Exciting news from the Britten-Pears Foundation….
The Britten-Pears Foundation is pleased to announce the completion of the Holst Archive Project and the launch of the new catalogue online, available to researchers through the Britten-Pears Foundation’s website. Funded by the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives, the project has focused on the cataloguing of the Holst Archive collection, consisting primarily of the collected papers of composer, musician, educator, conductor, and musicologist Imogen Holst and her father Gustav Holst, esteemed composer of The Planets.
With many digital images also available, the catalogue will interest researchers on a variety of topics, including twentieth century music, female musicians, the democratization of music, arts and culture during both world wars and in post-war society, music education, and the father-daughter relationship widely considered to be the most significant of the twentieth century.
Materials in this extensive collection cover the personal and professional lives of both figures, from notebooks, diaries and correspondence, to working files, broadcasts, articles and lectures, to original music manuscripts and published music, right through to photographs and recordings, including an oral history archive. Also included are the papers of G&I Holst Estate and the Holst Foundation, two companies set up to deal with the legacies of the Holsts.
Also available for research is the recently launched micro-site dedicated to the life and work of Imogen Holst www.imogenholst.org , through which the collection can be explored by overview, theme and highlights. The Holst Project blog can also be accessed at www.holstarchiveproject.org and discusses discoveries and highlights over the past twelve months, as well as the cataloguing process.
The complete Holst catalogue can be found at Britten Pears Arts Archive & Collections
For further enquiries, or to book a research visit, please email archive@brittenpearsarts.org
Judith Ratcliffe, Archivist, Britten-Pears Foundation