Grace Williams; Off the Beaten Track
“To compose music is to do something off the beaten track, even if you’re a man. But if you’re a woman composer it is considered very odd indeed.” -Grace Williams
As with a number of composers who are women or people of color, Grace Mary Williams’s music has been lost, underperformed, and generally sidelined within the canon. Unlike her teacher, Ralph Vaughan Williams, or her close friend Benjamin Britten, Williams’s music faded from public ears and frequent performances after her death from cancer in 1977. Perhaps one thread that we can follow is Williams’s apparent love of the sea: although she wrote Sea Sketches, her best-known work, in London, she grew up next to the sea in Wales and apparently longed for it when she was away.
Williams penned the first symphony written by a Welsh composer, and she was also the first British woman to score a feature-length film — Blue Scar — in 1949. In 1924, at the age of eighteen, Williams won first prize in a British Broadcasting Corporation competition for the composition of new dance music. This was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration between Williams and the BBC, which included commissions and nearly 1100 letters documenting her musical and compositional life.
Williams was born in the winter of 1906 near Cardiff, in Wales. She attended University College, Cardiff where one of her classmates Imogen Holst, the daughter of well-known composer Gustav Holst. During the 1930s, Holst accepted a position as Benjamin Britten’s assistant — a position which Williams had already turned down despite her friendship with the composer. Williams, Holst, and a cadre of other women studying music remained in touch after the end of their schooling. Despite this, Williams referred to her time at Cardiff as a waste of “three precious years.” She found the environment stifling and too conservative for her to compose music.
After Williams finished her schooling at Cardiff, she continued her studies at the Royal College of Music beginning in 1926. It was at RCM that she began studying with Vaughan Williams, as well as with Gordon Jacob. After attending RCM, she received a scholarship and studied in Vienna in the 1930s with Egon Wellesz, returning to London in 1931. Less researched are the ways in which her early life was sliced through by both World Wars, which undoubtedly hindered her movement around the continent and affected her life deeply. Williams was an avowed pacifist, and her compositional activities themselves were affected when the BBC repeatedly slashed its orchestras, sometimes eliminating them completely, during the Second World War — although these cuts did not always affect the performance of her music negatively. Occasionally scheduled performances of her music were shuffled to another BBC orchestra, giving her a larger audience. After a serious illness in 1947, Williams returned to Wales so that her parents could care for her. Much of her music after this was shaped by the BBC’s Welsh orchestra, which was “at least twenty short of the BBC’s other regional orchestra.”
Sea Sketches (1944) remains another work drawn on Williams’ close relationship with the sea in Wales. Scored for string orchestra in five movements, the work depicts various moods of the sea; the wind, waves, tranquilness, sailing songs, and even music depicting sirens luring sailors in. Her dedication of Sea Sketches shows, perhaps, a bit of the soft affection she held for her family and for her seaside upbringing, dedicated to “my parents who had the good sense to set up home on the coast of Glamorgan.” Soon after writing Sea Sketches, in London, Williams confided to a friend that “I don’t want to stay in London — I just long to get home and live in comfort by the sea.”
In Williams, we find a matter-of-fact composer with high musical and educational standards, and a sharp critique of compositional styles, both her own and others’. We know that she was a harsh critic of her own music, withdrawing the first of her two symphonies, and writing on the manuscript for her violin sonata ‘second movement worth performing, first and third not good enough.” Williams also seemed acutely aware of her position, noting that “to compose music is to do something off the beaten track, even if you’re a man. But if you’re a woman composer it is considered very odd indeed.”
Margaret Rowley is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Boston University, where she works on urban sound and Islamic secularism in Senegal.
Sources:
Boyd, Malcolm. “Williams, Grace.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 16 Nov. 2019.
Cotterill, Graeme. Music in the Blood & Poetry in the Soul? National Identity in the Life and Music of Grace Williams (Doctoral dissertation, PQDT — UK & Ireland), 2012.
Cotterill, Graeme. “Shall Nation Speak Unto Nation? Grace Williams and the BBC in Wales, 1931–1950.” Women & Music 17 (2013): 59–77,108.
The CCCO takes a trip over seas with more beautiful English music for strings. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis was inspired by this English Renaissance composer, creating a work featuring many of our musicians from the orchestra. Antonio Vivaldi, famous composer of the Four Seasons also gained much recognition from his concerti “L’estro armonico” (The Harmonic Inspiration); we will perform his passioned Concerto Grosso in G minor.
Welsh composer Grace Williams, a student of Vaughan Williams, composed her “Sea Sketches” in 1944, comprising of five movements depicting various moods of the sea for string orchestra. And of course, be prepared to be serenaded by Sir Edward Elgar himself.
PROGRAM:
GRACE WILLIAMS Sea Sketches
ELGAR Serenade for Strings
VIVALDI Concerto Grosso “L’estro armonico”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Tickets start at just $30, available at this link.
