Ralph Vaughan Williams ranks among the most versatile, influential, and enduringly popular British musicians of his era. Throughout his wide-ranging career—as composer, conductor, editor, scholar, folksong collector, teacher, author, administrator, and philanthropist—Vaughan Williams worked tirelessly to improve the standards and quality of British musical life. His dedicated work ethic and fastidious attention to musical detail helped him forge a compelling and original expressive idiom grounded in a profound understanding of musical history and tradition, popularized in concert staples like the Tallis Fantasia, The Lark Ascending, A London Symphony, the Songs of Travel, and the Serenade to Music.

Drawing upon both recent scholarship and newly accessible scores and correspondence, Eric Saylor interweaves in Vaughan Williams an exploration of the composer’s life—including new insights about his early career, military service in the Great War, and relationships with the women he loved and married—with chapters surveying his enormous body of music, spanning hymn tunes to operas, keyboard etudes to solo concerti, wind band music for amateurs to perhaps the finest symphonic cycle of the twentieth century. The resulting portrait reveals Vaughan Williams’s complex artistry and dynamic personality, a portrayal often at odds with the avuncular persona of “Uncle Ralph” familiar to the music-loving public. This contemporary reassessment of the composer’s life and works provides a concise and engaging overview of both, positioning Vaughan Williams as an artist of rare skill, sensitivity, and human insight.

About the Author:

Eric Saylor is Professor of Music History and Musicology at Drake University, having completed his graduate studies in musicology at Arizona State University and the University of Michigan. A specialist in British music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he is the author of English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (2017) and co-editor of Blackness in Opera (with Naomi André and Karen Bryan, 2012) and The Sea in the British Musical Imagination (with Christopher Scheer, 2015). His research has been published in leading journals and presented at conferences throughout North America and Europe. Dr. Saylor was named the Outstanding Teacher of the Year award by Drake’s College of Arts and Sciences (2004), and was the recipient of a Drake Humanities Research Scholar award (2018–21), and a Visiting Research Fellowship from Merton College, Oxford (2019). He also served as President of the North American British Music Studies Association from 2016 to 2020. He lives in Urbandale, and with the completion of Vaughan Williams, is looking forward to having more time to indulge hobbies such as bicycling, cooking, and reading.