Arthur Strangways

Background

Fox Strangways was born in Norwich, the first son of Walter Aston Fox Strangways, an army officer, and his wife, Harriet Elizabeth née Buller.

Education

He was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a third-class degree in Classics in 1882.

Career

After a career as a schoolmaster, Fox Strangways developed an interest in Indian music, and in the years before the First World War he did much to bring Rabindranath Tagore to wider attention. Fox Strangways wrote music criticism for The Times, was chief music critic of The Observer, and founded the quarterly magazine Music and Letters. Together with the tenor Steuart Wilson, Fox Strangways made English translations of the lieder of Schubert and Schumann.

Foreign the following two years he was a student at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.

Foreign the next twenty-six years, Fox Strangways was a schoolmaster, first at Dulwich College (1884-1886) and then at his old school, Wellington (1887–1910), where he was the music master from 1893 to 1901, and a housemaster from 1901 to 1910. During his time at Wellington he visited India, and became interested in Indian music

After he left Wellington he returned to India for eight months in 1911, collecting material for a book,, which Grove"s Dictionary of Music and Musicians described in 2013 as "still a classic on its subject". He befriended the poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore, and acted, without payment, as his literary agent in the years before the First World War.

He secured valuable contracts for Tagore and made possible his international career.

Returning to England, Fox Strangways settled in London. He contributed concert reviews to The Times and later joined the staff of the paper. During the First World War he deputised for the chief music critic, H C Colles, who was away on active service.

In 1925 he moved to The Observer as chief music critic, where he remained until 1939, when he retired aged eighty and was succeeded by William Glock.

When Colles edited the third edition of Grove"s Dictionary (1927), Fox Strangways was a major contributor. In 1920 Fox Strangways realised an ambition to found a periodical "which should deal fully and authoritatively with musical matters of abiding interest".

He financed and edited Music and Letters, a quarterly publication. Fox Strangways recruited what The Times described as "a brilliant group of contributors packed its pages with good writing and good sense".

He retired as editor in 1936.

The magazine continued under a series of editors including Eric Blom, Richard Capell, Judge-Advocate Westrup, Denis Arnold, Nigel Fortune, John Whenham and Tim Carter, and continues (at 2013) to be published, latterly by the Oxford University Press. He retired to Dinton, Wiltshire, where he died at the age of 88.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The music of Hindostan

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Music of Hindostan (Classic Reprint)

    (Indus and Granges basins; and it is with the music of tha...)

  • The Music of Hindostan

Views

The first edition contained a controversial article about Elgar by Bernard Shaw praising him at the expense of Hubert Parry, to which Elgar responded in the next issue strongly defending Parry.