Run time: Approx. 13 minutes

The Lark Ascending
By George Meredith

He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound,

Of many links without a break,

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

 For singing till his heaven fills,

‘Tis love of earth that he instils,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup

And he the wine which overflows

to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings

In light, and then the fancy sings.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending is a single-movement work for violin and orchestra, inspired by the poem of the same name by George Meredith. In his poem, Meredith describes the unique visual and auditory experience of a lark taking flight, while also capturing the sense of awe inspired by witnessing such a scene.

Larks, which are ubiquitous throughout the United Kingdom, possess one of the most unique songs of any bird. Their bright, high-pitched, fluttering sounds as they hover in the air like a helicopter, unlike most birds, which sing from a perch. Remarkably, they can continue for up to fifteen minutes seemingly without pause for breath. As Meredith wrote, they “drop the silver chain of sound, / Of many links without a break.” Sometimes they hover so high that they are almost invisible. For many, the skylark’s song is the quintessential sound of the English countryside.

In his lyrical interpretation of the poem, Vaughan Williams captures all the elements Meredith extolls: the lark’s song and flight, the beauty of the pastoral English landscape, and the well of emotion stirred in the observer of this small miracle of nature. The violin begins as the bird itself, rising from the earth and gradually ascending into its high register, where it hovers before descending again. Just like the lark, the violin plays extended passages without pause. Vaughan Williams captures it without resorting to mimicry, ebbing and flowing seamlessly between soaring lines evoking its majestic ascent, and fluttering passages that echo its song. Gradually, the scope of the music opens to include an English folk song, evoking a sense of place and reflecting the lark’s intrinsic connection to the English countryside.

Vaughan Williams wrote a great deal of music that we might call pastoral, and at a time when many of his contemporaries were becoming increasingly avant‑garde, he held true to more traditional styles. The music critic John Alexander Fuller Maitland remarked that when listening to his music, “one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new.” Witnessing scenes of nature can evoke a similar suspension of time—the sense that what is happening now could have unfolded in exactly the same way a hundred years ago; that hearing a lark today is much the same experience as it was when Vaughan Williams heard one in 1914. The Lark Ascending captures something of that experience.