The son of a bassoonist in the Halle Orchestra, John Foulds played as a cellist
in promenade and theatre bands before himself joining the Halle cellos in 1900.
The conductor Hans Richter gave him conducting experience. Although Henry Wood
presented some of Foulds’s early orchestral compositions at th Queen’s Hall
Proms, he became best-known as a successful composer of light-music, such as
the once-famous *Keltic Lament* (1911). He was also a leading composer of
theatre scores, especially for his friends Lewis Casson and Sybil
Thorndike (the most famous was Foulds’s music for the
original production of George Bernard Shaw’s *Saint Joan*, with Thorndike in
the title role). Yret he wrote many orchestral, chamber, instrumental and
choral works of very different stamp. Few were printed in his lifetime; a
notable exception being the huge *World Requiem* (1919-21), in memory of the
Great War dead of all nations. This was performed at the Royal Albert Hall on
successive Armistice Nights, 1923-26, by up to 1,200 singers and players under the composer’s direction.

Foulds was a prolific composer from childhood. Though he could turn his hand
to almost any style he was an independent-minded explorer of new musical
resourceswho experimented with quarter-tones as early as the 1890s and wrote
pieces in exotic or non-diatonic modes. Like Gustav Holst, he was fascinated by
the mysticism of the East, especially India. Unlike Holst, he made a close
study of its music. (He married the violinist and authority on Indian music,
Maud McCarthy.) In the late 1930s Foulds became Director of European Music
for All-India Radio in Delhi. His ultimate dream was a
musical synthesis of East and West, and at the end of his life - he died
suddenly of cholera - he was composing pieces for ensembles of traditional
Indian instruments. Most of his principal scores remain unpublished, and many
manuscripts have been lost.