Welcome to the Vaughan Williams Foundation – one of the foremost sources of funding for recent and contemporary music in the UK
The Vaughan Williams Foundation is a new grant-giving charity which upholds the values and vision of the celebrated composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and his wife Ursula Vaughan Williams.
Our principal aims are to honour RVW’s desire to support his fellow composers, and to help make his own work widely accessible to the general public.
VWF was founded in 2022, 150 years after the composer’s birth, and brings together the two charities originally set up by Ralph (RVW Trust) and Ursula (Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust).
Funding
VWF supports the work of British/Irish composers from the last 100 years, as well as projects which further the knowledge and understanding of the life and music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and of the work of Ursula Vaughan Williams.
Applications for funding will open on 4 June. Ensembles, organisations and individuals are invited to apply.
The Foundation also offers annual Vaughan Williams Bursaries for postgraduate composition students.
RVW150
12 October 2022 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the launch of this Foundation and #RVW150 celebrations continued into the summer of 2023.
Find out more about the composer and explore some of the projects which happened in the anniversary year
READ THE LATEST
THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Featured Letter
Get to know the man and his music
RVW’s wide-ranging correspondence – with family, pupils, fellow composers, conductors and performers – paints an intriguing portrait of the man, as well as providing fascinating insights into his major preoccupations: musical, personal and political.
Our searchable database includes over 5000 annotated transcriptions of his correspondence all available to read online.
Letter of the Day
Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Gustav Holst
Letter No.: VWL264
Hawgoods Temperance Hotel
Bramber
Sussex
[Late July 1899]
Dear V.H.
This isn’t really a hotel but a refreshment room and tea gardens with apartments attached. We stay here any way till Friday and perhaps a week more. I think it is a good place for work. I have done 4 pages of full score today which is rather good for me.1
We have just come from a most magnificent evening walk – first a sunset seen from the downs – then blue twilight then stars and nearly losing our way and then home.
Do send me some more of your adorable programmes – I laughed out loud for a whole day over that one. I do hope your hand is really better – your looking glass style2 is magnificent.
I spent Sunday and Saturday evening with Howard Jones3 and we walked about and sat on gates till 12 p.m. and talked about music and organs and success and other incongruous subjects. He wants you to write to him but I explained that your hand was too bad. He is very much excited over playing to D’Albert.4
I will write to Gatty about Granville-Whitman (no I mean Walt-Bantock5) – Gatty’s variations were badly played and splendidly reviewed.6
Yrs
R.V.W.
1. This was probably either for the Mass written for his Mus. Doc., Catalogue of Works 1899/F, or the Serenade for small orchestra in A minor, Catalogue of Works 1898/1.
2. i.e. of handwriting with the left hand. Holst had persistent neuritis in his right arm.
3. Evlyn Howard-Jones, one of VW and Holst’s circle at the Royal College of Music and later a successful pianist.
4. Howard-Jones went to study with d’Albert after finishing in the Royal College of Music.
5. It is not clear what the link between Walt Whitman and Granville Bantock was that gave rise to this joke.
6. Referring to a concert in which Gatty’s Variations on Old King Cole for orchestra were played; see The Musical Times, 1 August, 1899.