Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotations

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

No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

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

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.

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

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

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

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.

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.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

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.

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

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

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.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough...

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

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

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.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

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.

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

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