The Man Behind The Lark Ascending

The Artist as Servant

On Classic FM, you never have to wait long before hearing The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Familiarity generally breeds contempt, but no matter how many times I hear it, I’m captivated.

The Lark Ascending was written in 1914 but the premiere was delayed until 1921 by the outbreak of World War I for which Vaughan Williams volunteered by lying about his age. For most, that means signing up despite only being sixteen. But Vaughan Williams, aged 42, took three years off his age in order to serve as a wagon orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Later, he was given a commission in the Royal Garrison Artillery, taking charge of both guns and horses.

This is no great surprise to anyone who studies the career of Ralph Vaughan Williams. He lived a life of service – and that included how and why he wrote music. Born into a clergy family in 1872 in the Cotswolds, his father was vicar and descendant of the Wedgwood and Darwin families. He was privileged to study at Charterhouse School, the Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge before becoming a pupil of Charles Stanford and Hubert Parry. He then moved to Berlin to study under Max Bruch before heading to Paris to learn orchestration under Maurice Ravel.

It's What You Do With It

But rather than pursue fame and acclaim as an original composer, he spent years travelling around Britain collecting folk songs. He didn’t want those songs to be lost, wanting them kept and preserved for new generations. He wove them into his compositions. Despite being an agnostic, Vaughan Williams edited The English Hymnal in 1904, and plugged some gaps by composing some brilliant Christian choral music as well writing an opera of The Pilgrim’s Progress (which, one suspects, Bunyan would have hated). He also composed concertos for unusual and neglected instruments, including the tuba, and recognized that military music was important to Britain’s cultural and communal life. So he composed English Folk Songs Suite in 1923.

In short, as we discuss on the Cooper and Cary podcast, Vaughan Williams was a servant, as well as an eminent and brilliant artist. His approach to his craft sounds like a thoroughly Christian response to the arts vs entertainment dichotomy we looked at last time. Rather than being a slave either to his audience or his own ego, Vaughan Williams used his gifts, abilities and experience to serve others. Christians have much to learn from him.

The Artist as Servant

This way of thinking does not come naturally for the artist, especially the young artist who wants to make a name for himself or herself. In fact, being public-spirited may seem like an unaffordable luxury. Maybe it’s okay for a descendant of the Wedgwood family who could afford the school fees for Charterhouse and private lessons with Ravel. You could argue that he should use that expensive education for the benefit of society, or a church he didn’t believe in. That might be a little curmudgeonly, and many would have used their privileges in self-aggrandising way. The artist is always tempted to impose their will on others, or bend the audience to their creative vision, rather than serving others. But service is a much healthier way of considering your craft.

My Recent Mid-Life Crisis

Last year, I was feeling a little sorry for myself, thinking the world – or at least the sitcom-commissioning part of it – had turned against me. When I started out, it all seemed easier. There were only a handful of production companies, less competition and more sitcoms on the television. Now, there are hundreds of production companies, channels, controllers and commissioners. On top of that, everyone’s a writer.

While I was in my funk, I would come up with a sitcom idea and then gloomily wonder how I was going to talk a producer into talking a commissioner into stumping up £1.6m to make my supreme vision of hilarity and mirth. A lot of writers think this way. It’s quite hard not to. That’s how I was thinking about it.

By God’s grace, I managed to notice that I had this rather resentful, self-centred approach to my work. I was ironing shirts at the time. I realised I need to reframe my craft in a service-oriented way. There are lots of production companies out there. How can I serve them? What kind of shows do they want to pitch? How can I come up with those sorts of shows? What sort of shows are they hoping I’m going to bring them, given my track record? How can they be ideas that they are excited about me writing for them? Essentially, how can I serve?

If you’d like to hear me talk about this more, I explained it all in a ninety-minute webinar called Supercharge Your Sitcom Career, but it applies to all the arts, I think. You can watch it here. It’s Pay-What-You-Like so it’s also a neat way of supporting this Substack, should you be so inclined. (If you already have, drop me a line and I’ll send you a link.)

And if you’re thinking about writing a novel, it’s worth asking how you can serve a publisher and an audience by writing one. One critical part of that thinking relates to genre, and how the artist or writer can lean into it. But we’ll get into that next time.

If you’d like to hear a conversation about music and Ralph Vaughan Williams, listen to the Cooper and Cary Have Words Podcast.