“Doing His Bit”: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Music for British Wartime Propaganda Films

Ralph Vaughan Williams espoused a practical aesthetic, as he believed that composers must first address national concerns. Too old to serve in the Armed Forces during the Second World War, Vaughan Williams was determined to serve his nation in its fight against fascism. Anxious for war work, he mentioned to Arthur Benjamin that he was willing to compose for films. Benjamin contacted Muir Mathieson, the musical director of the wartime Ministry of Information, who quickly offers Vaughan Williams the opportunity to score the 1941 Michael Powell film; 49th Parallel. The film was a success and Vaughan Williams was fascinated by the new propaganda opportunities provided by scoring film music. This dissertation examines in detail the film music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, especially in regard to its role as a propaganda tool used to support national morale during the Second World War. This research explores the role that Vaughan Williams’s nationalistic style of music played within the first three propaganda films that Vaughan Williams scored—49th Parallel (1941), Coastal Command (1942), and Flemish Farm (1943)—as well as their place within the war effort as an extension of the stereotype of the soft-spoken, resilient Briton. Despite Vaughan Williams’s firm place in the history and repertory of twentieth-century British composers alongside Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst, little research has been conducted on his film scores. In addition to analyzing the surviving original scores for each of these films, this study investigates some potential explanation for Vaughan William’s late entrance into film composition. This includes a brief analysis of the composer’s humanitarian efforts throughout the war, his involvement with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and his efforts on behalf of both European and Jewish immigrants. Although film music has often been relegated to a second-class status art-form, this research further traces the melodic themes that Vaughan Williams had not only written for each film, but also reused later in the “high-art” realm of the British concert hall