Vaughan Williams and Folk Song.

What struck me most about the Vaughan Williams articles this week was the composer’s absolute commitment to and belief in the power of folk music to establish an English national identity. He believed in folk song so much that he wrote an opera that he did not anticipate would garner any acclaim or success; he simply wanted to showcase the many English folk songs sprinkled throughout the work. This opera, entitled Hugh the Drover, does not utilize folk song to develop the storyline. Rather, the folk influence is “…atmospheric, appropriate for underscoring the rural setting but irrelevant to the plot” (Saylor 49). It is amazing to me that in the Victorian Era Covent Garden would only produce opera with Italian libretto, and I find it very smart of Vaughan Williams to capitalize upon this disservice to national music by composing his own English opera, rampant with indigenous folk melody. Even better it seems that the opera was well received. The opera’s success coupled with the work of the English Folk Song Society aided in the reemergence of English folk songs in school, church, and everyday life.

The convictions in indigenous folk song Vaughan Williams had reminded me of a book I read in college entitled Balkan Fascination: Creating an Alternative Music Culture in America. This book by Mirjana Lausevic explores a subculture in America in which white Anglo-Saxons indentify with the music and dance of Eastern European rural society. The conclusion that Lausevic comes to is that there is no Anglo-Saxon culture left in America, so certain individuals seek the vibrancy and quirkiness of another culture in order to feel like they belong somewhere. It seems to me that Vaughan Williams had a similar aim in cultivating the old songs of his own heritage. I wonder though if certain English people did identity with the music and dance of another culture to order to gain a sense of identity, or whether in the midst of World War I this attachment to another culture was considered taboo. I appreciated Vaughan William’s quote at the conclusion of the Saylor article, which reads, 

This was Vaughan Williams artistic ideal: he wanted England to have its own autonomous, distinctive musical life, but he also knew that “…this life cannot develop and fructify further except in an atmosphere of friendship and sympathy with other nations […] our national art must not be a backwater, but must take its part in the great stream that has flowed through the centuries.” (Saylor 83).