Grace Williams’ music is strongly linked to her home of Wales, with folk tunes often appearing in her compositions. In fact, it has been said "She had brought the music of Wales to the world."
She was also a pioneer as one of the first, if not the first, female film composer. On the 120th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate her life and work.
Grace Williams
Grace Mary Williams was born in Barry, South Wales on 19th February 1906. Her parents, William Matthews Williams and Rose Emily Richards Williams, were both teachers and her father was an amateur choral director. They encouraged Williams’ early interest in music. Her father’s approach to teaching music was to share his extensive library of music scores and recordings, and allow his children to explore music on their own rather than sitting exams.
Williams learnt the piano and often accompanied her father’s choir in rehearsals. She also played violin in the family trio, alongside her brother Glyn on cello and her father on piano. Her initial exploration of composition was encouraged at school by her teacher Miss Rhyda Jones, who had studied with Walford Davies.
Williams would sit on the beach at Cold Knap, Barry, composing songs and dances. The early influence of the sea would always be an important inspiration for her compositions.
Williams’ musical studies
In 1923, Williams was awarded the Morfydd Owen scholarship to the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire (now Cardiff University). Here she studied under Professor David Evans; however the focus on academic studies did not support her creativity. In 1926 she moved to London and began her studies at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
This was a key period for British female composers, and Williams studied alongside Elizabeth Maconchy (who remained a lifelong friend), Dorothy Gow and Imogen Holst, the daughter of Gustav Holst. Vaughan Williams encouraged the students to meet together to critique each other’s work.
In 1930, Williams was awarded the prestigious RCM Octavia Travelling Scholarship. She travelled to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz.
Career
Williams returned to London in 1931 and became the music teacher at Camden School for Girls as well as a visiting lecturer at Southlands College of Education. During this time she composed the orchestral overture ‘Hen Walia’, based on the lullaby ‘Huna blentyn’ and other folk tunes. This was followed by her ‘Elegy for String Orchestra’ (1936), and “Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon” (1939), which was based on ‘The Mabinogion’, a collection of early Welsh folklore tales.
During World War II, she was evacuated to Grantham in Lincolnshire with her students. The ‘Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes’ (1940) was written during this period. It was broadcast by the BBC in 1941 and public performances in Wales were so well received that the London Symphony Orchestra recorded the work. It remains one of her most popular compositions.
At the end of the war, Williams was struggling to earn money while spending free time writing music. This impacted her health and she suggested to friends that she might give up composing. In 1947 doctors, concerned for her health, suggested she return home to Barry where her parents could care for her.
This move proved key for Williams. In the late 1940s Wales was developing as a centre for the Arts with a BBC Welsh Broadcasting Region, the Welsh National Opera, the Welsh Office of the Arts Council and numerous music festivals.
Williams wrote incidental music for radio plays as well as scripts for BBC school broadcasts. These included her own arrangements of folk tunes from around the world. In 1948, she wrote the score for the film ‘Blue Scar’, becoming one of the first women – if not the first woman – to write music for film.
In 1949 Williams wrote her ‘Violin Concerto’. She described this effort in a letter to a friend: “From now until Christmas I’m having my last fling at composing… I’ve started on a Violin Concerto.” The work was premiered in 1950, the year she took up a post at the Welsh College of Music and Drama.
Thankfully the Violin Concerto was not Williams’ final work and she continued to take influence from her home country in future compositions. In 1955 she wrote ‘Penillion’ for the National Youth Orchestra of Wales.
She also wrote for the National Eisteddfod when it took place in Barry in 1968, composing ‘Ballads for Orchestra’.
Alongside her orchestral work, Williams also wrote vocal works in Welsh, English and Latin. Her Choral Suite “The Dancers” (1951) was one of her first accomplished vocal works and was premiered by soprano Joan Sutherland with the Penarth Ladies Choir in 1954.
Williams wrote numerous pieces for voices, including:
music for Saunders Lewis' Welsh carol ‘Rhosyn Duw’, for Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass (SATB), piano and viola in 1955
an opera “The Parlour” in 1960-1 (although it was not performed until 1966)
a song cycle, “Six Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins”, for contralto and string sextet in 1958
‘Ave Maris Stella’, for unaccompanied choir, in 1973.
In 1971, she wrote a large scale choral work – “Missa Cambrensis” – which drew on ‘Rhosyn Duw’. The work is over an hour long, and is scored for Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass soloists plus choir, a narrator, a children’s choir and large orchestra.
Due to her earlier challenges, Williams appreciated her later success. She wrote:
"You know, it was a marvellous sensation being asked to write something; someone wanting your music. Once I got going on it, the music absolutely haunted me.... Such was the elation of having a commission, the ideas flowed freely."
However, Williams was extremely critical of her own work. One entry in her diary read:
“DAY OF DESTRUCTION: Examined all my music manuscripts and destroyed nearly all which I considered not worth performing.”
This approach meant that some of Williams’ works were lost, including one she referred to in a letter to a friend:
“something (perhaps a serenade) for two harps and orchestra – and I got started in real earnest and the old feeling of being full of it returned – Then of course the inevitable happened – I got caught up in the nightmares of pedalling.”
Pedalling can be a challenge for harpists - the pedals are how harps change the pitch of the strings - but it is shame we never got to hear this work.
Williams’ last completed works were settings of Kipling and Beddoes for the unusual combination of SATB, harp and two horns written in 1975. The last music she wrote is actually in her “Second Symphony”, which was originally composed in 1956, but substantially revised in 1975.
Recordings of Williams’ work were made from the early 1970s by EMI, Decca and the BBC Artium label, including recordings of the “Second Symphony”, “Fairest of Stars”, “Penillion”, “Sea Sketches” and ‘Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes’.
Influence and legacy
Much of the music composed in the last 25 years of her life had links to Wales, including the oboe concertino "Carillons" (1965) and "Castell Caernarfon" (1969). She was also a huge influence on younger Welsh composers.
Williams was offered the OBE in 1966, but she turned it down. In 1976, on her 70th birthday, she received tributes from around the world and the Welsh BBC broadcast a programme of her music.
Not long after, Williams experienced symptoms that would turn out to be cancer. Treatment did not help.
On January 25th 1977, she wrote a farewell letter to Elizabeth Maconchy to tell her:
“...all along I’ve known this could happen and now it has I’m quite calm and prepared and can only count my blessings – that I’ve had such a run of good health, able to go on writing – and just being me with my thoughts and ideas and sensitivity. From now on it won’t be so good but even so there are sunsets and the sea and the understanding of friends.”
Grace Williams died on 10th February 1977.
Recordings continue to be made of her work, with the “Missa Cambrensis” recorded commercially for the first time and an archive recording of the 1966 performance of her opera “The Parlour” both realised in 2025.
Further reading and listening
BBC Radio 3 profiled Williams as their Composer of the Week
The Vaughan Williams Foundation hosts several of his letters to Grace Williams
Watch the British Music Society’s video on Williams on YouTube below:
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