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The Music of Jane Joseph

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Extract

In a photograph reproduced in A Scrap-book for the Holst Birthplace Museum, the leading lights of the 1928 Whitsun Festival at Canterbury Cathedral are pictured. Posing in the sunshine after a performance of The Coming of Christ, Masefield's modern mystery play with music by Gustav Holst, are 30-odd participants with the Dean, Dr George Bell, and Holst in the centre. Between Holst and Mrs Bell, and taller than either, sits an efficient-looking lady in her early thirties, clearly of some importance to the festival. This was Jane Marian Joseph, who first came under Holst's spell as a pupil at St Paul's Girls' School and had gone on to act out the principles for which he stood, not least in her meticulous organization of these festivals, and as a composer. After her untimely death, he was to describe her as ‘the best girl pupil I ever had’ in an assessment of her compositions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 A lively institution reprieved, at any rate for the moment, from the closure announced for this year.

2 Monthly Musical Record, April 1931.

3 Lilian Twiselton, draft of a letter to Denis Richards, 6 April 1954.

4 Although Holst (in his Monthly Musical Record article) does not mention this cycle or the De la Mare songs with quartet, the first and third songs of Mirage are listed separately.

5 BBC Transcription Service CN 724 (National Sound Archive).

6 String parts lost, but arranged by the writer from the piano reduction (Bardic Edition).

7 Letter from J B Cramer & Co to Jane, dated 28 May 1925, refers.