ABSTRACT
In December 1903, Vaughan Williams heard an elderly agricultural worker, Mr Potiphar, sing 'Bushes and Briars'. The experience proved to be overwhelming, and brought Vaughan Williams 'face to face' with English folk-song for the first time. From this beginning, he undertook to travel throughout England collecting folk-songs, a labor of love which occupied him for the next ten years and ultimately resulted in the notation of over 800 tunes and songs. Hymn tunes contained a similar communal potential since, in his view, the music of the Church – notably plainsong, but also psalmody and hymnody – had directly evolved from folk-song. The study of changes throws light upon Vaughan Williams's process of creating hymn tunes, especially where the adaptation of folk-songs is concerned. Perhaps the most fascinating and revealing aspect of Vaughan Williams's hymn-tune adaptations is that they demonstrate in miniature how intimately his compositional and nationalist concerns were conjoined.
