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) further admonishment "senza espressivo", meaning without any expression. This makes the movement extremely difficult to play, and the audience must use great concentration to keep from losing track of the composer's train of thought. Vaughan Williams himself, in his aforementioned programme note, speaks of “drifting” and “whiffs of theme” in characterising the music. This is the movement that sparked so many to see the work as a whole as being a vision of a post-nuclear world. Writers have used such words as “dead”, “barren”, and “ruins” to describe it. Curiously enough, both the second and fourth movements have the same