending, which in truth is not among his most profound works – and to examine why he is not merely a great composer, but one of Britain's greatest cultural figures, to rank with Shakespeare, or Milton, or Dickens, or Turner, or Constable, or Wren’. See Heffer, ‘Hinterland: Vaughan Williams Wrote the Theme Music for his Turbulent Times. It's Time We Recognised This Titan’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 January 2022, www.pressreader.com/uk/the-daily-telegraph-review/20220101/281676848248077. See also Jessica Duchen, “Vaughan Williams at 150: It's Time to Admit He's the Greatest English Composer of the 20th Century’, https://inews.co.uk/culture/ralph-vaughan-williams-150-bbc-philharmonic-its-time-to-admit-hes-the-greatest-english-composer-of-the-20th-century-1518856. Here is her brief remark on The Lark Ascending: ‘The trouble is that a few of his pieces are almost too popular for his own good, while others – possibly even better – enjoy airings once in the proverbial blue moon. The Lark Ascending often tops the Classical FM Hall of Fame and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis regularly graces concerts in cathedrals’.

⁴ Quoted in Vanessa Thorpe, ‘How the First World War Inspired Britain's Favourite Piece of Classical Music’, The Observer, 26 April 2014; www.theguardian.com/music/2014/apr/27/first-world-war-inspired-the-lark-ascending-favourite-classical-music.

⁵ For Vaughan Williams's disclosure of this information about his Pastoral Symphony, see his letter to Ursula Wood, 4 October 1938, VWL1378; The Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust, The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database, www.vaughanwilliams.uk.

⁶ For more on this terminology and how it relates to Vaughan Williams (and to music generally), see Saylor, Eric, ‘“It's Not Lambkins Frisking at All”: English Pastoral Music and the Great War’, The Musical Quarterly 91/1–2 (2008): 29–59Google Scholar, especially at 41–5.

⁷ Surviving early-stage manuscripts for Vaughan Williams's compositions are, with notable exceptions, often missing. See Vaughan Williams's comment about usually destroying his ‘rough copies’ in a letter to Alan Frank, 15 February 1958; VWL3375, The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database, www.vaughanwilliams.uk; and Adams, Byron, ‘The Stages of Revision of Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony’, in Vaughan Williams Essays, ed. Adams, Byron and Wells, Robin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 1–16Google Scholar, at 1–2. For information about the work's first performance in its violin and piano scoring, as well as his statement on the original manuscript, see Kennedy, Michael, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 81–2Google Scholar.

⁸ See The British Library, Collection items: Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending, Add MS 52385. Link: www.bl.uk/collection-items/vaughan-williams-the-lark-ascending.

⁹ See Kennedy, Michael, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 412Google Scholar; and A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 81–2.

¹⁰ Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 82.

¹¹ See Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974; reprint of the original 1950 edition published by George C. Harrop), 115, 205.

¹² Vaughan Williams, Letter to Hubert Foss, 7 February 1951; VWL2188, The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database, www.vaughanwilliams.uk. I thank David Manning for suggesting this point to me.

¹³ Andrew Green, ‘Liberating the Lark’, BBC Music Magazine, December, 2020, 26–34, at 29. I have not seen this programme note, nor do I know where a copy could be accessed.

¹⁴ See Fox-Strangways, A.H., ‘Ralph Vaughan Williams’, Music & Letters 1/2 (1920): 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 80.

¹⁵ Green, ‘Liberating the Lark’, 33–4.

¹⁶ Jameson, Michael, Ralph Vaughan Williams: An Essential Guide to His Life and Works, Classic FM Lifelines Series (London: Pavilion Books, 1997), 55Google Scholar.

¹⁷ King, Richard, The Lark Ascending: The Music of the British Landscape (London: Faber & Faber, 2019), iiiGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Betsy Schwarm, ‘The Lark Ascending’. Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 December 2015; www.britannica.com/topic/The-Lark-Ascending.

¹⁹ Unsigned article, “Vaughan Williams – The Lark Ascending”, www.bbc.co.uk/teach/ten-pieces/classical-music-vaughan-williams-lark-ascending/znwdbdm.

²⁰ Thorpe, ‘How the First World War Inspired Britain's Favourite Piece of Classical Music’.

²¹ Unsigned Classic FM article, ‘Vaughan-Williams Re-Assessed’, www.classicfm.com/composers/vaughan-williams/guides/vaughan-williams-re-assessed.

²² Williams, Ursula Vaughan, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 115Google Scholar.

²³ I discuss Vaughan Williams's memory of the 1903 event in ‘“There, in the fastness of Rural England”: Vaughan Williams, folk song and George Borrow's Lavengro’, The Musical Times 156, No. 1933 (2015): 43–56, at 45–6.

²⁴ King, The Lark Ascending, 12, 16.

²⁵ Green, ‘Liberating the Lark’, 34.

²⁶ David Gutman, ‘Vaughan Williams's Lark Ascending: A Complete Guide to the Best Recordings’, The Gramophone, 25 May 2021; www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/vaughan-williams-s-the-lark-ascending-a-complete-guide-to-the-best-recordings.

²⁷ See Mark, ‘Chamber Music and Works for Soloist With Orchestra’, in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 179–98, at 185–7.

²⁸ For the Grove quotation, see Hugh Ottaway, revised by Alain Frogley. ‘Vaughan Williams, Ralph’. Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com.

²⁹ Saylor, Eric, English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 114–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Saylor also writes that the work could arguably be grouped with the postwar compositions because of its debut after the war (p. 5).

³⁰ Williams, Vaughan, ‘The Romantic Movement and Its Results’, The Musician 1/23 (1897): 430–31Google Scholar; quoted in David Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13–16.

³¹ Williams, Vaughan, “Bach and Schumann”, The Vocalist 1/3 (1902): 72Google Scholar; quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, 129–32.

³² Williams, Vaughan, ‘The Romantic in Music: Some Thoughts on Brahms’, The Music Student 2/8 (1910): 116–20Google Scholar; quoted in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, 165–70.

³³ Vaughan Williams, undated letter to Grace Williams, VWL3848, The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database, www.vaughanwilliams.uk. Emphases are Vaughan Williams's own.

³⁴ See Kennedy, A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 81–2.

³⁵ See Adams, Byron, “Biblical Texts in the Works of Vaughan Williams”, in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Frogley, Alain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 99–117Google Scholar; Adams, Byron, ‘“No Armpits, Please, We're British”: Whitman and English Music, 1884–1936’, in Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood, ed. Kramer, Lawrence (New York: Garland, 2000), 25–42Google Scholar; and Adams, Byron, ‘“Music in the Air”: Vaughan Williams, Shakespeare, and the Construction of an Elizabethan England’, in Let Beauty Awake: Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Literature, ed. Rushton, Julian (London: Elgar Editions, 2010), 96–107Google Scholar.

³⁶ See Jerrold, Walter, George Meredith: An Essay towards Appreciation (London: Greening, 1902), 61–4Google Scholar. Indeed, some opinions of the poem deem its descriptions of natural beauty to be overdone. For example, see Baker, James V., “The Lark in English Poetry”, Prairie Schooner 24/1 (1950): 70–79Google Scholar, at 76.

³⁷ Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 156.

³⁸ Williams, Vaughan, ‘Some Thoughts on Beethoven's Choral Symphony’, in National Music and Other Essays, second edition (Oxford University Press, 1987), 103Google Scholar.

³⁹ Vaughan Williams, letter to Elsie Fry, 16 December [early 1940s], VWL5219, The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database, www.vaughanwilliams.uk/letter/vwl3848.

⁴⁰ For example, see his denigration of Berlioz as a melodist when compared with Dvořák in an undated letter to Grace Williams, VWL3894, The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database, www.vaughanwilliams.uk/letter/vwl3848. There is also his remark after hearing a student composer at Cornell University play a movement from a dissonant string quartet on the piano: ‘If a tune should occur to you, my boy, don't hesitate to write it down’. Archibald T. Davison claims that this remark was relayed to him by a Cornell Professor who was present at the event. See The R.C.M. Magazine 55/1 (1959): 29. This incident has since been quoted elsewhere. For example, see Day, James, Vaughan Williams, third edition, Master Musicians Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 96Google Scholar; and Heffer, Simon, Vaughan Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 134Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Payne, Elsie, ‘Vaughan Williams and Folk-Song’, The Music Review 15 (1954): 103, 125Google Scholar.

⁴² Macan, Edward, ‘Block Juxtapositions: A Structural Principle in the Music of Holst and Vaughan Williams’, British Music 15 (1993): 83–104Google Scholar, at 84.

⁴³ Table 1 is a reproduction of Manning's chart, found on page 79 of the second volume of his doctoral thesis, “Harmony, Tonality and Structure in Vaughan Williams's Music” (PhD diss., University of Cardiff, 2003). I thank him for his permission to use it here.

⁴⁴ For a useful commentary on the various connotations (both pleasurable and painful) borne by the term ‘nostalgia’, see Riley, Matthew, Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5–16Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ In her discussion and annotation of Vaughan Williams's essay, ‘The Letter and the Spirit’, Ceri Owen points out that, by his later years, Vaughan Williams had become more receptive to the role of the audience in creating a set of associations for a given piece of music. The composer even eventually omitted a paragraph in this essay (for reprinting in his 1953 Oxford University Press book Some Thoughts on Beethoven's Choral Symphony with Writings on Other Musical Subjects) about the importance of hearing a composition as it was intended by the composer. See Owen, ‘Vaughan Williams's “The Letter and the Spirit” (1920)’, in Vaughan Williams and His World, ed. Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 57–73, at 58–61. The case could be made that the interpretations I am critiquing here are a valid part of this (re)creation. I do not deny this, nor would I wish to deprive Mark, Saylor, or others of their personal responses to the music. I am only arguing that the best evidence points to the composer's own conception of The Lark Ascending as lying closer to associations that they (and others cited here) make a point of resisting.

⁴⁶ Pakenham, Simona, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Discovery of His Music (London: Macmillan, 1957), 72, 94Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Foss, Hubert, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), 114–16Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See James Day, Vaughan Williams, The Master Musicians, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 225; Howes, Frank, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), 96–9Google Scholar; Young, Percy, Vaughan Williams (London: Dennis Dobson Limited, 1953), 126–7Google Scholar; and Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 168.

⁴⁹ For a good explanation of why this book is controversial, see Alain Frogley's review of the first edition in Music & Letters 71/3 (1990): 435–8.

⁵⁰ Wilfrid Mellers, Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion, second edition (London: Travis & Emery, 1997), 69–79, at 79.

⁵¹ Revill, George, ‘The Lark Ascending: Monument to a Radical Pastoral’, Landscape Research 16/2 (1991): 25–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² See Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W., 121. (For the contents of the letter itself, see VWL1378 at The Letters of RVW Online Database: www.vaughanwilliams.uk/letter/vwl1378) Michael Kennedy echoes the association and calls the symphony Vaughan Williams's ‘war requiem’. See Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 155.

⁵³ See Frogley, ‘Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, in Vaughan Williams Studies, 1–22. For some earlier mentions of the Pastoral Symphony's wartime associations, see Kennedy, Michael, ‘Ralph Vaughan Williams in the First Centenary of His Birth’, Studi musicali 2 (1973): 175–87Google Scholar, at 182–3; and Vaillancourt, Michael, ‘Modal and Thematic Coherence in Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony’, The Music Review 52 (1991): 203–17Google Scholar, at 203–4.

⁵⁴ See Adams, “Foreword”, The Musical Quarterly 91/1–2 (2008): 1–7.

⁵⁵ Jenny Doctor expounds most upon these matters in this issue. See Doctor, ‘The Parataxis of “British Musical Modernism”’, The Musical Quarterly 91/1–2 (2008): 89–115, especially at 109–12.

⁵⁶ Saylor, ‘“It's Not Lambkins Frisking at All”’, 39–59.

⁵⁷ Barone, Anthony, ‘Modernist Rifts in a Pastoral Landscape: Observations on the Manuscripts of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony’, The Musical Quarterly 91/1–2 (2008): 60–88Google Scholar. J.P.E. Harper-Scott provides an alternative interpretation of the Fourth Symphony in his essay ‘Vaughan Williams's Antic Symphony’, in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 175–96.

⁵⁸ Grimley, Daniel M., ‘Music, Ice, and the “Geometry of Fear”: The Landscapes of Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica’, The Musical Quarterly 91/1–2 (2008): 116–50Google Scholar. Shortly thereafter, Grimley also published an essay similarly finding modernist currents in the Pastoral Symphony's structure and trope reinterpretations. See Grimley, ‘Landscape and Distance: Vaughan Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral’, in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Riley, 147–74.

⁵⁹ Here I am distinguishing between the terms ‘modern’ and ‘modernism’ (or “modernist’). While some (including early-twentieth-century British critics) have used these terms loosely, and recent decades have seen a blurring of their distinction in academic writing, twentieth-century historiographical parlance has traditionally reserved ‘modernism’ for composers and music demonstrating self-conscious attitudes relating to technical or aesthetic progress, subversion, autonomy, and/or perceived ‘demands of history’. There is not space here to do this issue justice, but a good understanding of musical modernism's special status can be gained from Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, The Oxford History of Western Music Volume 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–5, and Bonds, Mark Evan, A History of Music in Western Culture, 4th edn (Boston: Pearson, 2013), 495–8Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ The year 2023 saw the publication of a new volume of essays: Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, eds., Vaughan Williams and His World, cited above. Beyond recognitions of The Lark Ascending's popularity, the work rarely gets mentioned in it. But several of the book's contributions intensify the revisionist trends rehearsed here. For more on this, see my forthcoming review in Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.

⁶¹ Julian Onderdonk, ‘The Composer and Society: Family, Politics, Nation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Frogley and Thomson, 9–24, especially at 15, 24.

⁶² For a critique of this stance, see Ross, Ryan, ‘Is It Symphonic? Some Thoughts on the Critical Reception of Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica’, The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal 69 (2017): 6–9Google Scholar.

⁶³ Julian Horton, ‘The Later Symphonies’, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, 199–228, quotes at 226.

⁶⁴ Thomson, ‘Becoming a National Composer: Critical Reception to c. 1925’, and ‘Vaughan Williams and His Successors; Composers’ Forum’, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, 56–75 and 299–320, at 74, 300, and ff.

⁶⁵ Thomson, ‘Vaughan Williams and his Successors’, 317.

⁶⁶ For Vaughan Williams's generally hostile attitude toward ‘The Wrong Note’ school, and for those he considered to be part of it, see The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams Online Database: VWL932, VWL1457, VWL1785, VWL2476, VWL3361, VWL4308, and VWL4309. Elsewhere he was less than charitable toward the music of composers who aggressively embraced dissonance and other traditionally ‘modernist’ elements. For example, see his remarks on Stravinsky in VWL530; and his perfunctory remark on Schoenberg marking the latter's death in ‘Arnold Schönberg 1874–1951’, Music & Letters 32/4 (1951): 322 in Manning, ed., Vaughan Williams on Music, 173. Also worth recalling in this context is the beginning of the composer's 1955 tribute to Sibelius, where he compares the latter favourably (and rather caustically) against various avant-garde techniques. See ‘Sibelius (18785–1957) (A Tribute Written on the Occasion of his Ninetieth Birthday)’, in National Music and Other Essays, 261–4, at 261.

⁶⁷ Thomson, ‘Vaughan Williams and his Successors’, 307, 317.

⁶⁸ Adams, ‘Foreword’, 6.

⁶⁹ Guthrie, Kate, Music and the Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain: The Art of Appreciation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 8–9Google Scholar. Another noteworthy study involving “middlebrow” British music and reception is Chowrimootoo, Christopher, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten's Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ For a useful discussion of this impulse and examples of what has prompted it, see Frogley, ‘Modernism and its Discontents: Reclaiming the Major Minor British Composer’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 143/1 (2018): 243–254, especially at 243–6.

⁷¹ For example, see Harper-Scott, J.P.E., The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² Richard Taruskin, ‘Not Modern and Loving It’, in Taruskin, Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 120–33, at 126.

⁷³ Pace, Ian, ‘Modernist Fantasias: The Recuperation of a Concept’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 144/2 (2019): 473–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 493. Additionally, a very recent article by David Manning argues for firm boundaries in defining twentieth-century musical ‘modernism’, while citing others who have done similarly. See Manning, ‘Vaughan Williams, Modernism, and Neo-Romanticism: Sancta Civitas as a Vision “Among the Ruins”’, The Musical Quarterly 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdad008.

⁷⁴ Kirstie Asmussen has recently discussed how Vaughan Williams was directly complicit in the soft pastoralist, nationalist image projected in Hubert Foss's book Vaughan Williams: A Study, cited earlier in this article. See Asmussen, ‘Biographical Revisionism: Hubert Foss's Conflicting Portrayals of Vaughan Williams’, Journal of Musicological Research 38/3–4 (2019): 285–97, at 295–6.

⁷⁵ These views are presented and expounded upon in the following writings: ‘National Music’, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, and ‘The Making of Music’, all of which may be found in Kennedy, ed., National Music and Other Essays, 1–73, 154–9, and 205–42. For the quote about modernism and conservatism see Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 372.

⁷⁶ Saylor, Eric, Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 2022), 97–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.