Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) created a body of work that is both extensive and diverse throughout his long life, which certainly cannot be reduced to a single "British" label. There are certainly sonic constants in Vaughan Williams' musical language. These include the 'Tudor Tunes', referring to the use of modal scales from the music of the English Renaissance, primarily folk and church music, as well as the use of late Romantic harmony, which consciously aims for a general comprehensibility of music that, in a humanistic sense, should not be created in an elitist spirit according to Vaughan Williams. However, it would be quite misguided to identify Vaughan Williams' compositional style through individual stylistic features rather than considering the entirety of his musical expression.