Vaughan Williams was an eclectic composer and he required a period of twenty years to find his individual voice. Much emphasis has, in the past, been placed on the ‘breakthrough’ of folk song and on the composer’s supposed admittance of technical inferiority during this lengthy period of stylistic discovery. It is argued here, however, that this supposed affliction was due as much to a public-school self-modesty and that, in truth, he was no less advanced than his major peers. Moreover, this chapter attempts to accentuate the importance of his compositional ‘training’, under Parry, Charles Wood, Alan Gray, Stanford, Max Bruch, and Ravel, and, more particularly, the numerous continental and home-grown influences (notably Wagner and Parry), over and above the revelation of folk song in 1903, which played a dominant role in shaping his later style.

Is there such a thing as an English compositional tradition in the twentieth century? And if so, what is Britten’s place in it? Harrison Birtwistle thought not, and one can understand why. There is no obvious point of continuity from one generation to another: Parry and Elgar’s reference points are Austro-German, while Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s music is modally based and considerably affected by English folk music. Delius spent most of his life outside England, and his aesthetic and compositional predilections are the most difficult to relate to a tradition. Britten and Tippett both abjured what they saw as the stultifying nationalism of Holst and Vaughan Williams and embraced aspects of international modernism. Despite the fractures, however, there are aspects in common: it is through themes from English landscape and literature that connections between generations are most clearly seen: in pastoralism, for instance, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’; in the role of melancholy; in the preference for particular genres; and in the reworking of aspects of the English musical past.