Vaughan Williams Listening Challenge 2: A Pastoral Symphony and a Stricken Peninsula
Bird-Bolts and Cannon-Bullets, No. 33
For the second week of our RVW survey, we will begin with his Pastoral Symphony, his third. If you are familiar with Beethoven’s symphony of the same name, you will note that this sounds nothing like it. It is melancholic more than bucolic, and it has a steady undercurrent of tension despite its mostly slow tempos and quiet scoring. To me, this makes it an excellent accompaniment to our reading of Tolkien, because the writer’s pastoral scenes are also laced with sadness. This was the first of RVW’s symphonies to appear after his service as an ambulance driver in the First World War, and indeed much of it sounds elegiac, especially in the somber bugle call that we hear in the second movement.
For our lesser known work, we will listen to Stricken Peninsula, which was written to accompany a 1945 propaganda film about the British Army’s work in Italy at the end of the war. The score was lost, and so there had been no recordings of it in the years since until Phillip Lane reconstructed it. We owe Lane a debt of thanks; it is by turns rousing and atmospheric.
Here are links to our RVW playlist with the new music added:
RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Apple Music
RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Spotify
Let me know what you think. How does this music go with your Tolkienian reading?
Long time readers may note that the Rotation has not been updated recently, and we haven’t had a Meet-the-Artist playlist for a while. Which are you most interested in seeing in the next couple of weeks?
The Stack of the Week
I’m in the process of re-recommending some of the newsletters that featured as my early stacks of the week, since I didn’t have many subscribers back then. One of the first was Only Connect . . . by the wonderful
, who needs no introduction for many of you. Mary is an accomplished writer who has had a long career teaching writing, and for the past year or so she has been serializing her memoir on Substack. It is gripping and written with perfect balance and dazzling technique; when I first discovered it, I went back to the first installment and read all the way through in one sitting. Then I couldn’t wait for the next installment, so I ordered the book:
Just start with the first installment and keep reading:
Lately, Mary has teamed up with
, another of my favorite writers, to answer craft questions about writing. I will resist the urge to post here the installment in which they responded to my question (since I already posted it here), and instead I’ll link to their recent conversation about establishing a sense of place:Graduate Student Post of the Week
Our graduate student this week is Christine York, who writes Arbitrary Literary Criticisms. Christine is a second-year student in literature, and in this post she writes about Gudrun, the remarkable woman at the center of the Icelandic Saga of the People of Laxardal:
That’s all for this week’s Bird-Bolts. I’ll be back on Wednesday for the third week of the LOTR Reading Challenge. I have posted a schedule for the challenge, which you can find here.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet quill pen to yours.
Oh what a grand post about Vaughn Williams. As alway you surprise and delight and explain. Thank you so much for your generous, kind words about my memoir that I'm serializing here --and your link to it and to my collaboration with Eleanor Anstruther on This Writing Life where we each answer questions about writing: the how's, the why's, the ways and discuss in a shared video. You are such a generous and deeply read scholar with a striking sense of humor and a fine sensibility. I am so glad I found you and you me.