Grace Williams (1906-1977)

"Music for me has got to flow, because I have been brought up in the singing tradition, and everything I've ever written ... even the kind of string music I write, is basically melodic and onward-moving." - Grace Williams

Music ‘seemed to be the very essence of her being, and seemed to flow from her so easily’, Dorothy Gow wrote of her fellow composer Grace Williams. Born in Glamorganshire, Wales in 1906, Williams was among a generation of women who would make their mark on the landscape of twentieth-century music in the UK. Her output includes two symphonies, numerous orchestral works, an opera, choral pieces, chamber works and songs. She was also the first British woman to score a feature film, Blue Scar, in 1949.

Stylistically, her music combines a modern approach to harmony, form and timbre with a lyricism and programmatic flair that produced a musical language distinctively her own. In particular, from the 1930s onwards she began taking a serious interest in Welsh themes, both musically and narratively. Many of her best-known works have a Welsh inspiration behind them, including her 1930 overture Hen Walia, 1940 Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, and all the pieces recorded on our album of orchestral works.

Discover Grace Williams

'Having grown up in a coastal area, the sea was an endless source of inspiration for Williams. ‘I never tire of looking at it, and listening to it’, she said, noting that it inspired her ‘fondness for long undulating melodic lines and flowing rhythms’. She wrote the Sea Sketches through 1943 and 1944, when she was in London during the Blitz and far from the coastline in Glamorganshire that she found so calming. ‘What I really want, & have always wanted’, she wrote wistfully to Maconchy, ‘is to live near the sea’, later telling her friend about the bombings that hit her road in Hampstead while she was completing the work.'
Read the album booklet for our recording of Williams' orchestral works here.

'You know it was a marvellous sensation, simply being asked to write something; someone wanting your music. Once I got going on it the music absolutely haunted me. I went about London, and even when travelling on the underground the music was still there in my head.'
Read Grace Williams in her own words here.

'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.'
Read Grace Williams' biography here.

'Essentially a loner, Grace Williams had a touch of steel in the soul to match her singing spirit. As a composer, she certainly needed it.'
Read Geraint Lewis' article on Williams for BBC Music Magazine here.

'It seem to me that Stravinsky is the sort of person who’ll write one great work & then go completely shut for a few years — then another masterpiece. Parts of the Duo seemed so tired. He himself is a Sphinx isn’t he! So stony & repressed & self-conscious. His playing, I feel, is terribly self-conscious — he just can’t let himself go — no rhythm!!!'
Buy Sophie Fuller & Jenny Doctor's edited correspondence between Grace Williams and Elizabeth Maconchy here.

'Williams emerged as one of the first professional composers from Wales to assimilate aspects of her Welsh cultural heritage into a cosmopolitan and individual musical style.'
Buy Rhiannon Mathias' group biography of Williams, Maconchy and Lutyens here.

Scores and other recordings

Many of Williams' works, including three of the pieces on our disc and the Violin Concerto, are published by Oriana. Sea Sketches is among her works published by Oxford University Press, and some of her works are available via Music Centre Wales. Her manuscripts are available to consult at the National Library of Wales. For complete information, please visit the website dedicated to her.

Williams has a growing discography. Some select recordings include: