Presenter: Kirsten Barker, Caine College of the Arts, Music
Authors: Kirsten Barker
Faculty Advisor: Christopher Scheer, Caine College of the Arts, Music
Institution: Utah State University
The idea that music embodies meaning is largely accepted and uncontroversial. However, how this relationship is articulated is complicated and contributes to music’s ability to project different meanings, especially according to time and place. Such is the case with the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’s romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending (1920). This work contains both musical and extra musical traits that can be interpreted as pastoral and nostalgic. Understanding how these meanings interact through time provides the opportunity for reinterpretation the work in the present through an environmentally-oriented framework. Previous research regarding The Lark has specifically focused on aspects such as the work as a response to the First World War as well as potential symbolistic relationships with George Meredith’s eponymous 1881 poem. The present study will establish The Lark Ascending as a quintessential pastoral work by virtue of its musical content. By considering the circumstances of the work’s creation as well as its subsequent reception, these pastoral traits will be reinterpreted as an expression of nostalgia. This understanding of the work’s nostalgia underpins a new solastalgic reading, one where a contemporary audience is asked to reflect on the emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change and the piece is heard as an elegy for environmental loss and impossible futures.