Conference Agenda

This year (2024) marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Gustav Holst (1874-1934), one of the most celebrated British composers of the early twentieth century, yet very little is yet planned to celebrate the occasion. This is in marked contrast to his great friend, Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose sesquicentennial in 2022 was celebrated with international festivals and professional performances of works from across his output. Some of the reasons for the surprisingly different reception of Holst and his music were first suggested by Byron Adams in a 1992 Musical Quarterly review of a new biography of the composer by Michael Short. These included the overwhelming “popularity of a single uncharacteristic score” (The Planets) and the influence of the composer’s daughter, Imogen Holst, on the historiography, analysis, and reception of her father and his works. More than thirty years later, despite brilliant interventions by the likes of Raymond Head and Nalini Ghuman, this situation remains largely unchanged.

One largely unexplored aspect of Imogen’s influence on our understanding of her father’s music is her editing of his scores for recording and publication. This was recently illustrated by the first complete recording of the score of his 1925 opera, At the Boar’s Head from performances at the 2016 Warsaw Easter Festival. This recording strongly contrasts the only other one available which was prepared and produced by Imogen Holst (with the assistance of the composer Colin Matthews) in the 1970s. This paper will reconstruct, from letters, recording session notes, and other archival materials, the values and biases that underpin Imogen’s version of the work. Through evaluating rationales for her cuts, additions, tempi, and other musical decisions, and comparing recordings of the work, I demonstrate how Imogen viewed her father’s music as malleable and changeable according to her own artistic taste (even in the face of contradictory performance history). Consequently, that taste is often confused with that of her father’s (despite clearly different aesthetic outlooks) because of Imogen’s role as arbiter of her father’s legacy. Attempting to address this confusion invites us to rethink Holst’s music and discover new relevance for this composer in the twenty-first century.

The First World War impacted every facet of civilian life in Britain, including music. By February 1915 at Cambridge University the University Musical Society (C.U.M.S) had effectively ceased operations. Many of the smaller college societies found themselves increasingly short of members, and others reduced their activities in accordance with wartime sensibilities. The Girton College Musical Society (G.C.M.S.) notably deviated from those trends. As one of two all-women’s colleges at Cambridge, it did not suffer from reduced membership. Rather, its activities increased, both to keep up college morale on the Home Front and as a means of contributing to the war effort. What began as occasional recitals and choral meetings grew into weekly practices and performances. The choral ranks swelled such that they formed a separate Chapel Choir, and a small string orchestra performed regularly. In addition to increased activities, the war also created opportunities for musical leadership of two students: Jane Joseph and Irene Bonnett. Before arriving at Girton, both had attended St. Paul’s Girls School in London where they studied music with Gustav Holst, in whom they had a remarkable model of musical leadership, programming, and instructional skill. The GCMS benefitted noticeably from their experience, and by the end of the war, the GCMS had become a permanent musical fixture of Girton’s college life.

This paper takes direction from the work of Mayhall (2003), Tullberg (1998), Wollenberg (2001), Maxwell (2011), Fuller (2018), and Wollenberg & Darwall-Smith (2023) to investigate women’s musical leadership in gender-specific university spaces. It also draws on materials from the Girton College and Cambridge University Archives to examine Joseph’s and Bonnett’s musical activities there during the war years and how their leadership facilitated the GCMS’s growth into a permanent college society. The growth of the GCMS points to a broader change occurring in music, becoming an intellectual pursuit for women as well as a domestic accomplishment in the early twentieth century. The paper ultimately argues that at Girton, the war allowed women to make music and musical leadership a larger and more central part of their intellectual lives.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the musical elite in England increasingly viewed folksongs as valuable cultural resources. Folksong revivalists rushed to “collect” and curate English folk music to protect it from corruption or extinction, believing that its reintroduction into English society could rejuvenate a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing nation that they perceived to be in both cultural and racial decline. In their efforts to rescue this heritage, major collectors, such as Cecil Sharp, Frank Kidson, and Lucy Broadwood, were heavily influenced by the scientific rhetoric of the nineteenth century—especially theories of evolution and racial differences—which they utilized to validate their conception of a historical, racial folk identity. However, as collectors framed English folk music within a scientific framework, they struggled with contemporary anthropological notions of primitivity. As the folklorist Charlotte Burne wrote in 1887, “There are barbarians nearer home than in India or New Zealand” given “that widely separated stages of progress may coexist in the same country at the same time” (The Folk-Lore Journal 5:65). What distinguished the music of England’s rural poor from that of more “primitive” cultures?

This paper explores the ideological underpinnings of the Folk Revival movement during this period, with specific attention to discourses relating to purity and primitivity in English folksong. Drawing from records and publications of major institutions like the Folk-Song Society and Folk-Lore Society, as well as private correspondence from prominent folksong collectors, I demonstrate that revivalists were intensely preoccupied with questions of purity: establishing the exact linguistic, melodic, or racial criteria that determined the degree to which a song was (or wasn’t) authentically English. Furthermore, I argue that these definitions of folkloric purity were used to counterbalance anxieties surrounding contemporary conceptions of musical primitivity, and to explain how English primitivity (as found in the rural “folk”) differed from that found elsewhere in the world. This research sheds light on the extent to which revivalists saw themselves participating in scientific—rather than artistic—discourse, and reveals much about the cultural and political stakes of folkloric thought in England at the turn of the twentieth century.