What we really have here, although it is presented in disguise as two series of lectures and some occasional writings on a variety of subjects, is Vaughan Williams's musical autobiography. It is his Apologia pro vita mea, to vary Cardinal Newman's title, for although he may appear to be writing about folk-song, Beethoven, and hymn-tunes, he is also telling the reader what it was like to be the man who set out deliberately, with his friend Gustav Holst, to turn himself into an English composer. He achieved his aim, to a degree that enriched the music of his nation with some of its noblest and finest works, but there was also a penalty to be paid in that those who are not in sympathy with his aesthetic, not 'on his wavelength', as we would say today, regard him as parochial and even chauvinistic. They forget that he was, in the mildest and least aggressive way, a revolutionary and that, like all revolutionaries when they get into print, he often over-stated or over-coloured a point in order to put it across.

These writings are among the most fascinating left us by a twentieth-century composer, for they tell us so much about the composer through his enthusiasms and his prejudices. Some of them may now provoke a wry smile. Dufay and Dunstable merely historical curiosities? That this would change would have astonished musicians in 1932 as much as the thought that Mahler and Bruckner would be in the regular repertoire of British orchestras. His views on playing Bach on the piano seemed only 10 years after his death to be unbelievably antiquated and laughable; already they are finding sympathetic echoes again. The pendulum swings relentlessly. The tributes to his friends, Holst, Butterworth, Gurney, Henry Wood, and others recall to us Vaughan Williams's own generous and intensely human personality. How moving it is, too, to read his lament for the poetry that went out of music when the valveless horn was replaced. One hears the voice of Vaughan Williams himself in his writing as clearly and unmistakably as in his music.