Ralph Vaughan Williams quotes

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer renowned for his orchestral and choral music. His works often drew inspiration from English folk traditions and helped shape the landscape of 20th-century British music. He became a central figure in the revival of English classical music and left a lasting cultural legacy. Here are 14 of his quotes:

I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

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

The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

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

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

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

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

Art for art's sake has never flourished in England. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry, like our laws and our constitution, have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community – if we seek for art we shall not find it.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Before going any further may we take it that the object of art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means which we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves?

Ralph Vaughan Williams

It looks wrong, and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

Ralph Vaughan Williams