The 150^th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams in 2022 provoked mixed reaction in the British media: a three-month celebration on BBC Radio 3 and discussions of the composer’s legacy on Radio 4’s Front Row, but also criticism from those who felt that Vaughan Williams’s vision for English music, as they understood it, was deeply outdated. This criticism draws on narratives with which Vaughan Williams’s music has been associated for decades, above all the relationship between folksong, pastoralism and Englishness.

Drawing on research into the reception of Vaughan Williams’s music in both the UK and Continental Europe, Aidan will consider the formation of these narratives, the possibility of counternarratives, and the extent to which folksong, pastoralism and Englishness have become conflated in the popular reception of the composer, particularly on Classic FM. He will also consider Vaughan Williams’s place within broader and narrower definitions of modernism, and the role (or not) of the middlebrow as a methodological framework for discussing his work.