A breakthrough moment

Timothy and I have been rehearsing Vaughan Williams' "Songs of Travel" all week. I've been perplexed by the tonal arrangement of the cycle. The first song, "The Vagabond," is in C minor, and all the big, famous songs in the cycle return to C. ("Whither must I wander" and "Bright is the ring of words.") Then the final song, "I have trod the upward and the downward slope," is in D minor/major. Yet this last song includes motives from "Whither," "Bright," and ends with the opening figures of "The Vagabond." This last song was not published with the rest of the cycle, but was written later and added to the cycle posthumously. I felt very strongly that the cycle should end in the same key it started in—in other words, that we needed to transpose "I have trod" down to C minor. It doesn't make a difference for the singing; in fact, in C minor, the song is more in the center of Timothy's voice. I was thinking that maybe Vaughan Williams wrote this epilogue without actually looking at the cycle and remembered its key structure incorrectly. Ending in C minor brings the Traveller full circle—it wraps things up in a nice, neat package.

Well, yesterday we sang through the whole cycle without stopping for the first time, and Timothy asked me to play the final song in D just as an experiment. And now I get it—now I feel the move to D minor/major as being "right." Heard in its entirety, yes, C minor and major stick out in this cycle. But they are often colored by a lot of D. In the first song, the bass alternates between C and D, even if it ends in C minor. The fourth song, "Youth and Love," is in G major, but ends with D in the bass. And the sixth song, "The Infinite Shining Heavens," is actually written in D minor and pulls us through some strange harmonies to D major at the end. "Whither" is a continual push and pull between C minor and E-flat major, both on either side of D, and so leaves one feeling uncertain about its home. And "Bright," though it begins very clearly in C major, skirts very far afield before returning there. This "D influence" is very audible when you listen to the whole cycle. So the cycle gets set up for a different sort of resolution.

In "I have trod," there's a strong cadence halfway thought the song in C major on the words "I have bid farewell to hope." I think I really heard that for the first time yesterday, and that more than anything convinced me of Vaughan Williams's key choices. The Traveller moves beyond a C major hope into D major, the key of "The Infinite Shining Heavens." It's the beginning of a different phase, a different journey. I get it now—it all makes sense.

A breakthrough!

Of course, now I have to re-learn the last song in D.