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
Since 2023 we have awarded over £1.2 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 are currently open. 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.
Our 2026 scholars will be announced at the end of June.
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 Ralph Wedgwood
Letter No.: VWL260
X
[May or June 1898]
Dear Randolph
Just as I was seriously contemplating letting my full juiced Collins waxing over mellow drop in a silent Autumn night1 – those candles arrived and now I am seriously in doubt whether I am writing a Collins or writing to thank you again for them which their ‘real presence’ impels me to do; I am also flabbergasted with the effort of compressing into my limited range of experience both how awfully jolly (and amusing and instructive) it was being with you at W Hartlepool and how beautiful the candlesticks are and how good it was of you to have them packed up and how unkind it was of us to refuse to take them with us one in each hand. They make such a blaze in our room that we decided on the spot to spend the sum of £1-0-0 (one pound) on dark blue linen hangings – as we can’t repaper.2
I feel this is very inadequate expression of all I want to say – but I know you’ll understand and not only read between the lines but also in the little blank space marked X at the beginning of this letter as it seems a pity to leave that unoccupied.3
We have not done much exciting since we came back but a certain amount of work – I have thoughts of going in for my Mus: Doc: in January – but this must be a secret in case I fail;4 it makes me feel very young still going in for examinations when you have probably forgotten what an examination is; it makes me feel as if I was still on a toy bicycle while you were on in safety.
When are you coming to London? Do leave those shear-legs5 for 48 hours sometime (Sunday is unreckoned in this computation as it is not a working day) and we will go and have Asti Spumante & Crème de Menthe at Odones or Gatti’s or the Café Royal. I suppose you won’t be in Leeds on the 7th or 8th of Oct: as we are going there for 2 days of the festival – rather sporting nicht wahr – which is the best line to go by M.R. or G.N.R.?6
I have just had a letter from Amos7 in which he announces himself as being on the crest of a wave of contentment and expounded a theory of life which was very pretty but I didn’t know what it meant. He also has got himself much disliked by his slighting references to the successes of Our Brave Soldiers in Avenging the Hero Gordon – also by saying that he prefers the grave barbarian to the Christian cad.8
R.V.W.
1. VW is parodying lines from the third stanza of the Choric Song in Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters: ‘The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, / Drops in a silent autumn night’. VW once told Michael Kennedy he thought those lines the most beautiful in English poetry. A ‘Collins’ is a letter of thanks for hospitality.
2. The candlesticks were Ralph Wedgwood’s wedding present to Ralph and Adeline. They had been visiting Wedgwood at West Hartlepool where he was working for the North Eastern Railway, in order to collect them.
3. Presumably a reference to the fact that the VWs were on the move – they took up residence in Cowley Street on 30 May.
4. VW eventually submitted his Cambridge Mass for the Doctor of Music degree in October 1899.
5. For loading and unloading goods wagons.
6. Midland Railway and Great Northern Railway both provided services from London to Leeds, one from St Pancras and the other from King’s Cross.
7. Maurice Amos, a friend from Cambridge who became a judge and practised in Egypt.
8. A reference to the recent victory at Atbara in the Sudan in which the Mahdi’s forces were defeated by an Anglo-Egyptian force under Herbert Kitchener – it was seen as revenge for the murder of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1884.
