With Vaughan Williams and the Cardiff Festival Choir comes a strength of a different kind. This derives partly from the performers, but largely from RVW who,...having to find harmonies for tunes, did so in a way that suited their character...The Choir perform with spirit,...the women...with unfailing beauty of tone" (Gramophone) Since his student days Ralph Vaughan Williams had been delving into the roots of English music through a study of folksong and Elizabethan and Jacobean music.. He believed passionately in preserving such material saying in lectures given in 1902-3 that 'the collector of folk songs gives them back again to the world...will they not, perhaps, once more make their way back to the mouths of the people?' He was aware that for many people music sung in church was their one experience of practical music making each week 'and it was all too unworthy both of their faith and of music itself' (RVW Ursula Vaughan Williams OUP 1964).