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 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 through funding for performances and recordings, 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
Vaughan Williams Scholarships
We are pleased to announce that four scholarships of £8,000 each have been awarded to postgraduate students of composition.
Congratulations to our 2026 Vaughan Williams Scholars: Patrick Gorry, Scarlett Henderson, Donnchadh Mac Aodha and Dominic Wright.
For more than 40 years Vaughan Williams funding has been awarded to support postgraduate study in composition. The 270 previous recipients have included names such as Julian Anderson, Christian Alexander, Anna Meredith, Graham Fitkin, Larry Goves, Gavin Higgins, Hannah Kendall and Daniel Kidane.
Funding
Applications
Since 2023 we have awarded over £1.35 million to composer projects. Composers are at the heart of what we do. VWF offers three annual funding rounds towards:
the performance, commission and recording of music by British and Irish composers active in the last 100 years, and/or
work which furthers the knowledge and understanding of the life and work of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and of Ursula Vaughan Williams.
Applications will reopen on 1 October 2026. We welcome applications from ensembles, organisations and individuals.
RVW
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is one of the greatest of British composers whose music, generosity and vision for community music making continue to impact British musical life.
Find out more about the composer and explore our extensive archive of letters and photographs and catalogue of published works.
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 Laurence Taylor
Letter No.: VWL3199
From R. Vaughan Williams,
10, Hanover Terrace,
Regents Park,
London, N.W.1.
October 2nd 1955
Dear Mr Taylor1
My advice to you is as follows: – and I think it is the advice which would be given by any composer, whether they are bi-tonal, poly-tonal, or any other kind of tonal:-
You will not be wasting your time if, for a time you neglect free composition and make a thorough study of strict counterpoint, classical harmony, fugue and strict sonata form. You will then be fully equipped, your tools will be sharp and of tempered steel, ready for whatever use you wish to put them to.
I am glad you approve of the alteration of the last note in the slow movement of my number four. I had long felt that the original last note was wrong, and I fear I must confess, that I behaved like the lady in the Lost Chord, and tried out every possible note till I hit on the right one.
If you want to study books I suggest those written by R.O. Morris, Sixteenth Century Counterpoint – this of course is not a text book, but a treatise – published by Macmillan, but you will found2 excellent text books on harmony, counterpoint and form by him and H.K. Andrews published by Oxford University Press. There is a tendency at present to dispise3 Cherubini; I entirely disagree, I think every composer ought to go right through him.
Yours sincerely
R. Vaughan Williams
1. A young American composition student who had written to VW asking for guidance and encouragement. He gives an account of the circumstances of this letter and of a visit to the VWs in August 1958, a week before the composer’s death, in ‘RVW remembered: an afternoon with Ralph Vaughan Williams’, Journal of the RVW Society, xv (June 1999), p.7.
2. sic.
3. sic.
