Following in the footsteps: Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and his students at the Royal College of Music and their organ music in the early Twentieth Century
Date
2010-05
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford trained a generation of composers during his
tenure at the Royal College of Music. An accomplished conductor and composer
himself, he passed his ideas of harmony, melody, and musical craftsmanship on to his
students—or did he? This thesis explores the relationship between Stanford and each
of three composers, Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, and Ralph Vaughan Williams,
who studied with him at the RCM.
The method to study these students will be twofold: first, a look at their
lives in order to find what factors other than study at the RCM might have influenced
their compositional styles, and second, analysis of their organ music for elements of
melody, harmony, rhythm, and form, with a particular emphasis on how individual
building blocks of the music work together to form a cohesive style.
Musical analysis shows that the three students exhibited a spectrum of
deviation from their teacher. Bridge, the most conservative, departed the least from
the ideas and teachings of Stanford, followed by Vaughan Williams and, the most
different of the three, Howells. However, these composers were influenced by much
more than just studying with Stanford, and, although one can make generalizations
and conjectures as to their following their teacher’s ways, it is impossible to form
anything conclusive because of the many personal and musical factors and influences
in the composers’ lives.