Eric Saylor, Professor of Music History, Drake University

Eric Saylor is Professor of Music History at Drake University. He is the author of English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900-1955 (2017), co-editor of Blackness in Opera (with Naomi André and Karen M. Bryan, 2015) and The Sea in the British Musical Imagination (with Christopher Scheer, 2012), and former President of the North American British Music Studies Association.

Winner, 2022 Book of the Year, Presto Music Awards

"Saylor's writing style is eminently readable; it flows like a stream, but is carefully documented, chock-a-block full of details and info in rapid succession, dense though it is. He is good at piecing together a life of details and tidbits; like Sherlock Holmes, he teases out snippets everywhere." - Marvin J. Ward, CVNC

"I had long believed that RVW was a highly under-appreciated composer, as well as somewhat misunderstood, & those concepts were hugely confirmed by this book; I had never imagined the breadth, depth, diversity, and extent of his works and his activities." - Marvin J. Ward, BA & MA, SUNY Albany; MA, Université Laval, Québec; Ph.D., UNC-CH, CVNC

"the great value of the book is Saylor's intelligent view of the music, notably his analyses and interpretations of the symphonies and other major works" - Simon Heffer

"Vaughan Williams enthusiasts of all hues will want this; but prepare to be renedered breathless at the great man's astonishing energy" - Andrew Green

"... a ground-breaking biography... [Saylor] approaches his subject with fresh ears and a host of thoroughly researched and well-rounded insights that look set to change the discourse surrounding the composer... Saylor's measured contribution to our understanding of Vaughan Williams is welcome, and can only add to our understanding..." - Hugh Morris, The Guardian

"... a valuable study of Vaughan Williams's long life and multifarious work, one that will serve both the novice listener and the scholar. It is fair-minded and wide-ranging, both easy to read and unusually weighty for such a short book... recommended to anybody in search of information about this admirable man and creator." - Tim Page, Wall Street Journal

"This new study demands the attention of admirers of the composer; it will come as a salutary correction to those who continue to deny the composer's genius" - Robert Matthew-Walker, Musical Opinion

"Few great twentieth-century composers are both as popular and as misunderstood as Ralph Vaughan Williams: a national icon whose broader significance for the music of his time, and ours, is only just beginning to be fully appreciated. And few artists pose as many challenges to the biographer and critic: an exceptionally long and rich life, a huge and varied body of work, and a reputation often based as much on mythology as fact. Eric Saylor's landmark new study is therefore especially impressive, as it elegantly weaves together a scrupulously researched yet always engaging account of Vaughan Williams's life and art, makes accessible the latest scholarship (including the revelatory rediscovery of the composer's early works), and offers along the way myriad new insights into a complicated personal life and iconic creations such as The Lark Ascending" - Alain Frogley, University of Connecticut

"Eric Saylor's new biography of Vaughan Williams, one of Britain's greatest composers, is the first to take full account of research published in the last twenty years, of the hitherto unfamiliar early works of the composer published for the first time in the last 25 years, and of the online corpus of some 5000 letters written by him only recently made accessible. Saylor pulls all this together to give us a far more complete picture of the man and his works than we have had before. His book is a fitting tribute to Vaughan Williams for the 150th anniversary of his birth." - Hugh Cobbe, Director of the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust