Roy Douglas joins us a Vice President
We are delighted to announce that Roy
Douglas has agreed to become a Vice President
of The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.
Roy was closely associated with VW between 1944 and 1958 and helped
him prepare most of his major works, including his last four symphonies.
VW once introduced Roy Douglas as 'the man who writes my music' .
This flippant and typically self deprecating remark gave the opportunity
for certain predatory critics to seize upon it and suggest that VW
did not actually write his own music. VW often used colourful expressions
regarding his compositions such as " washing their
faces" and sometimes they were misunderstood. VW's handwriting was atrocious
and publishers were unable to find anyone willing to decipher or make his scores
suitable for publication. Anyone who has seen even a simple postcard written
by VW will know what a horrendous task it must have been.
Roy describes his position in the prelude of his book Working
with R.V.W.
" I have always found it difficult to choose the exact word to describe
my position in relation to the composer: copyist is very inadequate; editor too
pretentious; collaborator inaccurate; amanuensis is nearer. At one time I coined
the phrase 'musical mid-husband', as my job was to assist the composer in bringing
his creations into the world "
Later he writes; "He wrote his scores in ink and apparently very quickly
and many unintentional discrepancies found their way on to the pages. Small things
such as a missing bass clef after a tenor, arco missing after pizz., 'change
to flute 2' missing after piccolo, clarinets in A mistransposed as if in B flat,
trumpet passages written on the horns' were all easily put right. At times, however,
the complete woodwind or brass section or timpani would be playing up to the
end of a right-hand page and over the page there would be blank bars; in these
instances I would pencil-in what I thought ".
Roy was also asked to perform the 'play throughs', notably the Antartica in
the presence of Arthur Bliss, Gerald Finzi, Edward Dent and Ernest Irving, as
well as Alan Frank. Eventually in spite of the odds, he and VW became friends!
Roy describes the 'play throughs' of the Ninth Symphony,
"When I arrived at Hanover Terrace I asked for half an hour or so to look
through what I had to play. This he granted reluctantly, but every few minutes
he made some excuse to come into the room to see if I was ready. His eagerness
to hear his new 'tune' was so touching that I gave up studying the copy and sat
down and played the music to him."
And the Pilgrim's Progress,
"It took me thirtythree weeks to write out the full score of Pilgrim's
Progress,
from August to the following March, being somewhat hampered by the fact , that
by the time I was working on the second act, VW was working on the second Act,
V.W. was already rewriting parts of Act 1, and similarily with the later acts."