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
Applications
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.
We welcome applications from ensembles, organisations and individuals.
Our new Trustees
Joining the Board
We are delighted to announce the appointment of Sam Wigglesworth, Harriet Wybor and Raymond Yiu as new Trustees, bringing with them a wealth of experience and a passion for music.
We are so grateful for their commitment to the Foundation and look forward to working with them to develop VWF for the future.
Find out more about the faces behind the VWF and our work.
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.
Funding
Vaughan Williams Scholarships
4 scholarships of £8,000 each are awarded annually to postgraduate students of composition
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.
Congratulations to our 2025 Vaughan Williams Scholars: Tom Burkhill, Lucy Holmes, André Faria Serra and Elliott Park.
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 Edward J. Dent
Letter No.: VWL348
13 Cheyne Walk
S.W.
[September 1914]
Dear Dent
I am so much touched by your offer – but I really don’t know if I should accept – why shd you spoil your holiday – I do feel inclined to accept in fact – if the performance for the beginning of November in Edinburgh is not put off.1
Would you do a bit of it? The difficulty is there is only one set of wind parts. Would you, say, copy in the string parts of the slow movement – I cd send you a set of string parts & plenty of music paper & a very complete small score by Toye2 which wd guide you as to how to space it out.
If you really do offer to do this you would be doing a great service not only to me but to a young musician called Coles3 who was to have copied the score – He wanted to enlist (home service) & being married didn’t know if he could so Von Holst & I have arranged to keep his job warm & I have advanced him the money he wd have made over my score – he to take it out in other copying later – less any of the score which you did. I should, with your leave, consider written off his debt to me.
But really ought you to do it? I can’t express how much I feel your even offering to do it.
Yrs
R. Vaughan Williams
1. This refers to the collaborative reconstruction of the score of the London Symphony, Catalogue of Works 1913/5, from the orchestral parts by VW aided by a group of friends (Edward Dent, Denis Browne, and George Butterworth. The original score had been sent to Germany either to Fritz Busch to consider for performance (as VW told Michael Kennedy) or to Breitkopf & Härtel to consider for publication, since they had already published Willow Wood, Toward the Unknown Region, and A Sea Symphony (as VW told UVW), and was now considered irretrievable. See VWL409, VWL349 and VWL350, and R.V.W.: a biography, p.113-114. The reconstructed manuscript score is now in the British Library The performance in Edinburgh which created the need for a new full score was given by the Scottish Orchestra conducted by the composer in the Usher Hall on 30 Nov 1914. This performance is not noted in Lloyd, ‘Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony : the original version and early performances and recordings’, in Vaughan Williams in perspective : studies of an English composer, ed. Lewis Foreman (Albion Press, 1998).
2. Geoffrey Toye who had conducted the first performance of the London Symphony on 27 March 1914 at the Queen’s Hall.
3. Cecil Coles, a young Scottish composer and friend of Gustav Holst, was killed while serving with the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in 1918.
