The Lark Ascending
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The Lark Ascending is a popular musical piece featuring a prominent solo violin part, written by the famous British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1914. It is intended to convey the lyrical and almost eternally English beauty of the scene in which a skylark rises into the heavens above some sunny down and attains such height that it becomes barely visible to those on the ground below. The First World War halted composition, but the work was revised in 1920 and it was premièred under conductor Adrian Boult in 1921. It was dedicated to Marie Hall who gave the first performance with piano.
The musical work was inspired by George Meredith's 112 line poem of the same name about the skylark.
"The Lark Ascending" is the acknowledged direct inspiration for "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" by King Crimson (1973) an inspired brash rock-n-roll twist on Vaughan Williams's lyricism. The piece was also used as the main theme for the 1987 Australian film The Year My Voice Broke, starring Noah Taylor and Loene Carmen.
In addition, the work was used as part of the last two tracks of David Crowder Band's A Collision. The piece is discussed by David Crowder as part of a fictitious interview, and Crowder even goes as far as to quote a portion of George Meredith's work. In 2006, the conductor Samuel Hayes founded The Larks Ascending, an ensemble of solo voices specializing in new music by British composers and the composers who influenced them.
In 2007 it was voted #1 in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, over Elgar's Cello Concerto, Rachmaninoff's second Piano Concerto and Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.
