Imogen Holst - Composer

IMOGEN HOLST - A Biography

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH (Part 1, birth to Royal College of Music)

Imogen Holst was born in Richmond, Surrey on 12 April 1907. During the same year the family moved to Barnes, the place of Imogen’s earliest years and upbringing; her mother Isobel was a particularly special home-maker. In the summer of 1912 Imogen joined the Kindergarten class of the Incorporated Froebel Education Institute, but her education there was interrupted by contraction of typhoid t the age of seven. In order that she might most satisfactorily convalesce, her parents acquired the tenancy of a house in Thaxted, and she was cared for during the week (when Gustav and Isobel were in London) by two sisters of a local family named Beames. Following her illness, she continued at the Froebel Institute until 1917 when she went as a boarder to Eothen School, Caterham, a school to which she returned later as a music teacher.

Musical studies included the piano and violin (the latter at Eothen) but prior to formal study the first musical sounds she had experienced were of her father at the piano playing the Lyric Pieces of Grieg, and she danced to these before she could walk – dancing is how she began to move! Ever since these childhood days she thought of music in terms of dance. The earliest manuscripts of IH dated from 1918 when she was 11 years old. The Sonata for Strings and Piano, in only one short movement and written under the supervision of Mabel Rodwell Jones, is proudly marked Opus 1 (she never used Opus numbers as an adult) and was written in the summer at Thaxted during the family weekends spent there. Within that year one can perceive notable strides in her development, from the Four English Christmas Carols (Opus 2) which, as single line melodies (one petering out unfinished) appear to be the first unaided attempts at composition, to the Duet for Viola and Piano Opus 3, an altogether more assured little piece; her father, travelling on duty in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, was sent parcels on her prose, verse and music which he was always impatient and delighted to receive.

IH was a youngster of ingenuity and leadership, with a sharp eye for opportunity. The Dance of Nymphs and Shepherds from the Masque of The Tempest, a short one-movement string quartet, was composed especially so that she could pursue her passion for dancing. The experiment enabled her, as composer, to take charge of a group of girls, and photographs show that her achievements in choreography were not without merit! Although these four manuscripts survive, as well as one orchestrated arrangement, there follows a gap of some three years between 1922 to 1924 from which no music has been found.

In 1921, at the age of fourteen, she went to dancing school. She had been longing for the day to arrive, and she began her training under Ruby Ginner. Alas, this was short-lived: ill-health forced her to accept that she could not withstand a physical education of this kind. Although deeply disappointed, this did not affect her terrific spirit, and she was fortunate in being sent to St Paul’s Girls’ School where her father was Director of Music. She took up the horn in preference to the violin, the piano remaining very much her first study under Adine O’Neill. She left SPGS in 1925 after four successful years, but lived on in the school’s boarding house, Bute House, whilst studying to enter the Royal College of Music. Arriving there in 1926, she remained a student for four years until the summer of 1930. On admission, she took principal study piano with Kathleen Long and second study composition with George Dyson. Ralph Vaughan Williams covered paperwork, Elme Buesst score-reading, and W.H. Reed conducting. Percy Buck was in charge of the ‘music class’ and Hugh Allen, Director of the RCM, took the choral class. Her choices of first and second study soon altered. By the end of her first term she had already added conducting as another second study. During the following year, 1927-28, composition was elevated to partner the piano as joint principal study. Later, with continuing trouble from neuritis, she abandoned the piano altogether, composition thus assuming prime importance. She left George Dyson at the end of the summer of 1928, and became a pupil of Gordon Jacob. RVW continued to cover her paperwork.

She won a number of scholarships and prizes, notably an Open Scholarship in 1927 for composition, the Cobbett prize in 1928 for her Phantasy String Quartet (Grace Williams was placed second) and the Octavia Travelling Scholarship in 1930. She also won the Morley Scholarship in 1928 for the best all-round student. She was short-listed for the Mendelssohn Scholarship in June 1929, but this went to David Moule-Evans.

Although one might assume that IH was kept fully occupied by musical study, life was made busier by her interest in ballet and folk dancing, and she took advantage of the optional classes which were offered. Neither did she allow herself to be confined to the RCM: like so many students, she was attracted by the variety that London could offer, and these years were full of fascinating and inspiring experiences. In June 1927 she was introduced to Edward Elgar by her father; in the same year she attended a performance of the ballet Petrouchka conducted by the composer. Carmen was her first opera. She was already undertaking duties as an accompanist at the Morley College folk dancing class, and at about the same time she gave her first music lessons (surprisingly) to an organ pupil. The English Folk Dance Society asked her to teach at Royal Holloway College in October 1928. The Phantasy String Quartet success of 1928 played its part in the forging of potentially valuable contacts; besides College performances, it was heard at concerts supported by the Society of Women Musicians and by the British Music Society, the latter at the London Contemporary Music Centre. She was also represented at the Ballet Club Theatre, an important venue which recognised all the promising young composers of the time, with her Suite for solo viola.

Besides all this, she found time for a significant amount of foreign travel towards the end of the 1920s. She visited Bruges in 1927, went to Germany with a Morris Dancing group in 1928 and spent the prize money from her Cobbett success on a holiday in Switzerland in the same year. During 1929 a private visit to the Scilly Isles was followed by a trip to Canada and New York with Douglas Kennedy of the EFDS This seemingly limitless passion for travel was as yet unabated, and in 1930 the Octavia Travelling Scholarship took her to such cities as Copenhagen, Hamburg, Liege and Vienna.

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This is the first part of a full biography that will appear on ImogenHolst.com during Autumn 2007.