Ralph Vaughan Williams famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Art #Expression #Soul
It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Music #Writing #Men
Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Teacher #Cutting #Ideas
The attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is "wrong" and arises from insular ignorance.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Attitude #Believe #Ignorance
The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Talking #Opera #Tunes
The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Long #Soul #Generations
It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Sound #Looks
I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Country #Art #Thinking
I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Dog #Trying #Study
The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Music #Men #Path
Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Behinds
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Mean #Reality #Sound
There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Atheist #Writing #Reason
The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Unsaid #Duty
But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#Disappointment #Next #World
There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City - the intuition that I had been there already.
-- Ralph Vaughan Williams

#New York #Night #Sight

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