Imogen Holst
Imogen Clare Holst (12 April 1907 – 9 March 1984) was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. She is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. Her own music is not widely known and has received little critical attention; much of it is unpublished and unperformed.
About Imogen Holst in brief
Imogen Clare Holst (12 April 1907 – 9 March 1984) was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. She is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father. Her own music is not widely known and has received little critical attention; much of it is unpublished and unperformed. She was appointed CBE in 1975 and received numerous academic honours. Holst was the only child of the composer Gustav Holst and Isobel Harrison. She died in 1984 at the age of 80 and is buried in the churchyard of Aldebuurgh Church, where she was artistic director from 1956 to 1964. Her music has been recorded on two CDs, the first of which was released in 2009 and the second in 2012. Her father Gustav was a trombonist and teacher, and her mother was a music teacher and mother of a number of children. She had blue eyes, fair hair, an oval face reminiscent of her dad’s, and a rather prominent nose inherited from her mother. She won several prizes for composing at the Royal College of Music. In the early 1950s Holst became Benjamin Britten’s musical assistant, and began helping with the organisation of the annual Aldebirgh Festival, and during the following 20 years helped it to a position of pre-eminence in British musical life.
In 1964 she gave up her work as Britten’s assistant, to resume her own compositional career and to concentrate on the preservation of her parents’ musical legacy. In 1917 she wrote two instrumental pieces and four Christmas tunes, which she numbered as Opsol 1, 2, and 3, in the summer of that year. In 1920 she produced her first instrumental piece, Opsol 2, in summer of the same year as her father’s Christmas carol. In 1916 she wrote an annual Christmas song for the Whitsun Festival at Whitson, Essex, where the Holst family had lived since 1802. When she was five, she joined the kindergarten class at the Froebel Institute, and remained at the school for five years. In 1912 she began boarding at Eothen School, a small private school for girls in Caterotham, where Joseph Joseph, Gustav’s star pupil, taught music for girls. She studied piano with Eleanor Shuttleworth, violin with André Mange, and viola with Jane Joseph, and music theory with Joseph Mange. She also studied at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, where he was director of music. In 1913 she began playing the violin for the school’s annual Christmas concert. In 1914 she wrote her first piece for the Christmas concert, Opsols 1, 1, 3, and 4, in which she played the violin and the cello.
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This page is based on the article Imogen Holst published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
