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.
Holst's scrapbooks illustrate her enthusiastic and lifelong work on
amateur and community music making, and the important role she played in
the democratisation 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.
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.
A Gustav Holst Concert held in Carlisle on 12 February 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'.
Her scrapbook also contains 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 20th
century British music and culture, one that added immeasurably to the
democratisation 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!
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.
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