John Foulds

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John Herbert Foulds, (November 2, 1880 – April 25, 1939), was a British composer of classical music.

The son of a bassoonist in the Hallé Orchestra, John Foulds was born in Hulme, Manchester on 2 November 1880. Largely self-taught as a composer, he was one of the most remarkable and unjustly forgotten figures of the ‘British Musical Renaissance’. Though prolific from childhood, Foulds himself joined the Hallé as a cellist in 1900, having already served an apprenticeship in theatre and promenade orchestras in England and abroad. Hans Richter gave him conducting experience; Henry Wood took up some of his works, starting with Epithalamium at the 1906 Queen's Hall Proms.

In some respects ahead of his time (he started using quarter-tones as early as the 1890s, while some of his later works anticipate Messiaen and Minimalism) Foulds was in others an intensely practical musician. He became a successful composer of light music (his Keltic Lament was once a popular favourite) and wrote many effective theatre scores, notably for his friends Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike. Perhaps the best known was the music for the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (Foulds conducted a Suite from it at the Queen's Hall Proms in 1925). However his principal creative energies went into more ambitious and exploratory works, often coloured by his interest in the music of the East, especially India.

Foulds moved to London before World War I, during which he met and married the violinist Maud McCarthy, one of the leading Western authorities on Indian music. His gigantic World Requiem (1919-21), in memory of the dead of all nations, was performed annually on Armistice Night in the Royal Albert Hall from 1923 to 1926 under the auspices of the British Legion by up to 1,200 singers and instrumentalists: performances which constituted the first Festivals of Remembrance. When interest in the work lapsed Foulds spent the later 1920s in Paris, working as an accompanist for silent films, and in 1934 published an immensely stimulating book on contemporary musical developments, Music To-day. In 1935 he travelled to India, where he collected folk music, became Director of European Music for All-India Radio in Delhi, created an orchestra from scratch, and began to work towards his dream of a musical synthesis of East and West, actually composing pieces for ensembles of traditional Indian instruments. He died suddenly of cholera in Calcutta in 1939.

Foulds’ most substantial compositions include string quartets, symphonic poems, concertos, piano pieces and a huge ‘concert opera’ on Dante’s Divine Comedy (1905-08), as well as a series of Music-Pictures exploring the affinities between music and styles of painting. (Henry Wood introduced one of them at the 1913 Proms.) Few of these works were performed and fewer published in his lifetime, and several, especially from his last period in India, are lost. (The missing scores included a Symphony of East and West for Oriental instruments and Western symphony orchestra.) It is difficult to assess his achievement, or even to classify a composer who was master of a bewildering variety of styles. But he was clearly an adventurous figure of great innate musicality and superb technical skill. Such pieces as the Three Mantras for orchestra and wordless chorus (1919-30), the Essays in the Modes for piano (1920-27), his ninth string quartet, Quartetto Intimo (1931-2) and the piano concerto Dynamic Triptych (1927-29) represent a powerful and individual contribution to the music of their time.

Foulds' daughter deposited some of the surviving manuscripts by her father in the British Library, but many of them had suffered physical damage.^[1] In recent years, the conductor Sakari Oramo has begun to champion Foulds' work in concerts and in recordings.^[2]