Art & Creativity Quote by Ralph Vaughan Williams

There is something almost mischievous in Vaughan Williams’ pivot from “doing” to “being”: a little grammatical sleight of hand that smuggles in a whole philosophy of art-making. “Doing music” is the workaday verb of a working composer - craft, rehearsal, committees, critics, bad premieres, self-doubt. It’s the life of a professional: deadlines dressed up as inspiration. By naming “striving and disappointments” so bluntly, he refuses the romantic myth that composition is a clean channel to the sublime. It’s labor. It’s weather.

Then comes the escape hatch: not a promise of better reviews, or a kinder public, but a change in ontology. “I shall be being it” gestures at a state where music isn’t produced, performed, or evaluated - it’s inhabited. The line reads like a late-life attempt to reconcile two truths: he believed fiercely in the communal, lived-in value of music (especially the English folk and choral traditions), and he knew how easily the institutional world turns art into a treadmill of achievement.

The context matters: Vaughan Williams wrote through wars, modernism’s provocations, and the slow professionalization of British musical culture. He was celebrated, but not insulated from the machinery of taste. The quote’s intent isn’t self-pity; it’s a quiet refusal to let “music” be reduced to output. In the next world, he imagines, the art he served won’t demand proof of worth - it will simply be the air.