he has given me?" Composition The symphony is scored for two flutes (one doubling piccolo), oboe, cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. This is a smaller orchestra than Vaughan Williams used in his four earlier symphonies, with only two horns, no tuba, no harps and no percussion except timpani. The symphony is in the customary four-movement form. The composer provided metronome markings for all four movements, but they are widely regarded as dubious: the composer did not observe them when he conducted the work, and he expressed approval of Boult's tempi, which were similar to his own. His musical assistant Roy Douglas has suggested that Vaughan Williams simply miscalculated because he did not possess a metronome. In addition to the Pilgrim's Progress allusions, the score has echoes of Vaughan Williams's hymn tune "Sine nomine", in the second subject of the first movement and at the end of the fourth movement. I: Preludio The first movement, in Frank Howes's analysis (1954), can be seen either as "an elaborate ternary form with coda" or "an exposition of two big groups of themes succeeded without development by a condensed recapitulation". This movement owes something to sonata form, but does not display all its characteristics; the second subject has been derived from the first subject. The movement opens with a pedal C in the bass, answered by a horn call outlining a D major chord in a dotted rhythm, which implies mixolydian D. The violins use the notes of the pentatonic scale, making the key ambiguous. Wilfrid Mellers believes this is why Vaughan Williams billed the movement as a Preludio, "which suggests an emergent state". The horn call motif fluctuates from major to minor, outlining the tonal ambiguity, moving between the mixolydian and dorian modes, which becomes a characteristic of the movement. The bass's C pedal becomes the tonic when the key changes to either the aeolian or dorian modes. The modality then moves to E, with a new melody in the violins, which, although it does not include a sharpened seventh, outlines E major. The bass, now played pizzicato, supports the melody both melodically and harmonically and the texture incorporates suspensions and passing notes, making the harmony richer. A sudden descent of a semitone, an idea previously used in Vaughan Williams's works Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Job, marks a