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Almost singlehandedly, Ralph Vaughan Williams nurtured an entire generation of women composers. Among others, Elizabeth Maconchy, Ruth Gipps, Ina Boyle, Grace Williams and Helen Glatz all benefitted from his teaching, either privately or as students at the Royal College of Music, where he was a Professor of Composition from 1920 to 1942. The diversity of their styles is a testament to Vaughan Williams’s teaching methods. His approach focused on developing the individual’s voice, allowing each one of them to produce outstandingly original music.

But when these women left his teaching rooms, they met with prejudice that kept their works off concert stages. Vaughan Williams untiringly offered them his support. ‘Push on and one day perhaps the key will turn in the lock’ he told Elizabeth Maconchy, giving her encouragement while advocating for her work behind the scenes. Despite his best efforts, many of Vaughan Williams’s women students faced extreme difficulties pursuing careers as composers, and some – such as Ina Boyle and Helen Glatz – are only now being re-discovered.

In this programme, music historian Leah Broad goes in search of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s legacy as a teacher of women composers. She asks, what was it about his personality and teaching that produced such an astonishing variety of styles from such diverse individuals? And what has happened to the music by the women Vaughan Williams taught? Among others, she hears from Nicola LeFanu, daughter of Elizabeth Maconchy and herself a composer; and Victoria Rowe, who is keeping Ruth Gipps’s archive safe in a garden shed; and she visits Trinity College Dublin library to see the notes kept by Ina Boyle about her lessons with Vaughan Williams.

Producer: Caroline Donne
A CTVC production for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 3.