Sound Bites: The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams
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‘Complexe, mais pas compliqué.’
Maurice Ravel on composing
‘Complex, but not complicated’ – this was the phrase Maurice Ravel passed on to Ralph Vaughan Williams about composing, as his mentor. It reminds us of another famous phrase by another famous Frenchman, Auguste Escoffier, the chef who once asserted ‘above all, keep it simple.’ It might also bring to mind red wine, or whiskey, or cheese or bread, for what could be simpler than fermented grape juice, or fermented water and barley. More and more, it seems to me that the most lasting of human creations are those that are complex but not complicated, i.e. simple. I’ve written before on this blog about the difficulty of being simple, and it’s not easy. Indeed, it can be a life’s work, to create something that at once seems simple but in fact, when we look more closely, is labyrinthine in its complexity and depth, achieved through years of practice and applied craft.
And this brings us to The Lark Ascending. It’s not clear how long Vaughan Williams spent writing this. He wrote it for violinist Marie Hall before the outbreak of the First World War, and then revised it in 1920. Quite simply, it’s a piece of music which mimics the flight of the lark. But that’s to put it simply. It is, of course, more complicated than that.
We are so conditioned to 3 minute songs that one of the most refreshing aspects of classical music is to be able to listen for longer than that. Also, with the three minute songs we listen to, they have to hit us immediately or we’re not interested, while a piece of music like this, or a composition I should say, is more complicated and we don’t necessarily like it on first listening. There might be elements of it which beguile or intrigue us, but it’s only after listening to the music repeatedly that we can hear all of its intricacies. And The Lark Ascending is full of such intricacies.
It’s inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name. Meredith writes in its opening how the lark ‘drops the silver chain of sound/ Of many links without a break’ and Vaughan Williams has been faithful to this, with his mimetic composition which trills, and rises and falls, and calls to us across fields.
This brings me to its mimetic properties; it’s a piece of music which mimics the flight of the lark. Plato came up with the idea of mimesis, in that art mimics life, and suggested that art is an inferior replication of life. However, his student Aristotle had other ideas and in his Poetics argued that it’s a natural human instinct to imitate and allows us to more deeply understand the world around us, the trees, the wind, the lark ascending into the sky over a field. And that’s what Vaughan Williams gives, pure mimesis. Just as George Meredith did in his poem; the flight of a bird in all its complexity, in all its simplicity, ‘a silver chain of sound.’
If you've enjoyed this, you may enjoy this analysis from Dr. Jonathan James:
