Robin Greville Holloway is a British composer. Primarily a composer for orchestra and ensemble, he produced a large body of music, including his opera Clarissa, and dozens of orchestral and vocal works.
Background
Robin Greville Holloway was born on October 19, 1943, in Leamington, Warwickshire, England, where his parents, both trained as artists, were stationed as part of the wartime camouflage operation. He is the son of Robert Charles and Pamela Mary (Jacob) Holloway.
Education
Robin Holloway attended St Paul's Cathedral School in London from 1953 till 1957. He was educated at King's College School in London. He also studied composition privately with Alexander Goehr from 1959 till 1963. At King’s College, Cambridge, he received a Master of Arts degree in 1964. From New College, Oxford, he received a Doctor of Music degree in 1967.
Career
After receiving a Doctor of Music degree, Robin Holloway was a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, England till 1975. Since 1974, he has been a member of the music faculty at the University of Cambridge. At the beginning, he was an assistant lecturer in music and in 1980 attained a full lecturer position. In 1999, he became a reader in musical composition and, between 2001 and his retirement in 2011, Professor of Musical Composition. Among his pupils are Thomas Ades, Huw Watkins, Peter Seabourne, David Collins, George Benjamin, Judith Weir, and Jonathan Dove.
His doctoral thesis was published as Debussy and Wagner. Holloway’s work contains a comparison of each composer’s style, a discussion of Wagner’s ideas, and, near the end of the book, a discussion of the scenario for Jeux. In addition to Debussy and Wagner, Holloway has contributed articles to periodicals including The Spectator magazine on music-related subjects and to books, including Opera on Record (1979), The Music of Alexander Goehr (1980), The Britten Companion (1984), and Electro (1991).
As an author, Holloway is known for two collections of his journalistic and other occasional writings such as On Music: Essays and Diversions 1963-2003 and Essays & Diversions II.
Views
Holloway has tended to mix romantic and modernistic procedures, laced with a generous range of musical quotations, in varying proportions according to the genre. He has been described as a neo-romantic composer, reflecting his own affinity for the music of the last part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries. While some of his works do conform to this description, others evince a more complex, nuanced, and at times ironic relationship to the music of the past, verging on the post-modern.
Quotations:
"Musical composition is the raison d'etre. Copious splurging from the St Paul's days, drying out mid-teens to early twenties, picking up thereafter and gradually developing an individual voice."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"His individual style has been formed by a productive conflict between Romanticism and Modernism." - composer David Matthews