800 Words

A Sea Symphony

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony” has long been an inspiration to me ever since I was introduced to it by my High School music teacher, Bill McClellan, during one of his School/Community Project undertakings. I think about the opening 24 bars every time I journey to the ocean.  Yesterday was no exception as I wandered over the first dune and glimpsed at the great expanse of water for the first time in almost a year.

Written between the years 1903 and 1909, “A Sea Symphony” is Vaughan Williams first and longest symphony. He began writing the piece at the young age of 30, and even though it was not performed for another eight years, at the Leeds Festival in 1910, the work set the stage for a new era in symphonic and choral music in great Britain during the first half of the last century. What is amazing, and why, I believe, we sang it so many years ago at the School/Community Project, is that the chorus is used throughout the work as an integral part of the musical texture.

The text for the symphony was taken from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. The poet’s poems were hardly known at the time in England, but the composer was very much attracted to them for their ability to transcend both metaphysical and humanist perspectives. Whitman’s use of free verse was beginning to make waves in the compositional world at that time because composers were being drawn to fluidity of structure over the traditional metrical settings of texts. The opening lines of Whitman’s poem set the stage for what is to come:

“Behold, the sea itself,

And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships;

See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the green and blue,

See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port,

See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke.” 

“Today a rude brief recitative,

Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,

Of unnamed heroes in the ships -- of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can reach,

Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing,

And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations,

Fitful, like a surge.” Book XIX: Sea-Drift: Song for All Seas, All Ships

At the beginning of the twentieth century, England was blessed with an amazing array of brilliant composers: Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry, Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams. The latter studied with both Stanford and Parry at the Royal College of Music and was influenced by them. It could well be said that all these composers were “nautically obsessed” for they all wrote sea-related pieces: Stanford’s Songs of the Sea, Elgar’s Sea Pictures. At the same time, in Paris, Claude Debussy was writings La Mer (1905). What is it about the sea that draws forth human imagination and creativity?

Vaughan Williams traveled to Paris in the winter of 1907-1908 and studied for three months with Maurice Ravel. While Parry and Stanford had taught Vaughan Williams about the Germanic style of composition, Ravel opened Vaughan Williams’ creative imagination to the beauty and mystery of the pentatonic and whole tone scales, which was to become such an important feature of the French musical style. During his stay in Paris, Vaughan Williams was working on the orchestration of his first symphony. It is not a stretch to suggest that Ravel’s compositional style certainly influenced the English composer. But the French master was quoted as saying that Vaughan Williams was ““the only one of my students who does not write my music.”

Musically, the first of two strong unifying motives has always impressed me. It is the harmonic motif of two chords (usually one major and one minor). The Symphony opens with one of the most spectacular musical expressions of the sea. The Brass offer a fanfare at the opening in B-flat minor followed by the choir singing the same chord, “Behold, the sea itself.” The full orchestra swells, expressing the heavying waves, and resolves into the key of D Major. It is said that when attending the first rehearsal of his work, Vaughan Williams, was standing at the time of the opening and fell back into his seat, with the words, "I didn't know I was capable of such power." (See the Youtube 2012 PROMS concert with the BBC Symphony and Chorus under Sakari Oramo)

In the Grove article on Vaughan Williams, Hugh Ottaway and Alain Frogley call the Sea Symphony: “…a triumph of instinct over environment. The tone is optimistic, Whitman's emphasis on the unity of being and the brotherhood of man comes through strongly, and the vitality of the best things in it has proved enduring. Whatever the indebtedness to Parry and Stanford, and in the finale to Elgar, there is no mistaking the physical exhilaration or the visionary rapture.” (Grove Music Online)

Thank you, Bill McClelland for exposing me to this magnificent early twentieth century masterpiece so many years ago, which has blessed my life for forty years, and every time I encounter the sea.

June 23, 2019