TREVOR HOLD: Obituary
By Lewis Foreman
The composer Trevor
Hold, whose unexpected death from cancer
on 28 January has been a great shock
to a wide circle of musical friends
was in every way the countryman, a sensibility
articulated through music and poetry
for over forty years. ‘I suppose I compose
because I have to’ he once said to me,
‘it’s a part of my everyday living,
like breathing, eating sleeping. I feel
I get out of my system fears and other
emotions by the act of creation. I look
on every single work I have written
with tremendous affection – they are
my children.’
Born at Northampton
on 21 September 1939, he was the son
of a Northampton electric company meter
reader, otherwise a saxophone and clarinet
player whose aspiration on leaving army
music to become a cinema musician was
thwarted by the talkies. An attack of
polio at the age of seven which paralysed
Trevor Hold’s upper left arm resulted
in piano lessons as – successful – therapy.
In time he became a sympathetic accompanist,
notably in his own songs. When his uncle’s
Christmas present one year was Donald
Brook’s book Composers’ Gallery
the realisation dawned that composing
was an achievable calling, and he started
writing piano pieces, producing a Music
Box suite when only 10 and winning
a local talent competition in Northampton.
Losing interest in music in his early
teens, his enthusiasm was rekindled
when he discovered jazz, and later he
experienced a moment of revelation during
a musical appreciation lesson at Northampton
Grammar School (1950-57) when the teacher
played Delius’s On Hearing the First
Cuckoo in Spring, which Hold
remembered ‘absolutely knocked me for
six’.
He won a scholarship
to Nottingham University in 1957, ostensibly
to read English, but changed to music
after a year, and left with first class
honours. He went straight on to an MA
and was Head of Music at Market Harborough
Grammar School for a year before becoming
assistant lecturer in music at Aberystwyth
(1963-5). He soon moved on to a lectureship
in music at Liverpool University (1965-70),
where his latest music was played. This
included the haunting orchestral song
cycle The Unreturning Spring,
setting the airman poet James Farrar,
which had been published by the University
of Wales Press in 1965. Listening to
a tape of Leslie Head’s performance
in 1975 my enthusiasm for it has been
strongly renewed, but feeling perhaps
its woodwind obligatos and bird-call
interludes were too Brittenesque, Hold
was later ambivalent about it. He argued
that his first truly personal music
was the cycle For John Clare
for tenor and 11 instruments (1964)
– he remarked to me ‘that’s music that
sounds like me’. At this time he seemed
to be well launched as a composer, winning
the Clements Prize for his String Quartet
and the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society
Prize for his overture My Uncle Silas.
Hold identified closely
with the county of his youth. ‘I was
born at Northampton, the town where
the poet John Clare spent the last 23
years of his life’ he said. ‘Clare was
my local poet, writing about a landscape
I knew, in a dialect I myself used.
When he walked down hollow and up hill
to the village of Kingsthorpe, he took
the same road that I took every day
to and from primary school. The asylum
where he lived was next door to the
grammar school that I attended.’ I remember
being with Trevor by the woods which
would have gone if one of the Third
London Airport options had been chosen
in 1973; ‘they’d better not’ he said
‘I did my courting in those woods’.
Returning to these
roots, with his wife, Sue, and daughters
Sally and Becky, the family were established
at Wadenhoe, where they lived for more
than 30 years, until his death. During
this time there followed nearly twenty
years as Lecturer (later Senior Lecturer)
and Staff Tutor in Music in the Department
of Adult Education at the University
of Leicester. Here he became ubiquitious
in East Midlands’ music, composing for
local schools and choirs, conducting,
accompanying and running adult education
classes that had a wide following. Like
Britten, one of Hold’s beliefs was that
the composer should be writing for the
community in which he lives, and he
enjoyed many local commissions. ‘I write
choral music because that is what is
commissioned’ he commented. ‘When I
got into adult education in 1970, I
wanted to bridge this terrible gap between
modern music and the local audience.’
One of his students at that time was
a teenage David Owen Norris, later the
celebrated pianist, who remembers him
as always helpful and encouraging. A
highpoint of this time for Norris was
a series of lectures when Hold invited
a wide conspectus of composer to talk
about their own music.
Through Jill White,
the sympathetic BBC Radio 3 Music Producer
at Birmingham during the later 1970s
and 1980s, Hold enjoyed a succession
of BBC performances of his latest works,
notably his song cycles, given with
leading artists more or less as they
appeared. Thus we heard Gathered
from the Field (1977); The Image
Stays (1979); Wind Quintet (1982);
River Songs (1982); Glasgerion
(1987); Song at Night (1988);
The John Clare Song Book
(1988). In 1988 John Ogdon broadcast
the piano suite Kemps Nine Daie’s
Wonder. This was published in a
handsome edition by Basil Ramsay and
one remembers with affection Trevor’s
conspiratorial smile and twinkling eyes
as he waited for one to notice the instruction
‘in stilo "L & McC"’.
The crown of this activity
was the eloquent Symphony which Odaline
de la Martinez conducted with the BBC
Philharmonic Orchestra on 8 April 1988.
The Symphony was a mountain that Trevor
spent a long time considering, and he
told me that having seen what others
had written in the 1960s and 70s, in
the end he felt that he was able to
do it. In the traditional four movements,
for it he quarried his song cycle The
Image Stays where he found certain
ideas were crying out to be expanded
instrumentally. For the affecting ‘Elegy’
he turned to his setting of William
Cowper’s elegy ‘On the Loss of the Royal
George’. The conductor Odaline de la
Martinez highlighted ‘a wonderful scherzo
– full of life this continual sense
of rhythmic pulse which is changing
all the time’.
There were other orchestral
works including the Keele Overture
commissioned for the 21st
anniversary of Keele University in 1971
and, more recently, the Piano Concerto
introduced by Peter Jacobs.
It was inevitable that
he would move towards opera as the song
cycles became more dramatic, like little
monologues. ‘I can see actual characters’
he said, adding ‘rather than a singer
in a monkey suit’ Most of his operas
were practically conceived for known
performers, including The Falcon
for church performance, the Christmas
opera The Two Nativities
after a Wakefield Mystery play and Through
the Secret Gate for Northampton
High School for Girls. Later came the
children’s opera Ask No Questions,
and his full length opera The Second
Death, concerning time and the break
in time, with alternating scenes set
in the twentieth century and the civil
war. Here his lifelong obsession with
character and with communication found
a persuasive synthesis. Trevor documented
the making of this opera in his 1989
PhD thesis at Leicester University,
The Second Death: the making of an
opera.
Facing a less sympathetic
educational and academic climate he
took early retirement in 1989 and became
a freelance, being able to concentrate
on all his special interests. Hold wrote
poetry as well as music and his poems
appeared for over forty years in poetry
journals and East Midlands newspapers
and journals. Gathered in four collections,
Time and the Bell (1971), Caught
in Amber (1981), Mermaids and
Nightingales (1991) and Chasing
the Moon (2001) he found a quite
personal low key colloquial voice and
in his inimitable unhistrionic way,
celebrated places, people and history,
notably the local poet John Clare and
his wife the subject of many love poems.
‘More Larkin and Edward Thomas’ Trevor
would say. Trevor declared he aimed
to draw his two talents together, and
addressed himself consciously to rethink
what writing poetry is about, trying
to get the two balanced. His song cycle
The Image Stays, written to his
own words during the summer of 1974,
deals with various aspects of love,
some directly some more obliquely, rounded
by ‘His Portrait’ and ‘Her Portrait’.
‘Solo vocal music is my natural metier’
he concluded, confessing in a programme
note ‘I am a hopelessly compulsive songwriter
– perhaps I should say ‘song cycle-writer’,
for I have written very few separate
solo songs . . . to me, the song cycle
is as important a medium as the instrumental
sonata’.
Hold’s piano music,
notably championed by the pianist Peter
Jacobs encompassed four sonatas on which
he was engaged in the last two years
of his life, revising his first sonata
written in 1959, and producing third
and fourth sonatas. With his last letter
to me, dated 28 November 2003, he sent
the printed score of his Third Sonata,
the music framed by quotations from
T S Eliot, asking what I thought. It
was remarkable for its concision and
eloquent voice, in fact an epitome of
Trevor.
I once asked him if
he dreamed about music, and he admitted
he did, remembering how on two occasions
he ‘woke up dreaming a song which I
then committed to paper’. During one
of these he dreamed he was setting the
opening line of Cowper’s poem ‘The Loss
of the Royal George’, which he not only
set but then used it as the basis of
the slow movement of his symphony.
Trevor’s academic articles
were as meticulously researched and
presented as all his work, and some
25 years ago I invited him to write
a slim volume on Roger Quilter for Triad
Press. The late John Bishop of Thames
Publishing shared Trevor’s enthusiasm
for English song and published not only
some of Trevor’s music, but his editions
of English song and a new edition of
that Quilter book. Admiring Trevor’s
authority, Bishop asked him for a study
of English song for Thames Publishing,
but was a little taken aback at the
size of the manuscript Trevor produced
– a study of twenty English songs composers.
Unfortunately Bishop died, and the book
was published by The Boydell Press,
whose superb edition formed a memorial
to Bishop and, regretfully, now all
too soon to Hold himself (Parry to
Finzi, 2002).
Why so enjoyable a
composer has tended to have a regional
rather than a national reputation we
can put down to Trevor himself – he
told me he ‘found it very difficult
to push his career as a composer’, finding
the business side ‘very distasteful’.
Yet many believed in him, and all who
knew him loved the man and his vision.
His poem ‘A Closing Prayer’ ends with
his perfect epitaph:
Let
the cage open
And
the song-bird fly back to its maker.
He is survived by his
wife Sue and his daughters Sally and
Becky, to whom we send our very real
sympathy.
LEWIS FOREMAN
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Trevor
Hold - Catalogue of Works
