23+ Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes On Music, World And Hard Work

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer who lived from 1872 to 1958. He composed a wide variety of music, including symphonies, operas, ballets, chamber music, and film scores. He is best known for his large-scale choral works, including the cantatas Dona Nobis Pacem and Sancta Civitas. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ralph Vaughan Williams on music, life, love.

Top 10 Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

1. Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.
2. I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.
3. The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.
4. To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.
5. Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.
6. The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.
7. The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
8. I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.
9. Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.
10. Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

Ralph Vaughan Williams Short Quotes

• It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.
• There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.
• Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes About Music

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

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

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

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation. — Ralph Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Ralph Vaughan Williams

1. Ralph Vaughan Williams' work is a reminder of the importance of preserving traditional music and folk songs. His compositions often feature elements of English folk music and demonstrate the power of combining traditional and modern elements in music.
2. His work is also a testament to the importance of collaboration and the value of working with other musicians to create something new and unique.
3. Finally, Vaughan Williams' work is a reminder of the importance of experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in music.