Imogen Holst's scrapbook

Imogen Holst (1907-1984) was the daughter of composer Gustav Holst, best-known for his work The Planets. Holst, herself a composer, is perhaps best-known today as Benjamin Britten's musical assistant, but she also had an exceptional, wide-ranging but lesser known career as, amongst other things, teacher, conductor and public speaker, work which put her at the forefront of the development of music education and community music-making in England in the twentieth century.

This is the sixth of ten large scrapbooks Holst started as a student at the Royal College of Music in 1926, and continued until 1941, in which she pasted letters, postcards, programmes, press cuttings, photographs, tickets, drawings and other ephemeral material, writing captions next to the items. These volumes represent a colourful social record of cultural and musical life in pre-war England as well as telling the personal story of a passionate and open-minded woman musician.

Repository name: Britten-Pears Foundation

Item reference: HOL/2/7/6

Date: 1932-1934

Holst's bookplate reflecting her enduring passion for folk music and dance

Early in 1932 Holst joined the staff of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. She was passionate about the preservation and spread of the English folksong and dance heritage and her scrapbooks are full of press cuttings and programmes documenting her travels throughout the country lecturing, teaching, conducting and playing as accompanist for the Society, as well as her work arranging traditional folk tunes for amateurs and professionals to play and sing.

Repository name: Britten-Pears Foundation

Item reference: HOL/2/20/1/81

Holst with her Burford choir at the Abingdon Festival

Holst's scrapbooks illustrate her enthusiastic and lifelong work on amateur and community music making, and the important role she played in the democratization of music. She was a keen supporter of the Pipers' Guild, formed in 1932, which encouraged people to make and play their own musical instruments. Items in her scrapbook document Holst lecturing on the making and playing of bamboo pipes, arranging old English airs for performance on pipes as well as composing original tunes for both beginner and more advanced players.

Repository name: Britten-Pears Foundation

Item reference: HOL/2/7/6/109

Date: 1933

Holst's music manuscript for Badingham Chime for 12 handbells

Holst was an innovator in that she composed throughout her career for instruments such as brass band, pipes, recorders and hand bells, bringing these instruments into the art music or cultivated music worlds.

Repository name: Britten-Pears Foundation

Item reference: HOL/2/1/1/99

Date: 1969

Holst conducting a military band

A Gustav Holst Concert held in Carlisle on 12 Feb 1933 featured first performances of new works by both father and daughter. Imogen Holst's composition, a suite for brass band entitled The Unfortunate Traveller, was dedicated to St. Stephen's Band - the group of amateurs giving the work its first performance. Here Holst crossed social and cultural barriers, not only as this was the first occasion on which an original brass band work by a woman composer had been publicly performed, but also by conducting the performance herself. Holst is quoted in The Daily Mail review ‘This is the first time, so far as I know, that a woman has conducted a brass band at a public concert'.

Repository name: Britten-Pears Foundation

Item reference: HOL/2/11/4/6

Photo: Nicholas Horne

Date: 1948

Letter from Gustav to Imogen congratulating her on the publication of her Five short airs on a ground

Imogen Holst pasted into her scrapbook one of the last letters she received from her father, in May 1934, the month he died. Her papers represent the most significant father-daughter relationship in 20^th century British music and culture, one that added immeasurably to the democratization of music during this period, as both Holsts spent their lives and careers dedicated to the task of encouraging amateur music-making. Her archive tells the story of the shared ideals, interests and talents of father and daughter – as composers, conductors, music educators, ethnomusicologists and community musicians - however we see from Gustav's letter that he did not share his daughter's enthusiasm for pipes!

Repository name: Britten-Pears Foundation

Item reference: HOL/2/7/6/223

Date: May 1934