THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The White Gates,
Westcott Road,
Dorking.

[July 1933]

Dear Dr Myers¹

Thank you very much for your interesting pamphlet² – I did not want to acknowledge it until I had read it twice.
I wonder if we pay too much attention to peoples descriptions of their reactions to music. After all I suppose musical appreciation is inexplicable in words, and some people take refuge in analogies when they try to express describe their sensations & others try & hide them in technical criticism.
I am glad you think that song (at all events) came through excited speech.
I once heard a Gaelic preacher – this is of course a common experience – & when he got excited he recited on a fixed succession of notes

  (I am not sure of the pitch)

Now this & the allied formula

is the starting point of many British Folksongs.

E.G.

Bushes and briars 

Down in yon forest 

This is the fruit 
& Searching for Lambs 

Holy well 

etc.

Forgive this garrulity – but I am lying in bed with a cracked ankle.
Yours sincerely

R Vaughan Williams

1. Charles Samuel Myers, Cambridge psychologist and anthropologist with a special interest in ethnic music.
2. The pamphlet was possibly The absurdity of any mind-body relation, etc., a lecture which had been published by Oxford University Press in 1932.