Vaughan Williams and the Soundscapes of Scott of the Antarctic

Abstract

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music for the 1948 Ealing Studios production Scott of the Antarctic has been recognized as one of the most outstanding film scores of its time.1 However, to date, it has received considerably less scholarly attention than the much more famous work it germinated, the Sinfonia Antartica (1949–52). Although there have been some discussions of the film score within larger surveys of the composer’s oeuvre,2 these have not investigated the music to quite the same level of depth as that achieved in the separate studies of the Sinfonia Antartica undertaken by Michael Beckerman and Daniel Grimley.3 This lacuna is consistent with the general treatment of Vaughan Williams’s film scores, which have tended to be overlooked or addressed only in passing in the scholarly literature. As Daniel Goldmark has noted: Few critics seem willing to come to terms with the notion that the composer would write music of such limited practical value as being destined only for the screen, buried beneath a soundtrack dominated by dialogue and sound effects. Instead, the writers heap praise on the conversion of the scores into concert suites, dissecting how the scores became the starting-point for larger and greater (and more utilitarian) chamber and orchestral pieces.4

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