Ralph Vaughan Williams Quotes

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.