England's Pleasant Land - Ralph Vaughan Williams, arr. by Paul Noble - Indiana Univ. Wind Ens., by Paul Noble published on 2020-01-10T20:22:36Z Although born in Gloucestershire, Ralph Vaughan Williams spent most of his childhood in his maternal grandparents’ home, Leith Hill Place. Situated in the Surrey hills a few miles south of Dorking, it was in an area as yet untouched by the march of urban development, whose unspoilt landscape surely contributed to his lifelong love for the English countryside. Whilst at Charterhouse and later the Royal College of Music this remained his home and it was only when, at the age of 20, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, that his connection with rural life was severed. On coming down in 1895 he settled in London, where he would live for 34 years: by the time he moved to ‘The White Gates’ in Dorking in 1929, he had (as his second wife wrote), ‘long felt himself essentially a Londoner’. His affection for the open country, now increasingly under threat from housebuilding and the ubiquitous motorcar, remained as strong as ever, and in this he found an ally in another local resident, the writer and novelist E.M. Forster. Forster lived some 5 miles away in Abinger Hammer and their shared ‘passionate dislike of the ribbon development and the shoddy building that was encroaching on the country’ bore fruit in a collaborative venture, The Pageant of Abinger. With a text by Forster and a score for military band compiled by Vaughan Williams, its theme was the history of the locality from antiquity to the present day and it was staged in July 1934 in aid of the Parish Church Restoration Fund. (There are several additional pages of program notes describing the plays that followed, too much to include here.) Genre Briti Light Music - Premiere Publication