Vaughan Williams was an eclectic composer and he required a period of twenty years to find his individual voice. Much emphasis has, in the past, been placed on the ‘breakthrough’ of folk song and on the composer’s supposed admittance of technical inferiority during this lengthy period of stylistic discovery. It is argued here, however, that this supposed affliction was due as much to a public-school self-modesty and that, in truth, he was no less advanced than his major peers. Moreover, this chapter attempts to accentuate the importance of his compositional ‘training’, under Parry, Charles Wood, Alan Gray, Stanford, Max Bruch, and Ravel, and, more particularly, the numerous continental and home-grown influences (notably Wagner and Parry), over and above the revelation of folk song in 1903, which played a dominant role in shaping his later style.

While noting the usual scholarly snubbing of ‘excessive’ and ‘insubstantial’ dance tunes, Carlo Caballero explores dance’s significance and popularity – not only with audiences, but also with ‘serious’ composers. Writing about late nineteenth-century French musical culture, Caballero examines a vogue for the sixteenth-century pavane (with reference to examples by Saint-Saëns, Delibes, Fauré, Ravel and Debussy, amongst others), considering how and why the genre of the pavane became emblematic of a constellation of contemporary cultural strains of influence. As Caballero recounts, dance took on new significance during the period, aligned with historical prestige, antique exoticism, the French aristocracy, musical nationalism and modernity itself. Guided by this case history, Caballero reminds us of the cultural embeddedness of both dance and musical practices, and why we need ways of understanding these practices as both socially conditioned and conditioning.