Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony

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List of Illustrations
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Musical Examples
Notes to the Sketch Transcriptions
Abbreviations1. Introduction
2. The Ninth Symphony: Context, Sources, and Working Methods
3. First Movement
4. Second Movement
5. Third Movement
6. Fourth Movement
7. Salisbury, Hardy, and Bunyan: The Programmatic Origins of the Symphony
8. Conclusions
Appendix. Details of Structure and Other Physical Features of the Manuscripts
Select Bibliography
Index

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Ever since its première just before the composer's death, Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony has divided critical opinion and remained something of an enigma. Yet the composer thought highly of the work, and went against his usual practice by preserving all the sketches. This study, the first of its kind on a work of Vaughan Williams, analyses the symphony and traces its genesis through hundreds of pages of sketches and drafts; it also offers a general introduction to the composer's working methods. The manuscripts show how the composer worked meticulously to create the complex expressive ambivalence of the finished work, transforming in the process simpler conceptions redolent of his earlier music. Most crucially, however, the sketches reveal an underlying programme, centred on the theme of innocent sacrifice and drawing on Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Stonehenge, and Salisbury Cathedral. Vaughan Williams's new musical path in the symphony, it emerges, was closely allied to the continuing evolution of his visionary agnosticism.

Reviews

Music and Letters

Alain Frogley's book is a landmark contribution to a steadily growing field of research into Vaughan Williams and his music ... a result of more than fifteen years of meticulous and imaginative research that has come together to form an extended, highly organized study full of immense and telling detail

Music and Letters

Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony significantly deepens and complicates the traditional picture of a composer now seen as increasingly important. Alain Frogley's knowledge and understanding of the composer in general and of the Ninth Symphony in particular is deeply impressive, and his book is a most welcome addition to the literature

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