Symphony No. 8 (Vaughan Williams) Symphony No. 8 (Vaughan Williams) Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 8 in D minor was composed between 1953 and 1955. It was the first of his symphonies which Vaughan Williams numbered. Sir John Barbirolli conducted the premiere of the piece on 2 May 1956, with the Hallé Orchestra. The Eighth Symphony is the shortest of Vaughan Williams' nine symphonies, with a typical performance taking just under a half hour, yet it is remarkably inventive, especially in the composer's experiments in sonority. Not only does he use a much-expanded percussion section, including "all the 'phones and 'spiels known to the composer"
Vaughan Williams and English Folk Music song, "The Long Whip", seems to have been lost completely as a result. Vaughan Williams knew that the texts of many of the songs he was preserving had been printed as broadsides and he sometimes used broadside texts to fill out his songs for publication. He did not bowdlerise the material he collected for publication, as some other collectors did, but was as much as they were forced to recognise the constraints of the time when it came to publishing "unsuitable" material. Sometimes too he failed to note singers' names or occupations. Vaughan Williams and English Folk Music The composer