British composer R. Vaughan Williams

I adore him...’The Lark Ascending’ is stunning but his 5th Symphony brings me to tears...

he's never been fully swallowed by the flag-waving crowd in the way poor undeserving Elgar has been

That's quite interesting. He did study with Bruch and Ravel, and was more cosmopolitan in his outlook than most of his peers. So while he clearly drew on a distinctly English musical unconscious via folk song, I never get the sense, as a (foreign) listener, that he's using it as an imperialistic cudgel to demonstrate the purported superiority of British culture or some such – it's mainly a matter of writing what one (thinks one) knows, especially when there are unsuspected riches still waiting to be plumbed in one's own backyard. The same can incidentally be said for his near-contemporaries Béla Bartók and George Enescu, both of whom viewed the folk music of their respective countries (which have historically overlapped a great deal) as a means of shaking up the primarily Austro-Germanic academic tradition that makes up the core classical repertoire, and therefore as one musical idiom among many (albeit an audibly prominent one). Exit aesthetic zero-sum games whereby to write in one language is necessarily to belittle another national tradition (see: Wagner, Debussy), which makes for a better use of post-Romantic ideology than resentful isolationism.

In terms of his private feelings, however, Vaughan Williams appears to have been a bit of a two-faced figure: quite progressive for his time, certainly more left than right-leaning, but not up to par with what we would expect of a composer committed to those descriptors today:

https://unherd.com/2019/01/vaughan-williams-not-simply-a-nostalgic-nationalist/#en-18184-1

I did lol @ the line about how an influx of Austrian refugees/immigrants risks dislodging British culture, although to be perfectly fair, non-openly fash European countries had their reasons for thinking Austria was a wee bit problematic (and it still kind of is…).

As for The Lark Ascending's small m modernism, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I watched a cute little stop-motion animation video by a duo of French YouTubers who specialize in popularizing classical music (aka vulgarisation, heh) and they do a good job of pointing out just how revolutionary that kind of overt simplicity was in 1914, relating it to Satie – which I hadn't thought of, but it makes perfect sense.

it becomes a current in what we could very loosely call postmodernism i guess, by which all i mean is directions explored by 20th century music once serialism fell off

I've repped for him elsewhere, but among younger British composers, the most VW-ian of the lot has got to be Edmund Finnis, who achieves a similar sense of quasi mystical stasis rooted in English pastoralism without falling prey to parochialism. His harmonic language also happens to be richer than that of Tavener and other pomo Western 'holy minimalism' imitators. The Air, Turning, his sole widely distributed monograph (for NMC), is an excellent starting point if you're curious.

thank you pom for these thoughtful posts, which i’ll surely return to if i ever decide to explore the work of VW.

My pleasure, budo!