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) symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams's experiments with orchestration that so characterise his late music. The symphony is in four linked movements (i.e. one movement leads straight into the next, with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure. <score vorbis="1"> { \new PianoStaff « \new Staff \relative c" { \clef treble \numericTimeSignature \time 4/4 \key e \minor \tempo "Allegro" 4 = 100 f8--\ff g-- aes4->(~ \times 2/3 { aes8 g e) } \times