Grace Williams

Sea Sketches of 1944 and Penillion of 1955 are still played; Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes of 1940 is still the piece most listeners meet first. She was also the first British woman to write the score for a feature film. Her output would be larger than it is had she not withdrawn and destroyed a substantial part of it.

Barry, the Royal College and Vienna

Williams grew up in a musical household in Barry, a coal-exporting town on the south Wales coast, where her father was a schoolmaster who ran a children's choir. She read music at University College Cardiff and then went to the Royal College of Music in London in 1926, where she studied composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams and where her fellow student Benjamin Britten became a lifelong correspondent. In 1930 she took a travelling scholarship to Vienna and studied with Egon Wellesz, a pupil of Schoenberg and a scholar of Byzantine music.

Those two teachers pull in opposite directions, and the tension is audible. Vaughan Williams offered a modal, folk-derived English idiom and an instinct for the orchestra as a body of colour. Wellesz offered Viennese rigour and a European sense of how a structure is argued. Williams took the orchestral ear from the first and the discipline from the second, and she never wrote in either man's manner.

Teaching, the war, and the return to Wales

She taught in schools in London through the 1930s, worked for the BBC during the Second World War preparing programmes, and in the mid 1940s gave up teaching, returned to Barry and lived by composition, arranging and broadcasting for the rest of her life. That decision is unusual for a British composer of her generation and almost unheard of for a woman of it: she supported herself by writing music in a small Welsh town rather than by holding a university or conservatoire post.

The film score came in 1949. Blue Scar, directed by Jill Craigie, was a drama about a south Wales mining community made largely on location with local people in the cast, and Williams wrote the music for it. No British woman had scored a feature film before.

The three works most often played

Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, written in 1940, does exactly what its title says and does it without condescension: children's tunes, treated with the full apparatus of an orchestra, in a single continuous span of about ten minutes. It is the piece that survived as a repertory item, and it has probably been the introduction to Welsh orchestral music for more listeners than anything else written in the century.

Sea Sketches, completed in 1944, is scored for string orchestra alone and is in five movements: High Wind, Sailing Song, Channel Sirens, Breakers and Calm Sea in Summer. The sea in question is the Bristol Channel as heard from Barry, and the writing is unusually specific. Channel Sirens is not a picture of weather but of ships calling to one another in fog, and the strings are asked for sounds that are more atmospheric than melodic. It is the work in which her ear for orchestral colour is most concentrated, because she denied herself every colour except strings.

Penillion, from 1955, takes its title from the Welsh practice of penillion singing, or cerdd dant, in which a singer performs a counter-melody against a harp playing a known tune, the two lines beginning and ending together but running independently in between. The orchestral work is not an arrangement of any penillion; it borrows the principle, setting independent lines against a given one in four movements. It is the clearest instance of a Welsh formal idea being used as a compositional method rather than as local colour.

Works

The withdrawals, and the letters to Britten

Williams withdrew works throughout her life, sometimes many years after they had been performed and well received, and in several cases she destroyed the material. The First Symphony went, as did a good deal of earlier music. The catalogue that survives is therefore a catalogue she edited, and the editing was severe by any standard. It is the single most awkward fact about her, and it should not be romanticised into modesty: she was a professional who judged her own work by a fixed standard and removed what failed it, at a cost to her reputation that a composer with a larger surviving output would not have paid.

The other thread that runs the length of her career is the correspondence with Benjamin Britten, which began at the Royal College and continued for decades. The letters are technical as often as they are personal, two composers reading each other's scores and saying plainly what does not work. For a composer living in Barry with no institutional colleagues, that correspondence was the professional conversation she would otherwise have had in a common room.

What she left the Welsh orchestral tradition

Before Williams, Welsh composition meant hymn tunes, part-songs, oratorio and the eisteddfod test piece. After her, an orchestra in Wales had native repertoire to play that had been written for it and not adapted to it. Alun Hoddinott and William Mathias, both a generation younger, inherited a position she had largely made: that a Welsh composer could write symphonically, be broadcast, be published and be programmed without leaving the subject of Wales behind or being confined to it. A studio at the Wales Millennium Centre, seating 60, carries her name.

Also in this programme

• Welsh classical musicThe composers, the choirs and the institutions
• Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau: Land of My FathersThe anthem, its author and its music
• The eisteddfodWhat an eisteddfod is, and how the music competition works
• Owain Arwel Hughes: the career, and the music around itOwain Arwel Hughes and Welsh orchestral music