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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,
his spectacles and baton which were donated by Ursula
Vaughan Williams' estate.
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.
(click
here to visit the Library web site (opening hours etc)
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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