Art rests peacefully in the heart and mind...
Ralph Vaughan-Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Constable, and the Idyllized/Idolized English Landscape
DAN BLIM, University of Michigan
By the early twentieth century, Great Britain, the ruler of the world's most extensive colonial empire, had turned its attention inward. Trading imperialism for nationalism, the concept of "Little England" became increasingly popular, especially for British composers. At the forefront of British nationalist music was Ralph Vaughan Williams, specifically his evocation of the pastoral. But the meaning of the term "pastoral" has largely gone unquestioned, as has the source of Vaughan Williams's pastoral music, beyond the incorporation of English folk melodies and idioms. This paper uses the tradition of British landscape painting, exemplified by John Constable, as a resource for charting both the properties and emergence of pastoral music as national music.
Unlike British music, dormant from the baroque through most of the nineteenth century, British painting enjoyed a healthy, continuous tradition. Despite this, Constable remained relatively obscure in England. Starting in 1902, Constable began to attract not simply scholarly, but also popular attention, evidenced in the rapidly increasing cost of and demand for his works. This resurgence of interest in Constable's landscapes is synchronous with the rise of the pastoral in Vaughan Williams's music.
An examination of the formal elements of Constable's paintings maps directly onto an aesthetic analysis of Vaughan Williams's music—both employ evocations of space and distance, and a distinct human element integrated into the countryside. Both artists create a landscape, which is distinctly and recognizably British, while simultaneously transforming it into an idealized, particularly nostalgic landscape. Contemporary reviews of Vaughan Williams's music discuss this at length, while travel guides and magazines in turn-of-the-century Britain used reproduced Constable paintings in lieu of real photographs.
This effort to idealize not simply landscape, but nationallandscape, points to a larger question of postcolonial modernity. Virginia Boyes argues in The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology, and the English Folk Revival that folksong enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp essentially colonized the folk community. Similarly, the construction of English landscapes in Constable and Vaughan Williams can be seen as a form of self-colonization. This rendering of the past as nostalgic yet attainable to modern viewers effectively substitutes it for exotic, colonized cultures. There was an increasing desire in the face of modernity to regain, to own the past. By examining Britain's evolving attitude towards Constable, we find not only a referential source for Vaughan Williams, but also a deeper understanding of British postcolonial nationalist sentiment.
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Carole Collier's point of view:
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Juxtaposing Constable's paintings to Vauhan Williams' scintillating music seems wonderfully appropriate indeed. The two symbolise everything that is indisputably supreme about Great Britain, that breath-taking nation that simply transcends beauty in all forms!
The British countryside is the embodiment of heartfelt musical harmonies that crash like gentle yet determined sea-waves into life-like landscape paintings that beckon us to love this most magnificent country that has been adorned with more splendour that anyone's imagination could possibly conceive in a lifetime!
One could think of few things better than Constable's paintings pirouetting through a captivating atmosphere euphonised by the elegance of Vaughan Williams' undying notes of excellence.
DAN BLIM, University of Michigan
By the early twentieth century, Great Britain, the ruler of the world's most extensive colonial empire, had turned its attention inward. Trading imperialism for nationalism, the concept of "Little England" became increasingly popular, especially for British composers. At the forefront of British nationalist music was Ralph Vaughan Williams, specifically his evocation of the pastoral. But the meaning of the term "pastoral" has largely gone unquestioned, as has the source of Vaughan Williams's pastoral music, beyond the incorporation of English folk melodies and idioms. This paper uses the tradition of British landscape painting, exemplified by John Constable, as a resource for charting both the properties and emergence of pastoral music as national music.
Unlike British music, dormant from the baroque through most of the nineteenth century, British painting enjoyed a healthy, continuous tradition. Despite this, Constable remained relatively obscure in England. Starting in 1902, Constable began to attract not simply scholarly, but also popular attention, evidenced in the rapidly increasing cost of and demand for his works. This resurgence of interest in Constable's landscapes is synchronous with the rise of the pastoral in Vaughan Williams's music.
An examination of the formal elements of Constable's paintings maps directly onto an aesthetic analysis of Vaughan Williams's music—both employ evocations of space and distance, and a distinct human element integrated into the countryside. Both artists create a landscape, which is distinctly and recognizably British, while simultaneously transforming it into an idealized, particularly nostalgic landscape. Contemporary reviews of Vaughan Williams's music discuss this at length, while travel guides and magazines in turn-of-the-century Britain used reproduced Constable paintings in lieu of real photographs.
This effort to idealize not simply landscape, but nationallandscape, points to a larger question of postcolonial modernity. Virginia Boyes argues in The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology, and the English Folk Revival that folksong enthusiasts such as Cecil Sharp essentially colonized the folk community. Similarly, the construction of English landscapes in Constable and Vaughan Williams can be seen as a form of self-colonization. This rendering of the past as nostalgic yet attainable to modern viewers effectively substitutes it for exotic, colonized cultures. There was an increasing desire in the face of modernity to regain, to own the past. By examining Britain's evolving attitude towards Constable, we find not only a referential source for Vaughan Williams, but also a deeper understanding of British postcolonial nationalist sentiment.
*****************************
Carole Collier's point of view:
----------------------------------
Juxtaposing Constable's paintings to Vauhan Williams' scintillating music seems wonderfully appropriate indeed. The two symbolise everything that is indisputably supreme about Great Britain, that breath-taking nation that simply transcends beauty in all forms!
The British countryside is the embodiment of heartfelt musical harmonies that crash like gentle yet determined sea-waves into life-like landscape paintings that beckon us to love this most magnificent country that has been adorned with more splendour that anyone's imagination could possibly conceive in a lifetime!
One could think of few things better than Constable's paintings pirouetting through a captivating atmosphere euphonised by the elegance of Vaughan Williams' undying notes of excellence.
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