Listening to music. Like Fauré, Vaughan William's catalogue is all slow. But if Fauré wrote fast music which was really slow music played fast, Vaughan Williams didn't even pretend to write fast music (i.e., metronomically fast). As for the Oxford Elegy, I have a constitutional allergy to the accompanied spoken voice - to melodrama. Pomposity. If the sung voice is the most musical of instruments, the spoken voice is the least.