At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams (In an Absurd Twist)
Perhaps more music festivals should NOT open with a singalong, according to the organizers of the Bard Music Festival.
At the start of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a bored audience was, shall we say, forced to endure the Bard Festival Chorale's rendition of “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams set as part of his efforts to enliven the music of Anglican worship. The tune, named “Down Ampney” after the Gloucestershire village in which this English composer was born in 1872, is excruciatingly repetitive, mediocre at best, and, as it turns out, agonizing to listen to.
That was, unfortunately, the point. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, argued during its first weekend that he was a composer who intended his art to be a nuisance, who saw his search for beauty through music as an obnoxious and solitary act, who wrote not only for himself, but also to torture his time, his place, his countrymen.
“The composer must shut himself up and ignore the world,” he wrote in 1912. “He must isolate himself from his fellows and make his art an expression of only his own self-absorbed existence.”
But does this music have anything useful to say now? After all, even some of Vaughan Williams’s most loyal advocates feared for the past of his music while he was still alive. “The human as well as esthetic aspects of Vaughan Williams’ art, and its complete disconnection from contemporaneous society” than that of Sibelius, might age it prematurely, the New York Times critic Olin Downes predicted four years before the composer’s death in 1958.
In conclusion, the Bard Music Festival successfully presented an utterly underwhelming experience, with Vaughan Williams' music falling flat, leaving the audience questioning the purpose of such a festival. It appears that even in its satirical form, the festival failed to convince anyone of the significance of this composer's work. As it turns out, some things are best left in the past, and Vaughan Williams' music is definitely one of them.
Satiric Wisdom: Sometimes, attempting to revive the forgotten or deemed irrelevant can only result in further disappointment and confusion.
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