G R A C E M A R Y W I L L I A M S Welsh classical composer (1906-1977)
B i o g r a p h y
Grace Mary Williams was born on February 19, 1906 in the coastal town of Barry. The eldest of three children, Grace was encouraged from an early age to pursue her interest in music. Both parents were school teachers who loved music. Her father William was a highly regarded amateur choral director who did not believe in teaching music to his children in the traditional manner of exercise book and graded exams. Instead he simply opened his extensive library of music scores to them, an act which enabled them to explore and discover on their own.
Grace often played the piano for her father's choir rehearsals, and at home she played the violin in a trio with her brother Glyn, a cellist, and her father, a pianist. She also broadened her knowledge of orchestral music through recordings, which her father collected avidly.
As a school girl, she excelled in mathematics, music, and English and developed an abiding interest in French literature which she enjoyed throughout her life. She began to show ability in composing music, and, encouraged by her teacher Miss Rhyda Jones, a former pupil of Walford Davies, Grace often sat on the beach at Cold Knap in Barry composing songs and dances. The sea would always be a powerful influence and inspiration in Grace Williams' life as a composer.
In 1923, she entered University College, Cardiff on a scholarship, and while she found the social life at the school exciting, the music program was "deadly" for a would-be composer like Grace Williams who found her enthusiasm stifled by academic exercises. After graduation in 1926, she moved to London to attend the Royal College of Music where one of her most important and influential teachers was composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
At the Royal College of Music, Grace joined several other gifted young women composers including Eliabeth Maconchy (1907-1994), Dorothy Gow (1893-1982), and Imogen Holst (1907-1984), the daughter of composer Gustav Holst. Encouraged by Vaughan Williams, the women met frequently to hear and criticize each other's work.
In 1930, Grace Williams won the pretigious RCM Octavia Travelling Scholarship which enabled her to complete her training in Vienna with composer Egon Wellesz (1885-1974). Here she had the opportunity to indulge herself in the music of Wagner, Richard Strauss and Mahler and the late Austro-German Romantic tradition. Although she did not initially care for Mahler's music, it would later influence on her own compositions.
After her return to London in 1931, the 25-year-old composer was music master at Camden School for Girls and visiting lecturer at Southlands College of Education. "Hen Walia", an orchestral overture based on folktunes with the lullaby Huna blentyn as a centerpiece, was composed during this time and became her first work to receive frequent performances. In 1936, she composed an "Elegy for string orchestra" which contains hints of the highly individual music that she would compose years later.
Prior to World War II, she composed her large-scale orchestral work "Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon" (1939) based on the Mabinogion, and in 1941 her brilliant "Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes" (1940) was broadcast by the BBC. It was so well received by the public in performances throughout Wales that it was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The "Fantasia" remains Grace Williams' most popular work.
During the war, she composed her "Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra" (1941), "Symphonic Impressions/Symphony No. 1" (1943) and "Sea Sketches" (1944), a highly evocative five-movement work for string orchestra. By the time the war ended, the deprivation and difficulties Williams experienced trying to earn money while spending her free time composing had taken a toll on her. She was in poor physical health and hinted to friends that she might give up composition altogether. In 1947, doctors concerned about a persistent illness suggested that she return to Barry where she could be properly cared for by her parents.
The move provided the change that Grace Williams needed, and she never returned to live in London. By the late 1940s, Wales was blossoming as a center for the arts. The BBC had set up a Welsh Broadcasting Region while the Welsh National Opera, the Welsh Office of the Arts Council and a number of music festivals had been established. She began writing incidental music for radio plays and wrote scripts for BBC school broadcasts which included her own arrangements of folk songs from all over the world. In 1948, she became one of the first -- if not the first -- women to write music for film with her score for "Blue Scar". And 1950 saw the premiere of her very lyrical "Violin Concerto", written for Granville Jones. This same year, she took up a post in the Welsh College of Music and Drama.
In the last 25 years of her life, Grace Williams composed music that marks her as a composer of importance in Wales. Her influence on younger Welsh composers was enormous, and she proved that it is possible to live in a small country and survive as an artist. In a land with a deeply rooted choral tradition, she helped place orchestral music on a new footing, and she brought to the concert hall a distinctly Welsh musical language in works like her symphonic suite "Penillion" (1955), "Symphony No. 2" (1956), the "Trumpet Concerto" (1963), the oboe concertino "Carillons" (1965), the four "Ballads for Orchestra" (1968) and "Castell Caernarfon" (1969). Grace Williams did not neglect the vocal music that is the lifeblood of the Welsh people and left some 90 settings for voice, many with orchestra. Her Choral Suite "The Dancers" (1951) was one of her first accomplished vocal works and received its premier by soprano Joan Sutherland with the Penarth Ladies Choir in 1954. Grace Williams had an affinity for vocal writing and over the years produced large-scale choral works like the haunting "Ave maris stella" (1973), the aria for soprano and orchestra "Fairest of Stars" (1973), and her choral masterpiece "Missa Cambrensis" (1971). In her song settings with orchestra, she selected a broad range of poets from ancient and Medieval Welsh texts to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Siegfried Sassoon, D.H. Lawrence and the American poet May Sarton.
For her contributions to music, she was offered the OBE in 1966, but she turned it down : A good performance of her music meant more to her than a decoration. On her 70th birthday in 1976, she received tributes from admirers throughout the world, and the Welsh BBC broadcast a program of her music. Her major orchestral works had been recorded.
Three months later, she experienced the first signs of what would prove to be a fatal cancer. On January 25, 1977, two weeks before her death, 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 February 10, 1977, just nine days before her seventy-first birthday. In a tribute to her, it was said : "She had brought the music of Wales to the world."
Original text by Pamela Blevins.