Everybody talks about finding your voice. Do your homework and your voice will find you. -Branford Marsalis

I'm a late bloomer. It's taken me a long time to find my voice, and I think all the records I've made over the years, I was finding my voice, and that's part of the process. -Jenny Lewis

It's not about finding your voice, it's about giving yourself permission to use your voice. -Kris Carr

The late British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was not a child prodigy. By most accounts, he did not begin composing music with his authentic voice until his late thirties, when he spent quality time studying technical matters, specifically orchestration, with Maurice Ravel. Many elements of his voice were already in place: a love of modal melodies and folk songs; a fascination with Baroque complexities of form such as fugue, canon, and counterpoint; a love of transcendentalist, nature, and spiritual poetry; and a lush lyricism often reduced to a criticized reliance on a slow, pastoral type of navel-gazing. While revered by a large set of the British cognoscenti and the public, the more modernist elements of British musical society, often represented by the younger Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), found him out of touch with the times. There’s always a bigger (more youthful) fish.

Vaughan Williams' choice of text settings and some of his most expressive instrumental music highlight a kind of duplicity in his nature that begs the question of whether or not complete honesty with oneself and one's fellow listeners is a necessary element of one's voice. He was directly related to Charles Darwin (great-uncle) and maintained a "cheerful agnosticism" throughout his life. Yet, he chose many biblical texts to set to music and edited a famous hymnal for the Church of England. He was also a rather renowned flirt who maintained a live-in, sometimes sexual relationship with his future second wife while remaining married to his first. He was seen by many as a stiff-upper-lip British academic musicologist who walked around the countryside collecting folk songs with Gustav Holst. Yet, he was also a man of tremendous appetites who loved to drink and eat and often fought with his weight and general health. One hundred and fifty years after his birth, many are still attempting to discover the "real" Vaughan Williams and understand his musical voice's complexities of personality and style.

While maintaining a humanistic philosophy, Vaughan Williams was also a patriot who, despite being forty-two at the time, volunteered to serve his country as an ambulance driver during World War I. During this time, he heard a bugler practicing, as they often want to do, who accidentally undershot a pitch on one of the calls, hitting a seventh of the chord instead of the octave. After the war, in 1922, Vaughan Williams completed his Symphony No.3 and used that fractured memory as one of the symphony’s defining motives.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No.3), 1922

1. Molto moderato

The first movement contains moments of exquisite, expansive beauty that fade into moments of concern and worry, musically located just a half-step away. Some moments settle into the serenity of a single, peaceful voice floating above the ground that often maintains a general sense of unease. For myself, this movement is a rhapsody on impermanence. It is the knowledge that no matter how hard one wishes, there is no eternal glory; everything changes, and all that is solid melts into air - something that makes the awareness and enjoyment of beauty in the moment all the more special.

2 Lento moderato

Here is the bugler. This movement is full of what I hear as ascension motifs, something I’m sure the composer frequently imagined as a wartime ambulance driver. Can one imagine with any artistic integrity the trope of souls rising to heaven if you don’t maintain a belief in a literal afterlife? Sure. Does this speak to duplicity in the composer’s voice? Perhaps. Regardless, this movement is so effective at achieving the mood it sets out to present that the solo has been used for official ceremonies in Britain and was listened to by Vaughan Williams’ widow on a bedside record player after the composer passed away in her arms. 

3. Moderato pesante

When listening to this movement, I am reminded of how Vaughan Williams was a man of large appetites. One can almost hear the steins sloshing around in joyous fraternity and camaraderie. Whether the brotherhood of soldiers during wartime or a looking away from the battlefield to a respite in a pub back home, this movement is the symphony’s most vigorous - a bold statement of strength and resolve. 

4. Lento - Moderato maestoso

The symphony ends with material similar to that in the second movement, but with a broader scope. The orchestration is thicker, more intense. Instead of a bugler, the movement opens with a textless soprano soloist intoning a long cadential phrase over a rolling timpani. The overall effect is to suggest a perspective that looks upon the war scene as a whole instead of focusing on the individuals suffering in it. It is an elegiac rhapsody for all of humanity.

Later this week, I will wrap up the topic of finding one’s voice with some personal perspectives and comparisons (always risky), as well as some final attempts at some answers to the many questions I have asked so far, along with posing some lingering ones.