Early Years and Family
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in The Vicarage, in Down Ampney, on October 12, 1872 to Arthur and Margaret Vaughan Williams. Ralph’s father; Arthur was the vicar of the All Saints Church in Down Ampney in 1868. Through his mothers side Ralph had two famous great-great-grand fathers; Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the pottery at Stoke-on-Trent, and Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. In 1875 Ralph’s father suddenly died, when he was only two years old. His mother moved him and his two siblings to the Wedgwood family home: Leith Hill Place, in Surrey.
Musical Training and Schooling
Music was very important to the family and his early music lessons were given by his aunt Sophy, who was his mothers sister. He wrote his first piano piece when he was six, called The Robin’s Nest . Ralph and his siblings would play duets together and all were good students. It soon came time for Ralph to go to school so he followed his brother Hervey to preparatory school at Rottingdean near Brighton in 1883. He liked the music teachers there very much and was introduced to J.S. Bach. He learned the violin and soon became good enough to know Raff's Cavatina by heart. In 1887 Ralph became a student at Charterhouse school near Godalming in Surrey where he remained until 1890, he was fourteen at the time. Here he organized concerts and wanted to pursue Viola but his family disagreed and chose the organ for him instead.
In 1890 Ralph entered the Royal College of Music. After two semesters he became the student of Sir Hubert Perry. Perry grew Ralph’s musical knowledge and had a certain love of english choral music, which Ralph relied upon later in his life. In 1892, Ralph went to Trinity College, Cambridge to st...
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... an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music at Oxford.
In 1914, Ralph finished his first Opera, Hugh the Drover, a work he had begun writing in 1910. It is a romantic ballad with words by Harold Child charting the love-at-first-sight relationship of Hugh and Mary, the constable's daughter. Vaughan Williams wanted to write a "musical" about English life. It is indeed full of wonderful tunes in Vaughan Williams' most fresh and lyrical style. It even succeeds in setting a boxing match between Hugh and John the Butcher, to whom Mary was about to be unhappily married. The opera was first publicly performed in 1924, with forces of the British National Opera Company conducted by Malcolm Sargent.
Work Cited
Connock, Stephen, MBE. "The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams." The Life of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, 19 Aug. 2001. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.
Charles attended Brentwood School in Essex which is father was headmaster of but in 1894 Charles changed schools to Clifton College before winning a scholarship to Hertford College in Oxford in 1898.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1980)9: 708-709
Grove, George. The Musical Times Volume 47. United Kingdom: Musical Times Publications Ltd. 1906, Print.
room and play then, he took piano lessons when he was seven. By the age of
Mozart’s father, Leopold, was a composer, violinist, and assistant concert master at the Salzburg court. Due to the fact that his father was deeply involved in music, Mozart was influenced at a very young age. Mozart began learning how to play the piano as early as the age of three. Under his father’s advice, Mozart and his sister, Maria Anna, excelled greatly.
TitleAuthor/ EditorPublisherDate James Galways’ Music in TimeWilliam MannMichael Beazley Publishers1982 The Concise Oxford History of MusicGerald AbrahamOxford University Press1979 Music in Western CivilizationPaul Henry LangW. W. Norton and Company1941 The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Classical MusicRobert AinsleyCarlton Books Limited1995 The Cambridge Music GuideStanley SadieCambridge University Press1985 School text: Western European Orchestral MusicMary AllenHamilton Girls’ High School1999 History of MusicRoy BennettCambridge University Press1982 Classical Music for DummiesDavid PogueIDG Books Worldwide,Inc1997
Susskind, Pamela. "Clara Schumann." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ed. Stanley Sadie and George Grove. 1980. Print.
film music. On the one side there are the purists, who cry foul at the piecing together of
Taruskin, R., & Taruskin, R. (2010). Music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
He received a thorough basic education; his father being a good teacher, and son being a bright student. From his father Franz also learned to play the violin, and from his brother he learned the piano. The family, indeed, was a very musical one; the "String Quartet Parties" family were well known in the part of Vienna in which they lived. But soon, young Franz learned all that his family had to teach him. Later, any neighbors who could play any instruments were drawn in and the quartet became a little orchestra.
Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26th, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. Williams wrote fiction and motion picture screenplays but is primarily acclaimed for his plays. Thomas was the first son and second child of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. He was named after his paternal grandfather and insisted to be called Tom by the age of ten. His siblings include an older sister named Rose and a younger brother named Dakin. Williams spent a great deal of time with his sister Rose because she was not very stable, emotionally or mentally. Daryl E. Haley once said that Rose "was emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions." Tom was primarily raised by his mother because his father was a traveling shoe salesman. Edwina Dakin Williams was the daughter of a minister and very over protective of Thomas. She began to be over protective after he caught Diphtheria when he was five years old. His mother was also an aggressive woman caught up in her fantasies of genteel southern living. Amanda Wingfield, a character in his play The Glass Menagerie, was modeled after Williams' mother. Cornelius Coffin Williams, Tom's father, spent most of his time on the road. Cornelius came from a very prestigious family that included Mississippi's very first governor and senator. Mr. Haley also states that Tom's father was "at turns distant and abusive," that is, when he was actually around. Toms father also repeatedly favored his younger brother Dakin over both of his older children. Big Daddy, in Tom's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is modeled after his father. Thomas once said, in reference to his parents relationship, "It was just a wrong marriage." From 1923 to 1926 Thomas attended Ben Blewette Junior High, and was at this time that some of his first stories were published in a local newspaper.
At the young age of ten, Bach’s parents died, and he was sent to live with is brother, who was an organist. During his stay with his brother, he studied composition and learned how to play the keyboard on his own (Johann Sebastian Bach). After the death of his brother, Bach went to school in Luneberg and came into interaction with intense musical culture. It was there that he characterized himself as a viola player and a violinist. Moreover, before he was eighteen years old, he left Luneberg and was renowned as a master organist, clavichordist, and also a promising composer. Bach began his professional career playing the viola and violin in the court orchestra in Weimar. However, although he was not unhappy, the organ was his true passion. Subsequently, he was employed in Arnstadt where he wrote virtually all organ music (Carlson and Smith 32).
Smith, Jane Stuart and Betty Carlson. “The Gift of Music: Great Composures and Their Influence.” Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books Publishing. 1987. Print.
His influences derived somewhat directly from English folk music and Tudor music, as he attempted to break British music away from the typical Germanic orchestration style and sounds of the time. Vaughan Williams, during his time at the Royal College of Music, studied with Hubert Parry and later Charles Villiers Stanford, having spent 3 years studying music and history at Trinity College, Cambridge. However, Vaughan Williams grew frustrated with the Germanic-influenced state of 19th century British music. Through the critic Calvocoressi, Vaughan Williams found teaching with Ravel, and spent 3 months from 1907-1908 in Paris studying orchestration. Ravel attempted to push Vaughan-Williams away from the British-Teutonic archetype, and in some ways, this brought on an initially disapproving British critical response to Vaughan-Williams’ works.
Smith, Jane Stuart and Betty Carlson. “The Gift of Music: Great Composures and Their Influence.” Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books Publishing. 1987. Print. April 2014.