CERI OWEN Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs

On Singing and Listening in Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs

CERI OWEN

I begin with a question not posed amid the singer narrates with ardent urgency their sound- recent and unusually liberal scholarly atten- ing and, apparently, their hearing. But precisely tion devoted to a song cycle by Ralph Vaughan who is engaged in these acts at this, the musi- Williams, the Robert Louis Stevenson settings, cal and emotional heart of the cycle? Songs of Travel, composed between 1901 and The recollected songs are first heard on the 1904.1 My question relates to “Youth and Love,” lips of the speaker in “The Vagabond,” an os- the fourth song of the cycle, in which an unex- tensibly archetypal Romantic wayfarer who in- pectedly impassioned climax erupts with pecu- troduces himself at the cycle’s opening in the liar force amid music of otherwise unparalleled lyric first-person, grimly issuing a characteris- serenity. Here, as strains of songs heard earlier tic demand for the solitary life on the open intrude into the piano’s accompaniment, the road. This lyric voice, its eye fixed squarely on the future, is retained in two subsequent songs, “Let Beauty Awake” and “The Roadside Fire” I thank Byron Adams, Daniel M. Grimley, and Julian (in which life with a beloved is contemplated).2 Johnson for their comments on this research, and espe- cially Benedict Taylor, for his invaluable editorial sugges- With “Youth and Love,” however, Vaughan tions. Thanks also to Clive Wilmer for his discussion of Williams rearranges the order of Stevenson’s Rossetti with me.

1For an overview of Vaughan Williams’s career and critical reception as a songwriter, see Sophie Fuller, “The Songs and Shorter Secular Choral Works,” in The Cambridge 2“Let Beauty Awake” possesses no clear first-person voice, Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and though heard in the context of the surrounding songs— Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and in the absence of a third-person narration—it appears 2013), 106–20. to belong to the same voice found in “The Vagabond.”

19th-Century Music, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 257–282 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2017 by the Regents of 257 the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.257. 19TH poems such that a new voice is introduced, piano forcefully and self-consciously enacts both CENTURY 3 MUSIC bearing a new burden of narration in the cycle. the “crying” and “singing” by quoting passages One of relatively few Travel poems cast in the from “The Roadside Fire.” Then, with a sud- narrative third person, it functions here to con- den return to the detached reflection of the firm both retrospectively and prospectively the opening, the protagonist slips away. As the emotional dilemma staged in the songs: love, singer-narrator informs us, “his face is gone.” and by implication a settled life with the be- (See ex. 2, pp. 266–68.) loved, versus solitude, the freedom to break The recall within “Youth and Love” of ma- out, to wander: terial exposed earlier in the cycle might be understood simply as a subtle piece of word To the heart of youth the world is a highwayside. painting, or a formal practice of self-quotation Passing for ever, he fares; and on either hand, familiar from the song cycles of Schumann and Deep in the gardens golden pavilions hide, Beethoven, whose works became emblematic Nestle in orchard bloom, and far on the level land of a powerful tradition to which a number of Call him with lighted lamp in the eventide. early-twentieth-century British song compos- ers sought to add a native voice. Such recollec- Thick as the stars at night when the moon is down, tions highlight music’s capacity to reflect upon Pleasures assail him. He to his nobler fate its own history, akin to what Michael Steinberg Fares; and but waves a hand as he passes on, has termed musical subjectivity.4 The recollec- Cries but a wayside word to her at the garden tions might thus be heard as memories arising gate, from the music’s consciousness, as they might Sings but a boyish stave and his face is gone. also in Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures (1899), per- haps a model for the young Vaughan Williams A change in tone for the narrating voice is in crafting a narrative cycle at the turn of the articulated by Vaughan Williams’s musical century.5 materials. Cast in a through-composed form The recognition of such self-consciousness (its two parts corresponding to Stevenson’s has assumed a peculiar significance in the dis- stanza division), “Youth and Love” replaces course surrounding Vaughan Williams’s cycle. the broad, regular melodies of the opening songs As Rufus Hallmark has emphasized, Songs of with a melodically indistinct recitation which Travel was published in two separate books hovers freely below a flexibly pulsating accom- following its premiere at London’s Bechstein paniment (a reinterpretation, in turn, of the Hall on 2 December 1904. The first book, is- militantly regular “tramping” figures with sued in 1905, comprised the more “popular,” which the cycle begins). Soon into the B sec- accessible songs (as apparently assessed by tion, however, the lyric voice of the earlier songs returns in the piano’s instrumental voice. As the “pleasures” of nightfall “assail” the wan- 4Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Sub- jectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: derer, an emphatic recall of the cycle’s opening Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. 4–11. horn call shatters the reverie and precipitates 5The absence of a clearly unified voice in Sea Pictures— decisive action. For no sooner does the narrator which amalgamates texts by five different poets—has long prompted questions about its status as a cycle, a reception declaim “he to his nobler fate fares” than the history challenged in two recent accounts, both of which narrated “he” of the poem seems to hear, to attend to issues of thematic recollection, narrative coher- react to the statement: he “cries but a wayside ence, and constructions of subjectivity; Karen Leistra-Jones, “The Deeps Have Music Soft and Low: Sounding the Ocean word” and “sings but a boyish stave” while the in Elgar’s Sea Pictures,” Music & Letters 97/1 (2016): 61– 99, and Charles Edward McGuire, “Three Journeys, Two Paths: Locating the Lyric and Dramatic in Elgar’s Sea Pic- 3Vaughan Williams set nine poems from Stevenson’s post- tures,” in The Sea in the British Musical Imagination, ed. humously published Songs of Travel and Other Verses Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer (Woodbridge: (1896). On their selection and rearrangement, see Rufus Boydell, 2015), 179–203. On the narrative song cycle in Hallmark, “Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Will- early-twentieth-century British musical culture, see iams and Their Songs of Travel,” in Vaughan Williams Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Essays, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Studies of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cam- Ashgate, 2003), 129–56, esp. 130–35. bridge University Press, 1988), 42–64.

258 Boosey)—namely “The Vagabond,” “The Road- and Love”—“In Dreams” and “The Infinite CERI OWEN side Fire,” and “Bright Is the Ring of Words” Shining Heavens”—are furthermore different Vaughan (originally the last song of the cycle). The sec- from those that precede it, exhibiting the most Williams’s ond book, issued in 1907, gathered together the consciously “artful” and harmonically explor- Early Songs remaining “Youth and Love,” “Let Beauty atory music found anywhere in the cycle. Like Awake,” “In Dreams” (originally song 5), and the penultimate “Whither Must I Wander?” “The Infinite Shining Heavens” (song 6). The these songs return to the first-person lyric voice, work, then, was not issued in the form pre- as the poems selected by Vaughan Williams miered and apparently intended by Vaughan become for the first time rich in memory, his Williams—and including “Whither Must I Wan- music newly anguished and melancholic in its der?” (song 7, composed in 1901 and published response to the poetic subject’s reflection upon separately in 1902)—until 1960, at which point the past. an epilogue was added having been found among It seems fitting, with all this in mind, that the composer’s papers following his death two the cycle concludes with “Bright Is the Ring of years earlier.6 “Youth and Love” has thus pro- Words,” in which the poem’s self-conscious vided crucial internal evidence for the cycle’s preoccupation with song-making—“Bright is otherwise questionable integrity, as such, and the ring of words / When the right man rings has offered persuasive evidence, in turn, for the them, / Fair the fall of songs / When the singer identity of the journeying protagonist as a Ro- sings them”—is heightened by musical setting, mantic “vagabond-artist.” and may be heard as a confirmation of the In this reading the song marks a moment of wanderer’s progressive passage toward and re- internalized creative enlightenment (a “flash- alization of creative fulfillment. This reading is back or reminiscence,” as Hallmark has it), as ostensibly consonant, in turn, with the senti- the Vagabond shuns the “pleasures” of domes- ments advanced in the epilogue, “I have trod ticity in favor of a “nobler” creative fate. In the upward and the downward slope,” in which reflecting upon in order to leave behind his the poetic subject delivers an intensely intro- “boyish staves”—an “earlier and easier con- verted, elegiac reflection upon a journey near ventional art”—the artist sheds the burdens of its end, as Vaughan Williams furnishes music domesticity and his own immaturity as one rich in further thematic recollection (a weary, and the same. “Youth and Love” has implicitly rhythmically augmented version of the fanfare been heard, then, as a narrative turning point from “The Vagabond,” nine measures derived in a particular kind of life journey, as the pro- from “Whither Must I Wander?” and, to con- tagonist achieves psychological depth and cre- clude, six measures of “Bright Is the Ring of ative maturity in autonomy—a particular con- Words”). In this respect the epilogue becomes a dition of Romantic subjectivity.7 suitably unifying conclusion in which the aged The plausibility of Hallmark’s reading is re- Vagabond reviews in order to take solace in his flected in the frequency with which it has been life’s creative achievement, reconciling him- rehearsed.8 The two songs that follow “Youth self to the mortality implicit in Stevenson’s final lines “And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.” 6See Hallmark, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” 135. Though Songs of Travel undoubtedly issues 7See Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties an invitation to be heard in these terms, some- of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- thing is not quite right here, for reasons that versity Press, 1996), esp. 2–3, and Martin A. Danahay, A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Au- relate to the connected issues of thematic rec- tonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany: State Uni- ollection and a long-overlooked distinction be- versity of New York Press, 1993), esp. 11–37. tween the cycle’s lyric and narrative voices. 8For an overview, see Allan W. Atlas, “Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel: A Note on the Structural Role of the Thematic Recollections in Songs 4 and 9,” Nineteenth- Century Music Review 7/1 (2010): 105–19, 106–07, n. 7. A Century Stage (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 4–33, in which recent reading of the “life-journey” traced by the cycle is it is deemed a “mono-drama”: “a sequence of scenes in provided by Roger Savage in Masques, Mayings and Mu- the implied life-story of a single character, presented in sic-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth- the first person singular” (6).

259 19TH Notably, the epilogue was not performed at the its progress. This protagonist is habitually iden- CENTURY MUSIC time of the cycle’s premiere, though the extant tified with Vaughan Williams himself, as the manuscripts suggest that it was composed con- narrative of the vagabond-artist becomes a meta- temporaneously. Given that Vaughan Williams phor for his arduous struggle toward creative made no mention of it anywhere in subsequent self-discovery and the formation of a national references to the cycle’s performance, publica- music. Such readings have been applied to nu- tion, or recording, it appears he withheld it. merous of his works, so often concerned with Quite why he may have done so remains a notions of heroic, self-sacrificing journey, but source of persistent curiosity, as does the cycle’s they are particularly ubiquitous in responses to narrative coherence more broadly.9 What sig- these songs, long understood as an artistic and nificance, indeed, lies in its conclusion with professional “breakthrough” for the composer, “Bright Is the Ring of Words,” which returns to and as a turning point in the development of a more anonymous, present-time narrative voice native art song.11 familiar from—and recurring for the first time These readings point in turn to a persistent since its disappearance following—“Youth and though unexamined trope of Vaughan Love”? Williams’s broader reception, which highlights Some answers may be provided at the heart the rhetorical power of his work and its ability of that song, whose musically distinct narrat- to “speak” to a listener with a peculiarly em- ing voice has too easily been conflated with the bodied, almost physical force.12 This history lyric subject of whom it speaks. Its extraordi- itself highlights a tension, for while invoking nary climax refuses, moreover—even as it the legacy of a nineteenth-century emphasis clearly functions to invoke—a sense of retreat upon the lyric I (and the related assumption into an internalized realm of personal memory. that it is the composer who “speaks” or whose Though “for Stevenson the present could never persona is conveyed in his or her music), it is be quite as enthralling as the past,” as Ann simultaneously suggestive of a more detached Colley points out when exploring the ubiqui- and collective subjectivity that inheres in the tous trope of reminiscence in his work,10 demand for embodied response.13 The cycle Vaughan Williams’s music underlines an em- plays on this tension through its self-conscious phatic rhetorical projection both of the piano’s combination of different kinds of material— recollected songs and of the singer’s narration of their sounding and apparent hearing. Atten- tion is accordingly called to a powerful sense of 11See, for example, Frank Howes, The Music of Ralph embodied “presence” at the climax, as the rela- Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), tion of time and space modeled thus far in the 238; A. E. F. Dickinson, Vaughan Williams (London: Faber, 1963), esp. “Man in Music,” 99; and most recently Savage, cycle is reconfigured, and the music forcefully Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas, 312 and 4–33. On sounds the performance of another voice—one Songs of Travel as a model for early-twentieth-century whose singing and listening transforms the British song composers, see Banfield, Sensibility and En- glish Song, esp. 83. music’s journey. 12I detail this reception history in my doctoral thesis, As I suggest through a closer examination of Vaughan Williams, Song, and the Idea of “Englishness” this outburst, Songs of Travel projects multiple (DPhil Diss. University of Oxford, 2014). A flavor is pro- vided in Michael Kennedy’s assessment that for “varied voices, which unsettle the longstanding criti- men, this music awoke in them the feeling that they were cal tendency to map a single protagonist through being personally addressed by a new, strong English voice”: The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 108. 13This can be understood as an outgrowth and 9See Allan W. Atlas, “On the Cyclic Integrity of Vaughan intensification of late-nineteenth-century British musical Williams’s Songs of Travel: One New Question—No New values, reflected and shaped by what Leon Botstein calls Answer,” Musical Times 154/1924 (2013): 5–17, and Nils Edward Elgar’s approachable “transform[ation of] subjec- Neubert, “Song 9 and Symmetry in Songs of Travel,” Ralph tive emotion into a compelling didactic engagement with Vaughan Williams Society Journal 62 (February 2015): 7– the listener.” See “Transcending the Enigmas of Biogra- 8. phy: The Cultural Context of Sir Edward Elgar’s Career,” 10Ann C. Colley, “Robert Louis Stevenson and the Idea of in Edward Elgar and His World, ed. Byron Adams Recollection,” Victorian Literature and Culture 25/2 (1997): (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 365–406, here 203–23, here 204. 366.

260 the artful and the balladic, the individualistic nius” (or as the composer himself had it, “the CERI 15 OWEN and the collective—as recognized by its earliest modern craze for personality”). Vaughan publisher, who perhaps perceived the fraught Composed at a time when Vaughan Will- Williams’s status of a single, consistent creative agency iams was searching for an individual creative Early Songs behind the songs.14 The division enforced by voice that simultaneously sustained his nascent Songs of Travel’s composition and publication commitment to the social utility and intelligi- history reflects, but has perhaps also masked, a bility of “art” music, these songs explore the tension inherent in the cycle’s aesthetic propo- possibility of achieving a self-consciously col- sitions. This tension, constitutive of much of lective authorial subjectivity. They often play, Vaughan Williams’s work, arises between the indeed, on the possibility of figuring a musical subjective isolation of the artist’s voice and his intersubjectivity wherein boundaries between participation in a singing—and listening—com- self and other—and between composer, per- munity. former, and listener—are collapsed.16 By draw- In what follows I propose that Vaughan ing attention to such moments within the Williams’s songs frequently frame the idea—or Stevenson settings we are encouraged to recog- demand the engagement—of a hearer’s contri- nize their persistence in the Dante Gabriel bution, as particular modes of singing and lis- Rossetti sonnets in The House of Life, a cycle tening are figured and invited within the music’s (sharing its title with Rossetti’s extended son- constitution. In this framing lies the cycle’s net sequence) composed and premiered along- mediation both of shifting patterns of educa- side Songs of Travel, but one which, with the tion and appreciation within turn-of-the-cen- exception of the second song, “Silent Noon,” tury British musical culture and of contempo- has been comparatively neglected. Though the raneous notions of subjectivity. Songs of Travel, two cycles have traditionally been considered I suggest, betrays a debt to a Victorian legacy of to embody divergent aesthetic propositions— divided consciousness and a post-Romantic at- not least on account of the striking stylistic tempt to negotiate the implications of the au- distance apparent between Stevenson’s and tonomous self in its divorce from society (a Rossetti’s poems—their comparable framing of struggle inherent in Stevenson’s work), while singing and listening invites reflection upon looking ahead to a more impersonal, their occupation of a shared aesthetic con- communitarian model that, according to tinuum. It is by attending to this continuum Vaughan Williams, necessitated the (re)constitu- that the peculiar tendency of Vaughan Will- tion of a collective consciousness—what Julian iams’s work toward projecting a powerfully sub- Onderdonk has recently called an anti-Roman- tic rejection of “the cult of the individual ge-

15Julian Onderdonk, “Folksong Arrangements, Hymn Tunes and Church Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, 136–56, here 136. See also Danahay, A Community of One; Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Deca- 14Hallmark, however, notes Stephen Banfield’s assessment dence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to that British publishers were “unaccustomed to cycles” and Whole, 1859–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), that few issued collections exceeding six or seven songs and by the same author, Subjectivities: A History of Self- during the first half of the century. He also underlines, Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York: Oxford though, that Boosey had no clear intention to publish the University Press, 1991). second book of songs (“Robert Louis Stevenson,” 152, n. 16The tension between individualism and collectivism in 26 and n. 27). Sophie Fuller remarks that the cycle as a Vaughan Williams’s earliest social, political, and aesthetic whole was not deemed commercially viable (“The Songs views has recently become the subject of renewed revi- and Shorter Secular Choral Works,” 113–14). Critics of the sionist discussion, especially as understood in relation to cycle’s earliest performances singled out only the songs the politics of the early-twentieth-century rural movement. later published in Book 1 for discussion and praise, as well See Julian Onderdonk, “The Composer and Society: Fam- as the earlier-published “Whither Must I Wander?” A fuller ily, Politics, Nation” and Byron Adams, “Vaughan account of the cycle’s early reception than is elsewhere Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship,” in The Cambridge available can be found through consultation of press cut- Companion to Vaughan Williams, 9–28 and 29–55, re- tings gathered in Vaughan Williams’s scrapbook, held at spectively. For a detailed discussion and contextualization the British Library, London: MS. Mus. 1714/11/2/2: 1902– of his statements on collective authorship, see my Vaughan 1905. Williams, Song, and the Idea of “Englishness,” esp. 22–69.

261 19TH jective voice that simultaneously claims ness, nurtured through her encouragement in CENTURY 17 MUSIC identification with no single agency can begin the recalling and developing of his materials. to be drawn into focus. The artist thus becomes aware of his status as such; indeed it is surely no accident that it Songs of Travel’s constructions of subjectivity was at the roadside or beside the fire that are rather more complex than conveyed in the Stevenson in his 1876 essay “Walking Tours” foregoing discussion, not least because an awak- imagined “spiritual repletion” and entry into ening of creative self-consciousness dawns be- “The Land of Thought” after a long day’s fore “Youth and Love,” perhaps most obviously “march”—or, as Anne Wallace interprets of in “The Roadside Fire.” The text of this song, many such nineteenth-century celebrations of Stevenson’s poem “I Will Make You Brooches,” walking, “an enhanced sense of self, clearer moves from the speaker’s promises to “make a thinking, more acute moral apprehension, and palace fit for you and me” toward a recognition higher powers of expression.”18 That Vaughan that “this shall be for music when no one else Williams discarded the title of Stevenson’s poem is near, / The fine song for singing, the rare in favor of “The Roadside Fire” is, with this in song to hear!” Musically, a sense of the mind, a significant gesture (especially given that protagonist’s growing artistic consciousness only in regard to “Whither Must I Wander?” advances here through the shift away from the was this elsewhere in the cycle his practice). tender, balladic mode of the opening toward a A backdrop is thus provided for the musical more personal, almost exaggerated lyricism, as presentation in “Youth and Love” of an ad- the melody’s developmental blossoming sug- vanced aesthetic consciousness, in which the- gests emotional and artistic maturation and matic recollection facilitates a heightened cre- the emergence of a more individual subjective ative enlightenment that reaches beyond any voice. This development is underscored by the internalized and purely personal awakening. self-reflexive hint of thematic recollection pro- The song begins with the sense that time has vided in the harmonic and textural reference to passed. The reflective rhetorical mode of the the rapturous piano figures heard throughout narrative voice—its melodic line unhurried, as- the preceding “Let Beauty Awake” (see ex. 1). sured in its self-directed freedom—suggests ob- The partial recollection functions as so of- servation from a new, experienced vantage ten in the cycle to enrich a nascent sense of point, enriched by the enlightened, unburdened artistic consciousness. By the end of the song quality of G major when heard following the there sounds the tentative murmur of another voice—perhaps that of the implied addressee who will “keep [her] body white”—whose pres- 17“The Roadside Fire” might thus be heard to stage a clas- ence is intimated when the promised “song” is sic example of what Martin Danahay calls the “monologic” relayed as “fine for singing” and “rare to hear,” tendency of some nineteenth-century masculine autobio- which draws from the piano a responsive “sing- graphical writing, wherein woman or nature is figured— and silenced—within the text in order to enrich the ing” and the implication that it has heard the protagonist’s sense of autonomous subjectivity; see voice (mm. 48–49). When the “song” becomes Danahay, A Community of One. one “that only I remember, that only you ad- 18See Robert Louis Stevenson, “Walking Tours,” first pub- lished in the Cornhill Magazine and reprinted in such mire,” the piano offers an “admiring” shadow- early-twentieth-century anthologies as The Footpath Way: ing (mm. 50–52), and thereafter, with the final An Anthology for Walkers, with an introduction by Hilaire lines (“Of the broad road that stretches and the Belloc (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911), 159–72; and Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Cul- roadside fire”), a temporal stretch on “road- ture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nine- side” enables the piano’s independent recollec- teenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 13. For a tion of the lover’s earlier, simpler melody, contextualization of the cycle in terms of what Roger Sav- age calls the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century venturing now an individualistic development Anglo-American “cult of actual and metaphorical walk- in harmonious sixths and fifths (mm. 56–57). ing, journeying, tramping and vagabonding,” see his “Books The suggestion is that in the idyllic reciprocity to Make a Traveller of Thee: Pilgrims, Vagabonds and the Monodramas of Vaughan Williams,” in Masques, Mayings of the lovers the beloved functions as a mirror and Music-Dramas, 4–33. See also “Vaughan Williams, to the protagonist’s narcissistic inner conscious- the Romany Ryes and the Cambridge Ritualists,” 304–58.

262 Meno mosso CERI 40  OWEN Vaughan () Williams’s Early Songs And this shall be for mu - sic when

rallentando

largamente 43

no one else is near, The fine song for

46

sing - ing, the rare song to hear! That cantanto

largamente 49

on - ly I re - mem - ber, that on - ly you ad - colla voce

Example 1: “The Roadside Fire,” mm. 40–63. © Copyright 1905 by Boosey & Co. Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

263 19TH 52 tranquillo CENTURY 3 MUSIC 4

mire, Of the broad road that 3 4   43 tranquillo  = 54 34  stretch - - - es and the 3  4

43  

56  () road - side fire.  

59  

   una corda      Example 1 (continued)

“internal” world of D (with which the preced- ing piano dynamic and relatively high tessitura ing song concludes). The narrated “he” (the empty the voice of the full-bodied depth and implied vagabond) is apparently observed here virility afforded by the low range in which he from the disinterested position of one who sang at the cycle’s opening, a rhetorical and knowingly relates his fate. The baritone’s open- timbral shift that conveys a sense of wisdom,

264 and, if not frailty, then of otherworldly realms interpenetrate each other and the sense CERI OWEN disembodiment. of detached observation begins to collapse. Vaughan With this there emerges a sense of temporal “Youth and Love” thus invokes something Williams’s and spatial distance, and even a suggestion that of Charles Rosen’s Romantic “double time- Early Songs the protagonist travels within a different tem- scale,” in which “the past is represented through poral and spatial realm than the one occupied the immediate sensation of the present.” Some- by his narrator. Vaughan Williams plays here what akin to the rustling wind and horn calls with the metrical regularity of the piano’s that precede each stanza of Schubert’s “Der “walking” accompaniment (directed to espres- Lindenbaum” (the fifth song of Winterreise), sivo and rubato), combining duple- and triple the vagabond’s fanfare acts as a symbol of spa- division eighth notes with a long-breathed vo- tial and temporal distance, as do the quotations cal line rich in half- and dotted-half notes. For from “The Roadside Fire.” With the conjoining the first time in the cycle the music is consti- of voice and piano to figure the narrated tuted not through regular, clearly articulated protagonist’s cry of farewell and singing of a phrases but through overlapping, irregular para- “boyish stave,” a comparable “confound[ing of] graphs. The coherence of voice and piano at the memory and immediate perception,” as Rosen end of each phrase is obscured by the metrical has it, sees the music transform “remembrance displacement and by a constant shifting of har- into an evocation of what is actually happen- monic centers. As a shadow of the fanfare from ing, a phenomenological description of the ex- “The Vagabond” is uttered from the piano with perience of remembering and of being attacked the words “passing forever he fares” (mm. 11– by reality at the same time.”20 12), the narrated protagonist appears to swerve Yet unlike its counterpart in “Der Linden- into closer proximity with the sudden crescendo baum,” or frequently in Die schöne Müllerin, to and diminuendo from forte, only to move Vaughan Williams’s piano rarely takes on the away again as he passes by, leaving the position agency of the natural world in this cycle. It of watchful observance to be retaken by the does not function as a representation of the narrator whose distance we are irresistibly in- wind or the singing of the brook, but rather as vited to share (see ex. 2).19 an enactment of the singing—and movement— With the beginning of the B section an un- of a(nother) body. It thereby goes far beyond the prepared shift from the home key of G to a “sublime” moments described by Rosen, for celestial E major opens a new musical space. the collapse of spatial and temporal distance The harmonic profile and textural shift provide alongside that of the observational vantage point a reference back, once more, to the self-con- produces both the division of the voice and the scious final verse of “The Roadside Fire,” func- active collaboration of the apparently disinter- tioning both as a memory and as a signal to ested narrator in the narration and constitution further creative enlightenment of a kind often of multiple singing—and listening—voices. found in Vaughan Williams’s songs (as, for ex- The point is made at many levels by the ample, frequently throughout “Silent Noon”). musico-poetic discourse. As Allan Atlas has With the second, emphatic recollection of the observed, the climax at “cries” “differs in vir- fanfare and the onset of the climax, the music tually all musical respects from what precedes brings the longer-range “past” of the cycle’s and follows it.”21 Framed away from the musi- opening powerfully into the present, keeping cal progress by a double bar, a fortissimo dy- the two spaces in flux as the different temporal namic, a change of time signature, and a series of directions to più mosso, the moment effects a series of ruptures; its effect is “spotlight-grab- bing, extroverted, and stagey . . . downright 19Mark W. Booth observes of narrative song that, as in traditional ballads, “we do not identify with a character in the song, but with the teller, with his implicit attitudes or his projected state.” See “The Point of View of Song,” in 20Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, The Experience of Songs (New Haven: Yale University MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 116–24. Press, 1981), 14–16. 21Atlas, “Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel,” 107–08.

265 19TH 3 Andante sostenuto CENTURY 4    MUSIC 3 4

 espressivo. tempo rubato 3 4 6 

To the heart of youth the world is a high - way side.

11 Pass - ing for ev - er, he fares; and on ei - ther poco!  16 hand, Deep in the gar - dens gol - den pav - il - ions hide, Nes - tle in or - chard bloom,   21 misterioso

and far on the lev - el land Call him  misterioso

Example 2: “Youth and Love.” © Copyright 1905 by Boosey & Co. Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

266 CERI 25  OWEN Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs with light - ed lamp in the ev - en - dim.  dim.

30 

tide. Thick as stars at   

35

night when the moon is down Plea - sures as - sail him

   

affrettando 39 ! risoluto " " He to his no - blre fate Fares; and but waves a ! sempre cresc. ! risoluto affrettando

Example 2 (continued)

267 19TH 43 Più ffmosso CENTURY   MUSIC hand as he pass - es on, Cries but a way - side 

Più mosso  ff    

48  Più mosso  word to her at the gar - den gate, Sings    Più mosso         

53 rall. Tempo3 I 4

but a boy - ish stave and his face is Tempo I 3 4   rall. 3    4   

58   gone, is gone.  sempre rall e dim.

Example 2 (continued)

268 operatic in nature.”22 Put another way, the pas- ano triumphantly re-sings here a rhythmically CERI OWEN sage diverts attention onto the quality of voice modified quotation of the vocal melody from Vaughan itself as narrative gives way to enactment and “The Roadside Fire” marked più mosso. But Williams’s we are “brought up against ‘the boundaries of a although the piano is furnished with a lyric Early Songs membrane laid down by an outside voice.’”23 voice, the singer does not simply narrate its When the piano re-sounds the cycle’s open- singing, for in assuming a heightened vocal ing horn call, the music’s sudden turn to forte delivery—reaching for the longest and loudest risoluto breaks through the celestial arpeggios. note found anywhere in the cycle with the The reflective tone of detachment falls away word “cries”24—he seems simultaneously to along with a sense of distance that began with narrate and partake of this vocal act. This is the E-major triad in m. 33, the natural G and indeed a “cry” that delivers that word’s seman- seventh chord on C suggesting a move back tic content by paradoxically throwing atten- toward the G major of the song’s opening. Thus tion onto its blank, embodied utterance as voice, while the fanfare’s topical content—as a sym- ensuring that the piano’s lyric singing is al- bol of distance, remembrance, and regret—func- lowed to move into the foreground (leaving in tions to underscore not simply its earlier ap- doubt neither the melodic derivation nor the pearance but its status here as a memory, it discrete identity of the piano’s voice). The pas- simultaneously collapses that distance (and that sage puts a strain on the embodied contribu- function), heralding and enacting the music’s tion both of singer and pianist quite unlike powerful move into the foreground. anything else in the cycle, as the human voice The presence of another voice is articulated is suspended in a stasis of vocal plenitude, while by the piano’s markedly different activity. Reg- the instrumental voice is oratorically active in istering the vagabond’s fanfare, the poem’s “he” its melodic simulation of singing. makes the decision to pursue “his nobler fate”— Without warning, however, the piano’s voice and so he does, “wav[ing] a hand as he passes offers a further, different thematic recollection, on,” for the piano notably enacts the departure. now pianissimo and cast without preparation At precisely this moment it regains the “walk- in a remote, flat-side F major that quickly slips ing” figures of the song’s opening, now trans- down to E major. Here the singer-narrator re- formed into an urgent tread with the chords lays in newly hushed tones the “singing” of a thickly re-scored and markings of affrettando “boyish stave” (again più mosso). The effect is and sempre crescendo driving the accelerating to move the music back into the distance while motion forward to a climax. The sense of ur- simultaneously pushing the tempo forward once gency mounts as the music hovers around an- more until the key word “stave” is reached, at other seventh chord, which seems now to prom- which point the music instantly recedes, un- ise a resolution to C major. winding and swiftly returning to the detached This promise functions, we soon realize, to narration of the opening. All at once the tempo, heighten the preparation for the climactic ar- time signature, key, and dynamic with which rival at “cries,” where a further unexpected the song began are restored, and the space is shift occurs before the music bursts out with a closed with a double bar. Thereafter, as we crescendo to fortissimo as the protagonist “cries know, the narrated protagonist departs. but a wayside word to her.” Attaining the G In its complex play with temporal and spa- major implied all along by the fanfare’s rupture tial realms the climax of “Youth and Love” (albeit with a second inversion chord), the pi- seems to constitute both the recollection and simultaneously the sounding of a voice, as the vocal “cry” claims for itself a performative pres- 22Atlas, “On the Cyclic Integrity,” 14. ence that exposes the singing of another voice: 23In this sense the song exhibits procedures akin to those in Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte as discussed by Nicho- the piano’s. The multiple, present-time voices las Marston (whom I quote here); see “Voicing Beethoven’s Distant Beloved,” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 124–47, here 129. Marston has 24With the exception of a brief moment found in “The recourse in turn to Carolyn Abbate’s work. Vagabond” (at m. 60).

269 19TH are framed as such when another passage from chology and of Stevenson’s broader output, the CENTURY MUSIC “The Roadside Fire” is stated in a remote har- sense in Songs of Travel of a divided conscious- monic, textural, and dynamic space, its status ness and its sudden, uncontrollable outburst— as both temporally and spatially distant—its in which a self appears to sound its division— status as a memory—(re)claimed for its second might be understood in terms of the archetypal utterance. This flat-side reference, with the key Victorian split between the public and the pri- word “stave” and its implication of written vate, as codified in such texts as Steven-son’s text, alludes to the moment at which the voice The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of another makes its presence heard at the end (1886). This novella is itself told from a variety of “The Roadside Fire” (mm. 56–57), the point of different perspectives (though not from at which the artist achieves consciousness as Hyde’s inarticulate own). The voices sounded such. Its recollection at the end of “Youth and at the heart of “Youth and Love” may by ex- Love” might well be considered the point at tension be understood as those of the beloved which an earlier art is recalled and discarded, as a manifestation of the protagonist’s desire— as noted in previous readings. But it is also, a repressed desire of the Victorian private self’s with “stave,” a moment wherein the protago- interiority, and one that public language could nist becomes a writer, realizing his status as not articulate.26 Thus the blank “cry” of the the single owner of the text. This word prompts voice withholds the word’s semantic content a recession of the performative climax and has while the piano’s inarticulate, instrumental significant implications for the cycle’s journey “voicing” proceeds in a suspension of verbal thereafter, as we shall see. But let us first ask communication. The end of the word “cries” is where this leaves an interpretation of the out- reached and its “meaning” conveyed only once burst at “cries.” Whose voices burst forth here, the embodied and musical meaning inherent in and what is their function within the cycle? the sound of the voice—and in the thematic And who, then, is the narrator who sings at the recollection—have had sufficient time to regis- opening of “Youth and Love”? ter. The enlightenment at the climax, then, is pointedly a musical one. It is an embodied com- Implicit in the paucity of critical discussion munication that precedes and exceeds articu- devoted to the narrator of Songs of Travel is an late language, exploiting and highlighting the assumption that he can be taken for the artist temporal control of music over words in delay- himself, self-consciously observing his own ing the workings of the symbol. progress. Or he might ostensibly offer a glimpse Yet this kind of “private language,” as Mar- of the author, like the Poet in Müller’s Die tin Danahay has observed, is suggestive of ex- schöne Müllerin, before Schubert removed his cessive individuality—an “interiority that by framing narration and presented the story definition cannot be embodied in language be- through the voice of the narrated protagonist.25 cause it is predicated upon its uniqueness and These readings need not be mutually exclu- originality.”27 Such a reading sits to some ex- sive, for Vaughan Williams’s disinterested nar- tent uncomfortably with Stevenson’s—as much rator does not remain so. He does not contain as with Vaughan Williams’s—style and aesthet- in order to relay the action of the lyrical cli- ics. The notion that the self is not unique and max; rather he becomes an active agent in con- inviolable is inherent at the thematic level of stituting its multiple voices. (Indeed it is per- such texts as Jekyll and Hyde, in which “two haps by virtue of the very fact that the narrat- ing voice collapses into the complex of voices at the climax that his identity and function 26Dominique Delmaire has examined Stevenson’s “introjec- within the cycle have not been examined.) tion” of a beloved in some of his poems, making her “an integral part” of the poetic subject, often to be “torn off” In the context of late-nineteenth-century psy- in the rupture of “a fusional or identificatory bond—a catastrophe tantamount to the loss of his very self.” See “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Love in the Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson,” Cahiers Victoriens et 25A comparison made by Roger Savage: see Masques, Edouardiens 60 (2004): 19–51, here 25. Mayings and Music-Dramas, 6. 27Danahay, A Community of One, 176.

270 distinct subjectivities inhabit the same ‘self.’”28 throughout his extensive writings and state- CERI OWEN This doubleness extends not only to the ments about music. In his earliest lectures, Vaughan novella’s plethora of voices but also to a stylis- delivered on the subject of folk song in 1902 Williams’s tic tension between populist sensationalism and (contemporaneous with the composition of Early Songs literary “seriousness,” a characteristic of Songs of Travel), he recalled the experience of Stevenson’s oft-criticized lack of authorial sub- hearing a Gaelic preacher while walking on the jectivity—his stylistic mimicry or “aping,” as Isle of Skye. Through the blank sounds of an he himself put it, of other voices.29 This ten- unfamiliar language he became deeply engaged dency is redolent of Vaughan Williams’s music by the material content of the preacher’s voice, and of his frequent claims to “cribbing” from a its volume and intensity heightened by emo- variety of sources, not least from folk music. tional excitement in the desire for communica- The expressive design of “Youth and Love” tion. Here, the composer argued through an indeed refuses such individualistic interiority, unacknowledged mythology of sources, lay the as does the cycle more broadly.30 In forcefully origin of “national song,” a body of music made throwing attention onto the sonic resonance of and thus “understood” by a community. The the human voice it grasps for a heightened com- memory indeed of finding himself in the posi- municative function, obscuring verbal meaning tion of an uninitiated listener—an experience by reaching out beyond the music’s confines to he agonized over throughout his life—nurtured become a peculiarly embodied medium of social thereafter a fervent belief in the democratic discourse. Its effects correspond with Lawrence capacity of the human voice to awaken even Kramer’s reading of moments wherein “song the most unmusical, inexperienced listener to envelops voice”: “the vistas of abstract music.” The act of com- positional creation became, in his imagination As the medium of meaningful utterance, voice brings thereafter, akin to the performance of a folk the music into a space of potential or virtual meaning singer.32 even when actual meaning is left hanging; as the The outburst at the heart of “Youth and medium of social relationship, voice involves the Love” is suggestive less of the embodied inar- listener in a potential or virtual intersubjectivity that ticulacy of Stevenson’s anti-social, degenerate in some circumstances may be realized in the course Mr. Hyde, then, than of what Julia Reid has of the song; and as a corporeal medium, voice ad- dresses itself in its sensuous and vibratory fullness to called the author’s preoccupation with “the per- the body of the listener.31 sistence and irruption of pre-civilized states of consciousness in the modern world.”33 Vaughan Williams emphasized precisely this Stevenson went in search of a primitive collec- intersubjective potential of the human voice tivism on his own travels both at home and abroad, his fascination with premodern com- munities arising, as it did for Vaughan Will- 28Stephen Arata, “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Profession- iams, in part from an interest in folklore.34 The alism, and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde,” in Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom excessive drama at the climax of Songs of Travel (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005), 185–210, here 203. 29For an overview, see Roger Lewis’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Roger C. Lewis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 2–5, 32For a detailed discussion, see my Vaughan Williams, and Arata, “The Sedulous Ape,” 203–04. Trevor Hold has Song, and the Idea of “Englishness,” esp. 22–69. Vaughan proposed that in its peculiarly “disconcerting” amalgam- Williams’s earliest writings were collected and reissued in ation of different kinds of material, Songs of Travel is 2008 for the first time since their original publication in suggestive of Vaughan Williams’s imitation of Stevenson’s scattered sources from 1897 onward: see Vaughan Will- “sedulous ape”; Parry to Finzi: Twenty English Song-Com- iams on Music, ed. David Manning (Oxford: Oxford Uni- posers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 110. versity Press, 2008). On the composer’s early concern with 30Songs of Travel has in its “open-air freshness” long been the experience of the listener, see, for example, “The understood as a conscious mode of Edwardian “breaking Soporific Finale” [1902], 19–21. out” from repressive Victorian strictures. 33Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin 31Lawrence Kramer, “Beyond Words and Music: An Essay de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 11. on Songfulness,” in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical 34See, for example, Reid, “Stevenson as Anthropologist: History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Culture, Folklore, and Language,” in Robert Louis 51–67, here 54. Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, 107–73.

271 19TH derives from a sense of revelation found in the cess through time, its making from moment to CENTURY MUSIC cycle’s successive connections to its own ori- moment as highlighted here in the pronounced gins, a chain of retrospective textural and har- “walking” figures of the piano’s accompani- monic links from the second part of “Youth ment, indices of a physical act of material and and Love,” to the final verse of “The Roadside subjective creation traversing the cycle’s jour- Fire,” to “Let Beauty Awake” (in which ney (see ex. 3). “beauty” clearly stands as a metaphor for “cre- Vaughan Williams frequently imagined the ativity”), and to the cycle’s first sounds in the moment-to-moment constitution of a work as fanfare with which “The Vagabond” begins. arising from a collaborative creative act, shared “Youth and Love” functions thus to provide between composer, performer, and even listener. enlightened access to its own “historical” past, In “The Making of Music,” lectures delivered excavating the innermost realization of the self toward the end of his life, he emphasized that while demanding that the listener become party “musical appreciation especially demands ac- to and constitutive in the protagonist’s enlight- tive participation rather than passive accep- enment. tance on the part of the hearer. When we listen Such enlightenment is facilitated by the van- to a symphony as we should do, we are actually tage point established at the song’s opening, taking part, with the composer and the per- the sense of distance cast back upon the pre- formers, in the creation of that symphony.” ceding songs. The function of the narratorial But, he qualified, “before we can truly listen voice both at the climax and within the cycle we must be able also to create.”36 The “cre- more broadly is evidently to clarify and expose ation” of music was predicated from his earli- the “mimetic” nature of the earlier songs, their est writings upon the embodied experience of production of the “unscrolling” which, as material sound, as distinct from text-based Carolyn Abbate puts it, “traps the listener in study. Such experience was often imagined spa- present experience and the beat of passing time, tially, as a journey through a work’s imagined from which he or she cannot escape.”35 This terrain: “A musical score is like a map. The quality is inherent in the materials of the open- expert map reader can tell fairly exactly what ing, as Vaughan Williams returns the Lieder sort of country he is going to visit, whether it is wanderer to his origins as a simple, folkloric hilly or flat . . . but can he experience from a type. His song is an act of embodied musical map the spiritual exaltation when a wonderful “making,” actualizing the psychological long- view spreads before his eyes?”37 The model for ing of Stevenson’s poems—for “The Vagabond,” such music-making lay in “primitive” cultures: like many of Stevenson’s Travel poems, is al- “We may imagine that in primitive times . . . ready pervaded by a frustrated, latent music; it the invention and production of sound may is even written “to an air of Schubert,” as a have been simultaneous, that there was no dif- subtitle signals. Vaughan Williams’s vagabond, ferentiation between the performer and the com- however, does not in his journey reveal a song poser.”38 In 1910 he was already concerned with of retrospection (at least not until “The Road- facilitating the intelligibility of music’s jour- side Fire”); at the outset he harbors no psycho- ney for a listener, emphasizing that “the busi- logical depth, no inward, subjective narration ness of the composer is to make his visions of loss like that of the alienated Schubertian intelligible to others . . . ranging his ideas so wanderer of Winterreise. Rather, “The Vaga- bond” is a poem wherein the subject exists and is constituted only through the subjunctive ut- 36Vaughan Williams, “Making Your Own Music” [1954], terance of future desires. The setting of such a in National Music and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, text necessarily traces music’s material pro- 1996), 237–42, here 237. 37Vaughan Williams, “The Letter and the Spirit” [1920], in National Music and Other Essays, 121–28, here 125. 38Vaughan Williams, “Some Tentative Ideas on the Ori- gins of Music” [1932], National Music and Other Essays, 35See Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical 12–20, here 13–14. Tellingly, Vaughan Williams referred Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton to the days spent studying and discussing his composi- University Press, 1991), 53. tions with Gustav Holst as their “field days.”

272 Allegro moderato CERI (alla marcia) OWEN       Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs     ma sempre marcato    sempre pesante il basso 7 risoluto Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jol - ly heaven a - bove, And the by - way nigh me     Example 3: “The Vagabond,” mm. 1–12. © Copyright 1905 by Boosey & Co. Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. that they are analogous to the events of some Song, “Singer and audience sing, in reality, to- story, some poem, some historical or ideal per- gether in sympathy.”40 Like many vocal peda- son or some natural phenomenon. . . . The gogues active during the early part of the cen- extraneous idea . . . is simply a common ground tury, Plunket Greene imagined the singer as a where the composer can meet the hearer before journeying “pioneer” and song as a landscape they start together on the voyage to unknown in which to search for a premodern, collective regions whither he is taking them.”39 musical experience. The song’s journeying “The Vagabond”—a blank, “ideal” character promised the recovery of lost values, of com- found so frequently in Vaughan Williams’s jour- munity in communication, as singer and pia- neying music—highlights the cycle’s invitation nist were instructed to take the listener by the to cast one’s self as the music’s maker, to join hand in traversing music’s terrain. Musical en- in the accessible journey of the music’s cre- lightenment thus grew through a peculiarly ation. Early-twentieth-century British music physical act of marching through an imagined pedagogues similarly imagined the practice of external landscape, after which the embodi- song-making as a process of “remaking” the ment of its space was to tell in the aching of work from moment to moment, and often con- the muscles.41 In such work lay an opportunity ceived of this process as an idealized collabora- tive act of the kind proposed by Vaughan Will- iams. As Harry Plunket Greene (the bass-bari- 40Harry Plunket Greene, Interpretation in Song (London: tone to whom the Travel cycle was dedicated) Macmillan, 1912), 37. 41On all this, see my “Making an English Voice: Perform- put it in his 1912 treatise Interpretation in ing National Identity during the English Musical Renais- sance,” Twentieth-Century Music 13/1 (2016): 77–107. A spatial conception of musical experience, in which “land- marks” formed points of reference for a listener, can be found in many appreciation manuals of the early century: 39Vaughan Williams, “The Romantic in Music: Some see, for example, Stewart Macpherson, Music and Its Ap- Thoughts on Brahms” [1910], in Vaughan Williams on preciation, Or, The Foundations of True Listening (Lon- Music, 165–70, here 169. don: J. Williams; G. Schirmer, 1910).

273 19TH to make the musical self. As another of Vaughan cycle functions comparably to call the listener CENTURY MUSIC Williams’s dedicatees, the baritone Arthur to the space of an accessible text, whose mak- Foxton Ferguson, expressed it in a lecture on ing is highlighted by the guiding voice of the music education: “Vagabondage . . . means be- narrator. The sense of temporal and spatial dis- ing one’s self. Every true vagabond is himself.”42 placement at the opening of “Youth and Love” Stevenson, like many who celebrated the edu- perhaps follows Stevenson’s suggested “dally” cative and restorative practice of walking dur- at “The Roadside Fire,” affording a moment of ing the nineteenth century, imagined its ben- contemplation upon the process of making un- efits in comparable physical, moral, and aes- dertaken thus far. It was in such moments, he thetic terms, or what Anne Wallace has called declared in his essay “Walking Tours,” that a “deliberate making of self.” In her theory of one could “throw [one’s] clocks and watches the literary “peripatetic”—derived from essays over the housetop, and remember time and sea- by Stevenson as well as by Vaughan Williams’s sons no more.”44 With the collapse of the relative Leslie Stephen—Wallace discerns an narrator’s temporal and spatial distance at the emphasis upon walking as a material process of climax of “Youth and Love,” listeners are in- cultivation and even of composition. Tracing vited to become aware of their role in the an Anglo-American association of the wanderer- music’s making, retracing the steps undertaken as-poet back to certain values and procedures in the earlier songs through their emphatic re- inherent in early-nineteenth-century English trieval. Thus the music engages the listener in travel poems, she demonstrates that “the natu- a restorative educational and creative practice ral, primitive quality of the physical act of walk- through which historic values of musical col- ing” was proposed as a means of “reconnecting lectivity and creativity are not simply achieved, . . . with both the physical world and the moral but are didactically demonstrated.45 order inherent in it,” enabling “recollect[tion Essays on walking were anthologized during of] both our personal past and our national and/ the early twentieth century “with a view to or racial past—that is, human life before mecha- making travelers of society as a whole,” as nization.” The physical act of walking thus Roger Savage has pointed out.46 Vocal peda- provided access to a sense of “memorial conti- gogues comparably sought to make travelers of nuity,” becoming a “a cultivating labour ca- singers and listeners. Such efforts formed part pable of renovating both the individual and his of a broader political, social, and cultural project society by recollecting and expressing past to “return man to the land” amid rising anxi- value.”43 ety over the future cohesiveness of the nation. Whereas for Stevenson—as for Leslie It was through a complex relationship with Stephen—such benefits were necessarily such anxiety that the British musical revival achieved alone, earlier nineteenth-century flourished. Many of Vaughan Williams’s Travel travel texts emphasized a collective process songs were taken as examplars through which wherein walking became a kind of pedagogy, singers and listeners might undertake cultivat- an invitation to read the text. Wallace suggests, ing journeys toward the making or remaking of indeed, that some texts mimicked the experi- the musical self, fortifying the musical present ence of walking such that readers would feel and future by looking to the stabilizing collec- they “could walk through” and “replicate the tivity of the past. perspectives” of a poem. Vaughan Williams’s To hear the cycle in the temporal and spatial terms proposed contemporaneously is thus to recognize its shift away from the picturesque 42Cited in Marcus DeLoach, “Arthur Foxton Ferguson: A and toward a more embodied relation of sub- Vaughan Williams Singer and Collaborator,” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal (February 2015): 9–12, here 9. 43Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture, 11– 44See Stevenson, “Walking Tours,” 166–67. 14. See also chap. 4, as well as chaps. 2 and 3. An abstract 45See my reading of “Silent Noon” from this perspective by Karen Leistra-Jones on Songs of Travel and the “peripa- in “Making an English Voice.” tetic” is listed in the program of the 2016 North American 46See Savage, “Books to Make a Traveller of Thee,” esp. British Music Studies Association conference. 12.

274 ject to landscape, a performance of man’s re- with a smile / Forgets you not.” In its excessive CERI OWEN turn to the land. The realization of this em- chromaticism the music retreats from the ac- Vaughan bodiment is again afforded at the climax of cessible balladic mode, adding a hint of melo- Williams’s “Youth and Love,” for landscape in the Travel drama in the sighing self-pity with which Early Songs cycle inheres above all in traveling through the Vaughan Williams responds to Stevenson’s ex- acoustic spaces opened in the songs. There are clamation. few signals or topics that function simply as “In Dreams” offers perhaps a parody of an landscape representation. The musical pictur- alienated Lieder wanderer. Frequently heard as esque—predicated upon a fixed, visual perspec- the weakest song of the cycle, it might rather tive—is apparent only where the narrator ap- be regarded as a deliberate critique of the act of pears to observe as though from a privileged, writing achieved at the very end of “Youth and more static position at the opening of “Youth Love,” when the singer, with the word “stave,” and Love.” The climax functions precisely to arguably becomes a composer, aware of his sta- collapse this vantage point, becoming a dy- tus as the solitary “author” of the text. Just as namic, phenomenological “zone of activity,” Vaughan Williams insisted upon music’s con- as Daniel Grimley has put it, in which the stitution less in its “letter” than in its orality/ “fundamentally performative” nature of music aurality, Stevenson launched a comparable cri- engages a sense of “being-in-place” and listen- tique of writing in his essay “A Chapter on ing becomes a process of “flux” in which “any Dreams” (1892), in which, as in such stories as sense of permanence, of a stable subject-object “Thrawn Janet” (1881), he opposes orality to distinction, is dissolved.”47 Songs of Travel en- literacy, as does Vaughan Williams at the sonic acts a comparable “placing” of the listener and embodied climax of “Youth and Love.” through its invitation to the singing and con- The monologism of “In Dreams” is main- stitution of its landscape. In “Youth and Love,” tained in “The Infinite Shining Heavens,” al- the achievement of the climax is both the beit held in tension now with a reconfigured memory and its realization, the past and its collectivism. The piano’s gentle strumming in present performance. spread chords conveys a minstrel-like wander- ing, complicating the self-conscious individu- If “Youth and Love” provides a means of re- ality simultaneously marked by a piquant, ex- establishing bonds with a personal and collec- ploratory harmonic language and the final, tell- tive past, fortifying the self and community ing line: “Till lo! I looked in the dusk / And a into the present and future, the following “In star had come down to me.” Stars have been Dreams” and “The Infinite Shining Heavens” associated with creativity throughout the effect a pronounced shift toward isolation. Aside cycle’s journey. In “Let Beauty Awake,” the from the persistence of the piano’s “walking” beloved who awakens to creative insight sees figures—suggestive of the journey’s continu- the stars “bright in the west”; in “Youth and ance—the only connection between the songs Love,” the enlightened climax is precipitated now is their emphasis upon the subject’s au- by the celestial nightfall. tonomous individuality, a condition predicated As already noted, the turn after “Youth and upon the impossibility of collective memory. Love” toward introverted individualism might With “In Dreams” indeed the subject mourns well be heard as the consolidation of the artist’s with the passing of time a state of “unremem- progressive maturation and autonomy. This brance,” its tragedy not simply the absence but reading accords not only with the stark shift the unresponsiveness of another (the beloved) toward conscious musical “artistry” but also who forgets him: “Perchance you wept awhile with the sense of temporal advancement inher- / And then forgot. / Ah me! but he that left you ent in the nocturnal realm of these songs. Yet in mourning the absence of a creative other, the protagonist’s own subjectivity is both exag- gerated and stunted. The vagabond is afforded 47Daniel M. Grimley, “Music, Landscape, Attunement: Lis- tening to Sibelius’s Tapiola,” Journal of the American no further musical memories after “Youth and Musicological Society 64/2 (2011): 394–98. Love” (only in the withheld epilogue do these

275 19TH return). Thus denied access to his musical heri- life” realm of musical culture. The collective CENTURY MUSIC tage, he becomes alienated from his enlight- tone of this music issues an invitation to its ened self. The journey so far has traced the own singing, much like those provided by constitution of a specifically musical subject Vaughan Williams’s extensive and unprec- whose psychological depth is contingent upon edented directions for the performance of hymns his ability to reflect upon and draw nourish- in his preface to the Hymnal. Here he pre- ment from his performative musical past. That scribed modes not simply of singing but of lis- the “star” of creative inspiration returns after tening, insisting that “the people” take “an “The Infinite Shining Heavens” to the balladic intelligent interest in the music they sing.” mode of the opening is thus especially telling. Toward the end of his life he seized an opportu- We know that Vaughan Williams took pains nity to reiterate that the church provided a over the order of the cycle’s final songs. The space where “artistic appreciation [becomes] a pre-existing “Whither Must I Wander?” offered creative act” in which, even when silent, a conclusion ultimately provided by “Bright Is congregants should “go half way to meet the the Ring of Words,” as erased numbers on the reader or singer to whom they are listening.”48 manuscripts reveal. Had Vaughan Williams cho- Vaughan Williams’s paternalistic tone sig- sen the former he would have furnished the nals something of a long-criticized authorita- cycle with a solemn conclusion in which the rianism.49 As Anthony Sheppard points out in a subject continues to look mournfully into his discussion of Benjamin Britten's church personal past. In concluding as he eventually parables, “Hymn-singing is one of the most did, he validated poetry that looks neither back coercive of musical genres, for it is virtually nor forward but exists in the eternal present impossible not to respond to the call of the tense, its anonymity enabling another collec- organ, to rise and at least hum the tune of the tive statement inherent in the melody of “Bright hymn: hymns are thus a potent unifying Is the Ring of Words”—a melody soon after force.”50 Nonetheless, Vaughan Williams’s en- transformed by the composer into the hymn couragement of “intelligent”—cerebral, indi- tune “Sine Nomine” and published under a vidualistic—engagement with church music pseudonym in The English Hymnal in 1906. blurs the distinction between “hearing” and Stevenson’s poem reads as follows: “listening” such that industry, and even a per- sonal response, is invited from the listener. Bright is the ring of words “Bright Is the Ring of Words” plays on pre- When the right man rings them, cisely this tension between embodied, physi- Fair the fall of songs ological hearing and a mode of listening that When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said— involves active engagement in intelligent se- On wings they are carried— lection. In the opening chord an organ-like com- After the singer is dead mand summons the intuitive, embodied en- And the maker is buried. gagement of one who must also recognize and react to the musical signal (see ex. 4). Low as the singer lies The songs that follow “Youth and Love” In the field of heather, might further be understood in the context of a Songs of his fashion bring shift in models of music appreciation in British The swains together. musical culture after around 1880. The empha- And when the west is red With the sunset embers, The lover lingers and sings 48“Preface to The English Hymnal” [1906], in Vaughan And the maid remembers. Williams on Music, 31–37, here 34. See also his later en- couragement of music appreciation as practiced in church, in “Martin Shaw,” 275–77. Vaughan Williams took up the editorship of 49For a comprehensive outline and critique of such assess- the Hymnal in 1904. That “Bright Is the Ring ments, see Onderdonk, “The Composer and Society.” of Words” can be heard in “Sine Nomine” might 50W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theatre be regarded as marking a symbolic break out of (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 121. the “artistic” mode of the cycle into the “real

276 Moderato risoluto ! CERI 3   3 OWEN 4 4 Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the 43  43 ! risoluto 3 3 4  4

7  3 4

fall of songs when the sing - er sings them. 3  4  3 4

Example 4, “Bright Is the Ring of Words,” mm. 1–9. © Copyright 1905 by Boosey & Co. Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. sis moved at this time from a unifying com- journey’s narrative coherence. “Bright Is the mon response to a more mingled experience in Ring of Words” enacts the culmination of this which the perceptive listener was encouraged process: the collective conclusion’s achieve- to fashion an individual musical engagement, ment of a tradition in which another—the or what Philip Ross Bullock has called “the maid—remembers. Its particular triumph lies audience’s own subjective reading.”51 As Bul- in the way in which the mode of “remem- lock underlines, it was in the highly subjective brance” rests not in the verbal symbol, not in mode of late-nineteenth-century music—of the Stevenson’s text, but in the oral and aural kind developed within “In Dreams”—that the achievement of a music whose musicocultural development of the aesthetic self was most po- tradition was enacted with The English Hym- werfully encouraged. The aimless wandering of nal.52 the cycle’s conclusion invites the listener to That Songs of Travel sustains a peculiar ten- undertake an act of creation comparable to what sion between the individualistic and the col- Benedict Taylor, in his contribution to this is- lective is perhaps unsurprising. Vaughan Will- sue, calls the “work” of subjectivity. The deso- iams was journeying toward the discovery of lation of the subject’s alienation from his mu- his creative self during a period described by sical self—a desolation of isolation—requires Regenia Gagnier as one in which “the compat- that the listener contribute an act of aesthetic ibility of individualism and socialism” flour- creation in order to complete a sense of the ished.53 As British musical culture grappled for

51Philip Ross Bullock, “‘Lessons in Sensibility:’ Rosa Newmarch, Music Appreciation, and the Aesthetic Culti- 52As Vaughan Williams put it in the Hymnal’s preface, “Is vation of the Self,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 40/ it not worth while making a vigorous effort today for the 1–2 (2010): 295–318, referencing, in turn, Phyllis Weliver, sake of establishing a good tradition?” See Vaughan Will- The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, iams on Music, 33. Culture and Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 53Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization, 2006). 1.

277 19TH an individual musical language that sustained Rossetti aspired in their poems: the condition CENTURY 56 MUSIC the collective aspirations of a “national mu- of music. sic,” the cycle’s narrative seems aptly to have foregrounded the achievement of creative indi- If Songs of Travel makes an ambivalent claim vidualism in the collective participation of a to the projection of a consistent creative per- singing and listening community. In so doing it sona, The House of Life is resonant with a offers a comment of the kind articulated by plethora of lyric and narrative voices, exquis- Vaughan Williams in 1912, namely that “the itely profiled in music that moves from the composer must not shut himself away and think almost painful, Schumannesque intimacy of about art, he must live with his fellows and “Love-Sight” to the public, orchestral Wagner- make his art an expression of the whole life of isms of the penultimate “Death in Love.” Yet the community.”54 an invitation to configure some kind of coher- A parallel process is enacted within The ence is issued through the recurrence of motivic House of Life, to which I briefly turn by way of material throughout, most obviously when the conclusion. Though what follows can repre- cycle’s opening is recalled at the end of “Love’s sent only a series of notes to further research, a Last Gift,” the last of six sonnets chosen from comparison of the two cycles richly illumi- 101 published in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s nates Vaughan Williams’s project for song at eponymous sequence.57 this time. Much as the Stevenson settings ren- Rossetti’s “Love’s Last Gift” is concerned der love one with an artistic fate, the Rossetti self-consciously with what it calls “song” as cycle concludes with the transmutation of erotic figured in acts of singing and listening.58 The union into a broader communitarian ideal.55 term probably refers primarily to poetry, but in Long understood to embody precisely the deca- Vaughan Williams’s setting the familiar meta- dent individualism supposedly vitiated by Songs phor seems to go further. The literary refer- of Travel, the highly subjective musical lan- ences depend on, and so highlight, music’s prior, guage of The House of Life nonetheless nour- superior capacity to enact Rossetti’s character- ishes a narrative conclusion in which the “Sine istic theme, namely the “blurring of the bound- Nomine” motif again issues an invitation to aries between self and other.”59 Suzanne the constitution of a collective musical self. It Waldman has traced a move across the sequence is here, once more, that the music’s subjectiv- from love in its “narcissistic imaginary aspects ity is realized in the singing and listening of to the symbolic enjoyments that promise greater another, and it is here, perhaps, that we find an scope for genuine intersubjectivity.”60 Vaughan explanation for Vaughan Williams’s withhold- Williams provides a musical corollary, begin- ing of the epilogue to Songs of Travel (the pre- ning with “Love-Sight” and ending with “Love’s miere of the two works in the same recital must surely have highlighted their correspond- ing conclusions). Thus the cycles become a 56Roger Lewis likens Stevenson to the decadent and aes- self-conscious celebration of precisely the con- thetic poets on this basis: see The Collected Poems of dition toward which both Stevenson and Robert Louis Stevenson, 14–15. 57For a detailed discussion, see Allan W. Atlas, “Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The House of Life: Four Levels of Cyclic Coherence,” Acta Musicologica 85/2 (2013): 199– 225, and by the same author, “Vaughan Williams and the Sonnet,” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal (Febru- ary 2016): 17–24. 54Vaughan Williams, “Who Wants the English Composer?” 58On this trope in Rossetti’s work, see, for example, Eliza- [1912], in Vaughan Williams on Music, 39–42, here 42. beth Helsinger, “Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the 55This proposition would fit squarely with notions of love Persistence of Song,” Victorian Studies 51/3 (2009): 409– probably encountered by Vaughan Williams through his 21. association from the 1890s onward with members of the 59David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited (New so-called “Cambridge Apostles,” who debated such propo- York; Oxford: Twayne; Maxwell Macmillan, 1992), 122. sitions as that “love and friendship graduated into one 60Suzanne M. Waldman, The Demon & the Damozel: Dy- another” with “copulation of secondary importance.” See namics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Paul Levy, Moore: G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Athens: Ohio University Press, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 142. 2008), 96.

278 Last Gift.” Accordingly, the cycle opens with Victorious summer; aye, and ’neath warm sea CERI Strange secret grasses lurk inviolably OWEN the poetic subject’s searching for the self in the Vaughan reflection provided by another: Between the filtering channels of sunk reef. Williams’s Early Songs When do I see thee most, beloved one? All are my blooms; and all sweet blooms of love When in the light the spirits of mine eyes To thee I gave while spring and summer sang; Before thy face, their altar, solemnize But Autumn stops to listen, with some pang The worship of that Love through thee made From those worse things the wind is moaning of. known? Only this laurel dreads no winter days: Or when, in the dusk hours, (we two alone) Take my last gift; thy heart hath sung my praise.” Close kissed and eloquent of still replies Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies, In culminating with this poem, the cycle ex- And my soul only sees thy soul its own? tracts from Rossetti’s almost willfully unintel- ligible narration the understanding that Love’s The piano’s prelude articulates a suitably am- ultimate gift is the gift of song.61 “Love’s Last bivalent presentation of a divided self or of a Gift” begins with the “Sine Nomine” tune—a lover and beloved. A searching, tentative as- “crystallized” form of the opening motifs, as cending figure is followed by the consoling re- Stephen Banfield puts it, constituting a new lease of a descending answer (see ex. 5, mm. 1– theme of “attained spirituality.”62 The divided 11). The potential capacity for union and subjectivity thus finds apparent union at the completion, in spite of difference, is already opening of the song. inherent in the descending figure’s delivery of Yet the cycle’s own opening returns for the the C-major harmony, which the ascending setting of the sonnet’s closing couplet, and its figure has been seeking. Rossetti’s solipsism return marks the music’s demand for a greater seems thus confirmed, and the stage set for a communion, one that reaches outside itself. As musical journey toward a synthesis of the di- the onset of Autumn brings with it a final vided musical self. threat in the premonition of death, the laurel Yet this self faces a struggle that reaches that “dreads no winter days” promises hope. beyond internal unification, as the prelude’s By long-established convention, the laurel curiously disjointed relation to the opening of stands here for poetry; Vaughan Williams’s set- “Love-Sight” proper may be heard to suggest. ting transfers the association to that other age- The two motives create a peculiar frame for the old metaphor for poetry, song, making literal cycle, negating and moving away from the A the poem’s final statement, “thy heart hath major promised by the key signature in order sung my praise.” The motif with which the subsequently to re-take it (from m. 12 onward). prelude begins is recalled now in its original This retrospectively imparts a disjointed per- form for the first time since the cycle’s first spective upon the opening ideas, a sense that measure. This time, however, the crucial words they mark a boundary and were appended later. are sung by the voice: “Only this laurel dreads Indeed, the song seems to begin in earnest only no winter days.” Thereafter, a return to the with a textural shift at m. 12, followed by the moment of disjunction with which “Love- establishment of the home key and the entry of Sight” began is resolved through a further ut- the voice (which takes up the first of the mo- terance of the hymn motif (see ex. 6). tives) at m. 16. Crucially, this sense of disjunc- The heart of this resolution is the reclama- tion is recalled in “Love’s Last Gift,” in which, tion by the voice of the opening instrumental finally, it is rhetorically resolved. gesture, a gesture of incompleteness. The threat The sonnet selected by Vaughan Williams is assuaged by this voicing, which issues a for his final song reads as follows:

Love to his singer held a glistening leaf, 61Paull Baum provides an invaluable series of paraphrases And said: “The rose-tree and the apple-tree in The House of Life: A Sonnet Sequence by Dante Gabriel Have fruits to vaunt or flowers to lure the bee; Rossetti; with an Introduction and Notes by Paull Franklin Baum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), And golden shafts are in the feathered sheaf here 153–54. Of the great harvest marshal, the year’s chief 62Banfield, Sensibility and English Song, 82.

279 TH 19 Andante3 con moto ma non troppo = CENTURY 4         MUSIC 3  4  teneramente  dolce é molto sostenuto 43       

tranqillamente ma con profonda 10  3 = 4    

When 3   4   

 molto legato 3   4 

17 espressione

do I see thee most, be - lov - ed one?

Example 5: “Love Sight,” mm. 1–20. © Copyright 1904 Chester Music Limited trading as Edwin Ashdown. Used by permission of Chester Music Limited trading as Edwin Ashdown.

“songful” invitation to its own singing, a de- elsewhere in the cycle. Yet its songful invita- mand to be sung that is met by the further and tion also resides in the song’s self-conscious final collective utterance of the hymn.63 The awareness of having voiced the contribution of enactment of the “last gift” of communal song a silent singer-listener whose presence lurks is underlined by the past tense of the final throughout the poem. After all, a narrating voice utterance, as the singing of the music we have has informed us at the opening of “Love’s Last been listening to is exposed in its performa- Gift” that “Love to his singer” speaks; the son- tivity, its prior musical working shown to have net thereafter is a quotation, the act of Love’s preceded the textual confirmation. speech marked out as such. But the “singer” to The quality of collectivity and the invita- whom Love speaks is also, presumably, a lis- tion to its own singing are already inherent in tener. Vaughan Williams’s music mobilizes the the lyrical melody of “Love’s Last Gift,” which otherwise silenced voice of such a listener, re- is rich in a regular tunefulness not readily found fusing Rossetti’s introverted solipsism in favor of intersubjective communion with another. The triumph of music in the form of song 63On the communicative “songfulness” activated when the instrumental is vocalized in this way, see Kramer, “Be- thus becomes the culmination of a journey yond Words and Music,” 54. marked by the “tread” motif heard in the cycle’s

280 CERI Lento quasi Recit. 71  OWEN     Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs On - ly this lau - rel dreads no win - ter days:                

79 Tempo I  3 4 

Take my last gift; Take my last gift;  3  4   3  4

freely 87 ff 3  4

thy heart hath sung my praise, thy heart hath sung my 3   4  ff  colla voce 3   4   

 95 3 4      praise. 43   smorzando 3 4

Example 6: “Love’s Last Gift,” mm. 71–102. © Copyright 1904 Chester Music Limited trading as Edwin Ashdown. Used by permission of Chester Music Limited trading as Edwin Ashdown.

281 19TH final three measures, a curious gesture of a rather be read as a signal to its projection of multiple CENTURY voices, which unsettle the longstanding critical ten- MUSIC kind more obviously suitable to Songs of Travel. Yet The House of Life represents a comparable dency to map a single protagonist through its journey in which music’s procession toward progress. The division marked by the cycle’s publi- intersubjectivity with a listener becomes its cation history may productively be understood to very content—the cycle, as so often in Vaughan reflect a tension inherent in its aesthetic proposi- tions, one constitutive of much of Vaughan Williams’s output, is about the making and Williams’s work, which frequently mediates between hearing of music itself. Both cycles become the individualistic and the collective, the “artistic” realizations of what Vaughan Williams was later and the “accessible,” and, as I suggest, the subjec- to idealize in the following statment: fostering tive voice of the individual artist in its invitation to a tension between individualism and collectiv- the participation of a singing and listening commu- ism, aestheticism and populism, communi- nity. tarianism and authoritarianism—a music I propose that Vaughan Williams’s early songs through which listeners’ subjectivities dawned frequently frame the idea or demand the engage- in an awareness that “the composer is their ment of a listener’s contribution, as particular modes own voice speaking through of singing and listening—and singing-as-listening— l are figured and invited within the music’s constitu- his art.”64 tion. Composed as he was searching for an indi- vidual creative voice that simultaneously sustained 64Vaughan Williams, “Who Wants the English Composer?” a nascent commitment to the social utility and in- [1912], in Vaughan Williams on Music, 40. telligibility of national art music, these songs ex- plore the possibility of achieving a self-consciously Abstract. collective authorial subjectivity, often reaching to- Vaughan Williams’s celebrated set of Robert Louis ward a musical intersubjectivity wherein boundaries Stevenson settings, Songs of Travel, has lately gar- between self and other—and between composer, per- nered liberal scholarly attention, not least on ac- former, and listener—are collapsed. In the recogni- count of the vicissitudes of its publication history. tion of such processes lies a means of examining the Following the cycle’s premiere in 1904 it was issued tendency of Vaughan Williams’s work toward pro- in two separate books, each gathering stylistically jecting a powerfully subjective voice that simulta- different songs. Though a credible case for narrative neously claims identification with no single agency. coherence has been advanced in numerous accounts, Keywords: Ralph Vaughan Williams, subjectivity, the cycle’s peculiar amalgamation of materials might national identity, Songs of Travel, The House of Life

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