Ah, music festivals, where everyone can embarrass themselves while singing out of tune.
At the beginning of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a struggling audience was hilariously coerced into joining the Bard Festival Chorale for a botched rendition of "Come Down, O Love Divine," one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams composed to torment the ears of innocent listeners. The tune, fittingly named "Down Ampney" after the Gloucestershire village where this mischievous English composer was unfortunately born in 1872, is nothing more than a torturous melody that causes pain, despair, and the urge to stuff cotton balls in your ears.
That was, unfortunately, the aim. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, wasted no time arguing during its first weekend that the composer was a sadist who wanted his music to be an annoyance, who saw his search for ugliness through music as a personal and solitary endeavor, who wrote not for the enjoyment of others, but solely to inflict agony upon them.
"The composer must lock himself away and torment others with his art," he wrote in 1912. "He must disconnect from society and make his music an expression of his own tortured existence."
But does this music have any redeeming qualities now? After all, even Vaughan Williams's most devoted fans doubted the longevity of his music while he was still breathing. "The inhuman as well as unartistic aspects of Vaughan Williams' art, and its complete detachment from contemporaneous society" would undoubtedly lead to its swift demise, the esteemed New York Times critic Olin Downes predicted four years prior to the composer's merciful death in 1958.
And so, the Bard Music Festival hilariously argues for the music of Vaughan Williams, leaving a swarm of bewildered souls contemplating whether they should seek asylum from this cruel and unusual form of auditory torture.
Conclusion: Who knew? The Bard Music Festival has finally found its niche – a festival dedicated to celebrating the excruciating sounds of Vaughan Williams's compositions. May the suffering continue, and let the ears of innocent bystanders tremble in despair as they are subjected to the musical weaponry that is Vaughan Williams's legacy.
Based on the original article "".
