Vaughan Williams in Context

Challenging residual doubts about Vaughan Williams''s role and significance within twentieth-century music and culture this book places and explores his life and music in their broad musical cultural social and political contexts. Chapters by scholars from a range of disciplines re-evaluate the composer''s life and career within a world marked by both rapid change and refigured traditions. Building on scholarship that has established Vaughan Williams as aesthetically and politically progressive the book furthers a revisionist perspective by broadening understandings of the nature of his responses to the twentieth century. This portrait of a modern composer emerges not merely by focusing on under-represented interests and pursuits but also by contextualizing those activities that have been misrepresented as conservative or backward-looking.