I n 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.…