Snipped from http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1762418,00.html The forgotten man Conductor Sakari Oramo is on a mission to rehabilitate the lost genius of British music - John Foulds. Friday April 28, 2006 The Guardian Born in Manchester in 1880, John Foulds put down his musical roots in soil nourished by the new sense of direction that British music found in the final years of the 19th century. He left home at 13, making his living playing cello in theatres and cabarets and, in 1900, he gained a position in the Hallé Orchestra. The Hallé, under conductor Hans Richter, was then enjoying one of the most interesting phases in its existence, with strong links through Richter to the mainstream European tradition represented by Brahms and Bruckner. Richter encouraged Fould's own efforts at composition, and the young musician's first mature works - such as the elaborately Straussian tone-poem Mirage, and Apotheosis, an elegy for violin and orchestra - indeed reveal French and German influences, but there was much more to come. Meeting his future wife, the ethnomusicologist Maud McCarthy, and joining the theosophical movement generated a vivid interest in eastern, particularly Indian and Arabic, music, as well as in recreating the ancient musical cultures of the Greeks and Celts. Those influences can be seen first in Foulds's songs and piano music, and are evident too in his works of the early 1920s, when they became an integral part of his musical language. Unlike many of his composing peers his interest in Indian music wasn't cosmetic: he didn't simply glue the exotic elements on top of his own music, but actually allowed them to change his own musical style. Foulds went deeply into the theoretical details of the different scales, modes and rhythmic idioms of the vast musical heritage of the subcontinent. It could even be claimed that he did for Indian music something similar to Bartok's folk-song research in the Balkans, and, like Bartok, he made the results of his theoretical efforts an organic constituent of his own musical style. Returning to Britain in 1930, there were more masterpieces to come, such as the Quartetto Intimo, a strong, tight and dramatic string quartet finished in 1932. But still restless, Foulds embarked on yet another trip, to India, where he was to remain until the end of his life. In 1937 he became director of the European Music Department at All-India Radio, where, as well as giving weekly piano recitals, he worked on a new style of "Indo-European" musical fusion, for which he created an "Indo-European Orchestra". There was a plan to write a east-west symphony, but all this incredibly interesting fermentation was cut short by cholera. Foulds contracted the disease and died - "in exile", as he described it - in Calcutta in 1939. [snip] ========== ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India