Vaughan Williams and His World ed. by Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley (review)

Reviewed by: Vaughan Williams and His World ed. by Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley Ryan Ross Vaughan Williams and His World. Edited by Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley. (Bard Music Festival Series. ) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. xi, 330 p. ISBN 9780226830445 (hardcover), 105; ISBN 9780226830452 (paperback), 35; ISBN 780226830469 (ebook), 34. 99. Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. The spate of Vaughan Williams literature in recent years shows no signs of slowing. He and his music continue to be objects of sustained musicological focus to an extent that was hardly predictable just three decades ago. By my count, Vaughan Williams and His World is the eighth collection of essays wholly devoted to the composer since 1996, with a ninth collection forthcoming (Julian Onderdonk and Ceri Owen, eds. , Vaughan Williams in Context, Composers in Context Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). In the present collection, the authors take a deeply contextual approach, providing extensive treatment of the people, places, events, and ideas that surrounded the composer throughout his career. In several instances, they examine important documents in ways that provide fresh insights into his music and attitudes. Hence, the series appellation "and His World" is richly earned. This volume is a significant next step in Vaughan Williams research, and shows End Page 654 the considerable dist ance traversed from the earliest essay collections mentioned above. But in Vaughan Williams and His World, the authors also perpetuate a clear accompanying agenda that, while having roots in longstanding efforts to combat stubborn misconceptions about both man and music, has lately become pronounced. The back cover states that the book "traces the composer's stylistic and aesthetic development in a broadly chronological fashion, reappraising Vaughan Williams's music composed during and after the Second World War. " Further, it aims at "affirming his status as an artist whose leftist political convictions pervaded his life and music" and "reclaims Vaughan Williams's deeply held progressive ethical and democratic convictions while celebrating his achievements as a composer" (see also https: //press. uchicago. edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo208861005. html accessed 11 March 2024). This is not the first volume of essays whose authors aggressively highlight Vaughan Williams's left-leanings, to say nothing of other recent, similarly attuned writings. For example, in the words of Alain Frog-ley and Aidan J. Thomson, editors of The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge Companions to Music New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 300), "a feature of this volume has been the idea of 'Vaughan Williams the Progressive. ' " When the authors of Vaughan Williams and His World do likewise, they often go beyond dispassionate exploration of the composer's politics and embrace partisan advocacy. Unfortunately, such fervor at times strains available evidence and checkers the otherwise rigorous scholarship that marks this volume as a valuable addition to the Vaughan Williams literature. The back cover may slightly mislead. While most or all of the authors might be fully aligned with its self-described agenda (based upon their other publications), the most intensive advocacy largely resides in essays by the editors themselves, who sometimes juxtapose insightful material with undersup-ported arguments or exaggerations. Adams and Grimley set the tone for this dichotomy in the introduction. Here they offer many perceptive remarks about Vaughan Williams's character and musical orientation. Almost immediately they tell us that his ethical convictions were "broadly progressive for his time and yet simultaneously concerned with preserving what he considered the finest and most authentic of English traditions" (pp. 1–2). This is accurate enough, as are other statements relating to Vaughan Williams's love of freedom and distrust of authoritarians. But we also read that "by the early 1930s Vaughan Williams had embraced the political internationalism that he found in Walt Whitman's Transcendentalist vision of a united humanity" (p. 2), which later gets tied to the composer's advocacy for a European Federal Union (p. 136). If Adams and Grimley have direct evidence that Vaughan Williams's activism for a Federal Union (or other specific elements of his internationalist politics) were explicitly rooted in his regard for Whitman's poetry, they supply none, in which case they should perhaps qualify their language. Their subsequent. . .