Word: vaughan
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...Gloucestershire clergyman and blessed with a private income, Ralph Vaughan Williams was never a man in a hurry. Not until his 35th year, when his Walt Whitman cantata Toward the Unknown Region was performed (1907), did he attract any real attention; by then he was already six years a Mus.D. from Cambridge. He wrote his first ballet (Old King Cole] at 51, his first film score (49th Parallel) at 68. Ever eager to try his hand at something new, he surprised Harmonica Virtuoso Larry Adler with a Romance for Harmonica with orchestral accompaniment. By then Composer Williams...
...young man, Vaughan Williams in vain sought his own musical language in London (at the Royal College of Music) and Berlin (under Composer Max Bruch), finally found it in the modal, autochthonous abundance of the English countryside's folk music. Together with his friend Gustav Hoist, he severed the bonds binding English music to Germany and France. He once wrote: "Have we not all about us forms of musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art? For instance, the lilt of the chorus at a music-hall joining in a popular...
...time his stirring Symphony No. 6 had its premiere in 1948, when he was 76, musical history offered few parallels of such creative longevity. Yet Ralph Vaughan Williams went on to write three more symphonies. King George V gave him the Order of Merit in 1935, but he declined many other honors, knighthood included. He may not have attained the wide popularity of that musical Kipling, Sir Edward Elgar, but international professionals respected Vaughan Williams as the more important musician. And all England loved him as Sir Malcolm Sargent described him: "A darling fat man walking about clasping a bowler...
Died. Ralph Vaughan Williams, 85, British composer; in London (see Music...
Partly because the market for good jazz singers-i.e., singers who phrase and improvise in the manner of instruments in a jazz band-is remarkably small, Ernestine has remained a critical success and a popular failure. She is inevitably compared to Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday. Ernestine invariably rejects the comparisons. "I wish," she says, "they would let me be just me." She is, and "just me" is plenty good enough...