Lessons in Harmony by Jonathan Coe review – what can music tell us about national identity?

The unlikely friendship between French and English composers Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams has inspired a tender and generous novel

In 1907, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams confided to the critic Edwin Evans that he was finding his own music “lumpy and stodgy”. His musical education at the Royal College of Music, and indeed classical music in England in general at that time, had tended towards the Teutonic – Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – and their heavy contrapuntal style dominated his work. To free himself, he told Evans, he planned to spend some months studying under French composer Vincent d’Indy, who taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Evans’s colleague, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, had other ideas.