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The
Vaughan Williams Collection
Surrey Performing Arts Library, Dorking, Surrey
(situated on Denbies Wine Estate)
Although born in Gloucester Ralph Vaughan Williams had strong connections
with the Dorking area for most of his life. He was the first conductor
of the Leith Hill Festival – a post he held from 1905 until 1953.
His family home, Leith Hill Place, is a few miles south from the library
and the road on which his Dorking home, White Gates stood and where he
lived with his first wife, Adeline, is but a short distance away. Among
the major pieces he composed in Dorking were:
Five Tudor Portraits (1936)
Donna Nobis Pacem (1936)
Serenade to Music (1938)
Job (1930)
Symphonies 4–7
The Magnificat
String Quartet No 2 (1944)
Pilgrim's Progress (1951)
Five Variants on 'Dives and Lazarus'
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Left: Conducting
desk used by Vaughan Williams at the Leith Hill Festival.
Below left: Vaughan
Williams manuscript copy.
Both items from exhibitions held at the Performing Arts Library in Dorking.
Bottom: The library contains
a wealth of RVW material. |
Because of the local connections,
the Surrey County Library had accrued much material connected with
the composer and the Leith Hill Festival, so in the 1970s an attempt
was made to establish a Ralph Vaughan Williams Collection of published
books on the composer, reprints of his own writings, new publications
and editions of his scores and some of the now vast quantity of
his music issued on compact disc.
The collection contains no manuscript music,
letters, original documents or pictures however from time to time
exhibitions of original VW material are held. The collection comprises
around 70 books, 300 scores, 200 LP records, 100 compact discs,
all of which are available for loan directly from the Performing
Arts Library. Some of the publications are quite rare.
The
Surrey Performing Arts Library is located in the Denbies
Building, a breathtaking location amongst the vineyards of the
Estate (see above) and is well worth a visit. There is free parking,
a cafeteria and a shop.
Most of the collection
is listed in the Surrey Library catalogue, available at the Performing
Arts Library, at all other Surrey libraries and on the internet.
This
is not a research collection. (RVW manuscripts, mostly donated by
Ursula Vaughan Williams are held at the British
Library and elsewhere.)
nb: There is an RVW study centre at
Charterhouse School, Godalming, Surrey.
For more information or to
hire orchestral parts contact Graham
Muncy Senior Librarian at the Performing Arts Library.
For information on English Folk, Dance and songs and not necessarily
with reference to Vaughan Williams visit the Vaughan
Williams Memorial Library where indexes to the collections
of some of the best-known folk music collectors of the twentieth
century are now available on the Library's website - http://library.efdss.org
The bookstock is listed in:
Muncy, G & Barber, R
Ralph Vaughan Williams – A Bibliography
(RVW Society 1995)
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