Holst had hoped to build his career partly as a pianist, but stricken from adolescence with a nerve condition that increasingly affected the movement of his right hand, he eventually gave up the piano for the trombone.

The poetry of Walt Whitman also had a profound effect on Holst, as it did with many of his contemporaries, and he set Whitman's words in " Dirge for Two Veterans " and The Mystic Trumpeter ( 1904 ).

Despite being shy, Holst was fascinated by people and society, and had always believed that the best way to learn about a city was to get lost in it.

Towards the end of his life, Holst wrote Choral Fantasia ( 1930 ), and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band ; the resulting Hammersmith was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life, a musical expression of the London borough ( of Hammersmith ), which begins with an attempt to recreate the haunting sound of the River Thames sleepily flowing its way.

The composer's name was given as ' Gustav von Holst ' — by the time he wrote " Mercury " in 1916 he had dropped the ' von ', for he signed the score of that movement separately as ' Gustav Holst '.

Although Holst had no such patriotic intentions when he originally composed the music, these adaptations have encouraged others to draw upon the score in similar ways throughout the 20th Century.

She had been employed first in Wright's office, and then by the architect Hermann V. von Holst, who had taken over Wright's work in America when Wright abruptly left for Europe in 1909 — eloping with a woman.

Marion Mahony recommended to von Holst that he hire Griffin to develop a landscape plan for the area surrounding the three houses on Milliken Place for which Wright had been hired in Decatur, Illinois.

* I had Three Lives ( Poetry by Mikis Theodorakis in English, translated by Gail Holst )

He turned over his existing commissions to Hermann von Holst, who retained Marion Mahony, an architect in Wright's office, and George Mann Niedecken, an interior designer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who had worked with Wright on the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield, Illinois, the Avery Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois, and the Meyer May House in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to continue their work on the project.

Both Scott and Holst had an interest in eastern philosophy and religion, inspiring further interest in the subject from Edmund.

But after Wright had gone, Hermann V. von Holst, who had taken on Wright's commissions, hired Mahony with the stipulation that she would have control of design.

While at the Royal College of Music, Holst fell in love with the music of Wagner, which he was able to hear at Covent Garden.

Holst also wrote an orchestral Walt Whitman Overture in 1899, which was given a world premiere recording by the Munich Symphony Orchestra, as well as a recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Holst became an occasional organist and choir master at Thaxted Parish Church and began an annual music festival at Whitsuntide in 1916, at which students from Morley College and St Paul's School performed.

Interested as ever in new media, Holst wrote a score for the Associated Sound Film Industries picture ' The Bells ' in which Holst believed he appeared as an extra in a crowd scene.

In 2007, BBC Radio 4 produced a radio play by Martyn Wade called The Bringer of Peace, which is an intimate biographical portrait of Holst.

The Planets as a work in progress was originally scored for a piano duet, except for " Neptune ", which was scored for a single organ, as Holst believed that the sound of the piano was too percussive for a world as mysterious and distant as Neptune.

Holst stipulates that the women's choruses are " to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed ", and that the final bar ( scored for choruses alone ) is " to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance ".

In 2000, the Hallé Orchestra commissioned the English composer Colin Matthews, an authority on Holst, to write a new eighth movement, which he called " Pluto, the Renewer ".

This arrangement was issued on their second LP, In the Wake of Poseidon, although for copyright reasons it was renamed " The Devil's Triangle " and Robert Fripp claimed authorship, with Holst receiving no composer credit. A third progressive-rock band, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, performed an arrangement of " Jupiter " with lyrics which they entitled " Joybringer ". Black Metal / Viking Metal band Bathory arranged a section of " Jupiter " as the melody of the song " Hammerheart ", from the album Twilight of the Gods.

Gustav Holst and Ninette de Valois lived in houses on this stretch, both of which have corresponding blue plaques.

While it is true that Tippett's music is not as obviously ' English ' in style as composers of the so-called ' English pastoral school ' - Vaughan Williams, Holst and Delius, and later Howells and Finzi-there is an underlying thread of nature mysticism running through it which is as English as William Blake, Samuel Palmer or John Keats.

Other famous examples of early 20th century suites are The Planets by Gustav Holst, a ' Suite for Orchestra ' in which each piece represents the astrological significance of one of the seven uninhabited planets then known, as well as his First Suite in E-flat and Second Suite in F for Military Band.

In the 1930s, the company presented standard repertoire works including operas by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Puccini, lighter works by Balfe, Donizetti, Offenbach and Johann Strauss, some novelties, among which were operas by Holst, Ethel Smyth and Charles Villiers Stanford, and an unusual attempt at staging an oratorio, Mendelssohn's Elijah.

* Gustav Holst: Second Suite in F for Military Band, which includes a movement titled " Song of the Blacksmith "

The revival was part of a wider national movement in the period around the First World War, and contributed to the creation of a " national " or " pastoral " school of classical music which incorporated traditional songs or motifs, as can be seen in the compositions of Percy Grainger ( 1882 – 1961 ), Ralph Vaughan Williams ( 1872 – 1951 ), George Butterworth ( 1885 – 1916 ), Gustav Holst ( 1874 – 1934 ) and Frederick Delius ( 1862 – 1934 ).

Nola Jones conducted the Regional Honor Band, which prepared ( but may not have publicly performed all of ) some works by Joseph Olivadoti, Jacob de Haan, Jan Van der Roost, Gustav Holst, Fred M Hubbell, and Thomas S Allen.

Holst harmonised the tune to make it usable as a hymn, which was included in Songs of Praise in 1926 with the same words, but the tune was then called Thaxted ( named after the village where Holst lived for many years ).

Stylistically his music was significantly different from the mainstream English school of the middle 20th century ; instead of following in the lyrical, folk-song influenced tradition of Holst, Vaughan Williams and others, he wrote music which was chromatic, contrapuntal, and acerbic — more akin to Schoenberg, Bartók, and Hindemith than to any of his English contemporaries.

* In the early 1970s, Granada Television produced a half-hour documentary in its " Parade " art series entitled Egdon Heath in which an actor portraying Gustav Holst walks across the barren heath while the music from his tone poem Egdon Heath is playing, and sees scenes and characters from novel which inspired the music.

The orchestral premiere of The Planets suite, conducted at Holst's request by Adrian Boult, was held at short notice on 29 September 1918, during the last weeks of World War I, in the Queen's Hall with the financial support of Holst's friend and fellow composer H. Balfour Gardiner It was hastily rehearsed ; the musicians of the Queen's Hall Orchestra first saw the complicated music only two hours before the performance, and the choir for " Neptune " was recruited from pupils from St Paul's Girls ' School ( where Holst taught ).

Following the dissolution of his partnership with Purcell, Elmslie worked occasionally with various other architects, including Lawrence A. Fournier, William S. Hutton, Hermann V. von Holst and William Eugene Drummond, and produced a number of banks, train stations, commercial, and institutional buildings during the 1920s and 1930s.

Holst's great-grandfather, Matthias von Holst, was of Nordic origin, and came to England in 1802 from Riga, Latvia.

Vaughan Williams's own music was in general quite different from Holst ’ s, but he praised Holst's work abundantly and the two men developed a shared interest in exploring and maintaining the English vocal and choral tradition as found primarily in folk song, madrigals and church music.

During these years Holst also became interested in Hindu mysticism and spirituality, and this interest led to the composition of several works set to translations of Sanskrit texts, including: Sita ( 1899 – 1906 ), a three-act opera based on an episode in the Ramayana ; Sāvitri ( 1908 ), a chamber opera based on a tale from the Mahabharata ; 4 groups of Hymns from the Rig Veda ( 1908 – 14 ); and two texts originally by Kalidasa: Two Eastern Pictures ( 1909 – 10 ) and The Cloud Messenger ( 1913 ).

To make these translations from Sanskrit to English, Holst enrolled at University College London ( UCL ) to study the language as a ' non-matriculated ' student.

After the lukewarm reception of his choral work The Cloud Messenger in 1912, Holst was again off travelling, financing a trip to Spain with fellow composers Balfour Gardiner and brothers Clifford and Arnold Bax with funds from an anonymous donation.

The Manse in Thaxted where Holst lived from 1917 to 1925.

Holst himself adapted the theme from " Jupiter " as a hymn tune under the name of " Thaxted ", specifically for the words " I Vow to Thee My Country ".

) His daughter Imogen later recalled of " I Vow to Thee " that " At the time when he was asked to set these words to music, Holst was so over-worked and over-weary that he felt relieved to discover they ' fitted ' the tune from Jupiter ".

Contrary to what is also sometimes said, Holst was not a pacifist but wanted to enlist as his friend Vaughan Williams did, but he was rejected as unfit: he suffered neuritis in his right arm — something that caused him to seek help from several amanuenses in scoring The Planets.

Later in the mid-80s, the Laibach sound became more richly layered with samples from classical music including from Gustav Holst ’ s The Planets.

Holst Township was named after a Norwegian pioneer farmer, H. J. Hoist, who from 1904 to 1908 was the county sheriff.

At the RCM he found his composition tutor, Sir Charles Stanford, of little help to him, but found inspiration from Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst and his fellow-students, Herbert Howells, Eugene Goossens and Arthur Benjamin.

She attended St Paul's Girls ' School in London from 1919 until 1926, and played in the school's orchestra under Gustav Holst.

Early RCM pupils included ( clockwise from top left ) Samuel Coleridge-Taylor | Coleridge-Taylor, Gustav Holst | Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams | Vaughan Williams and John Ireland ( composer ) | Ireland

* Gustav Holst: " Chaconne " from First Suite in E-flat major for Military Band ( according to one writer, technically a passacaglia, but according to others, technically a chaconne )