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Jul 24, 2019 · This is how biographer and classical music scholar Michael Kennedy poetically described Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5. Indeed, this music, completed in 1943 as the Second World War raged, moves into an alternate world of radiant light, quiet serenity, and sublime mystery. Following Vaughan Williams’ ferocious and dissonant Fourth Symphony, it returns to the eternal, pastoral ...
Michael Kennedy characterises Vaughan Williams's music as a strongly individual blending of the modal harmonies familiar from folk‐song with the French influence of Ravel and Debussy.
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A biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd ed. ... Offers the incidental music that Vaughan Williams
Herbert's Divine Music in Vaughan Williams' Five Mystical Songs by O. Alan Weltzien Musicologist Michael Kennedy, commenting on Ralph Vaughan Williams' lifelong habit of setting poems, has stated, "it was the composer's job, as he saw it, to re-create the poem as music."1 What does this form of re-creation, this particular union of sister arts ...
- O. Alan Weltzien
- 1991
The music rises, as Michael Kennedy has memorably put it "to boiling-point" (p268) before the opening dissonances return, only to be summarily dismissed with a final chord of open fifths.
Vaughan Williams was indeed inspired by landscape, but not English landscape; rather, the landscape of wartime France. Michael Kennedy sees it as a pantheistic requiem for the dead of World War I.
Following the composer’s death in 1958, Vaughan Williams’s widow, Ursula, began preparing a substantial biography of her husband in coordination with a detailed treatment of his music by Michael Kennedy, a family friend who was a staff music critic for the Daily Telegraph.
