Robin Holloway

Abstract

‘Ah, Holloway—simultaneously advancing and retreating!’ a friend once memorably hailed him. Whatever his voluble nervousness of manner, there is certainly nothing equivocal about the speed and conviction with which he composes. All the same, his mature works convey a peculiarly complex sensibility. Born in 1943, he started composing copiously during his years as a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral (1952–7). After reading English and Music at King's College, Cambridge (1961–4), he did research on Wagner and Debussy at Oxford (1965–7), returning to Cambridge as a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College and, from 1974, as an assistant lecturer in the Faculty of Music. More important than any of this for his development, however, was the quickening of English musical life during his adolescence. If the release in 1957 of the first recording of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces was perhaps his profoundest formative experience, this was soon to be followed by William Glock's most progressive years at the BBC and by the emergence of the brilliant new generation of Goehr, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Maw, and Bennett; it was Goehr with whom he studied from 1960–66.