'All About is Night': Spiritual anxiety and the ritual impulse in World War I Europe

World War I was a seminal moment in the history of Western Culture. The five years between 1914 and 1919 changed the world forever through political revolution, economic upheavals, and intellectual turmoil. There was an overwhelming impression that the progress of human culture foreseen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was forever lost. The lives of everyone, including those previously on the forefront of the musical avant-garde, were thrown into chaos. There was a general fear that the War had forever separated the present from the past; that the past had died along with the millions of young men on the battlefields of Europe and the future was uncertain. Modern civilization had become mortal and felt as fragile as life. Composers responded to this sense of ‘fragility’ by seeking to create music whose sense of order, ritual, or spiritual renewal could speak to human needs. Composers such as Erik Satie and Ralph Vaughan Williams addressed early 20th-century disconnect with the past and fears of disorder in the present through the creation of music whose “ritual connotations” reflected the impulses of, and human needs expressed by, sacred music, even in the absence of its liturgical function. This document explores this thesis by examining the effects of the War on Western Culture and discussing the influence of the conflict on the writings of David Jones and J.R.R. Tolkien. Erik Satie and Ralph Vaughan Williams are taken as case studies of the ritual implications in responses to World War I. The document concludes that knowledge of the ritual connotations of certain musical works is crucial for the understanding of the War’s influence.