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Although Gustav Holst never collected English folk songs himself, he was very familiar with them through his friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams and other collectors such as Cecil Sharp and William Gillies Whittaker. He used a number of them in his compositions and made several arrangements of folk songs collected by others. His first work founded on folk song was Songs of the West, based on Sabine Baring-Gould's collection of songs from Devon and Cornwall - a companion piece to Somerset Rhapsody, which was based on Sharp's collection. While Somerset Rhapsody went on to become one of Holst's better-known works, Songs of the West has been largely forgotten.
Holst arranged sixteen songs from George Gardiner's Hampshire collection for the Novello series Folk Songs of England, as well as creating a number of choral arrangements of traditional songs. Through his friendship with Sharp he became a strong supporter of the English Folk Dance Society and taught at a number of their summer schools. His choral ballet The Morning of the Year introduced traditional English dances under the direction of co-producer Douglas Kennedy, and was performed in 1927 by the English Folk Dance Society in support of the Cecil Sharp Memorial Fund. This article considers Holst's engagement with English folk music, the genesis of his Songs of the West, and his wider contribution to the folk music movement in the early part of the twentieth century.
'I believe very strongly that we are largely the result of our surroundings and that we never do anything alone. Everything that is worth doing is the result of several minds playing on each other.'
Gustav Holst1
In October of 1909, as the daily temperatures started to show signs of dropping from the extremes of summer, the great and the good from the expatriate community in Delhi assembled at Government House to hear the Governor's band give a concert. The programme included pieces by well-known composers such as Handel, Gounod, and Brahms, as well as some whose names are less familiar to us today, such as Waldteufel and Komzác. In the middle of the concert the musical director, Edward Behr, had included the first performance of an orchestral arrangement of West Country folk songs, composed by a friend of his...