Ralph Vaughan Williams after Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli are Vernon Handley, Richard Hickox, Sir Mark Elder and Sir Andrew Davis. Record companies with extensive lists of Vaughan Williams recordings include EMI, Decca, Chandos, Hyperion and Naxos. Vaughan Williams refused a knighthood at least once, and declined the post of Master of the King's Music after Elgar's death. The one state honour he accepted was the Order of Merit in 1935, which confers no prenominal title: he preferred to remain "Dr Vaughan Williams". His academic and musical honours included an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Oxford (1919); the Cobbett medal for
Symphony No. 6 (Vaughan Williams) strings. Serge Koussevitzky led the score's American premiere on 7 August 1948, at Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before that year was out, the same musicians had taken the work to Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago (3 December). The first recording was made on 21 February 1949 by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York under Leopold Stokowski, who had been a fellow organ student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s (and was to give the U.S. premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1958). The second was by Sir Adrian Boult days later with the