Elizabeth Poston

Composer Elizabeth Poston was popular as a composer of hymns, carols, and scores for films and radio programs. She also composed songs and chamber music and was widely recognized as a radio broadcaster and as the editor of several music anthologies issued by Penguin Books. Poston was born on October 24, 1905, in Stevenage in England's Hertfordshire region. She spent part of her childhood in the city's Rooks Nest House historical structure, where novelist E.M. Forster had grown up and which he described in the novel Howard's End. She studied piano with Howard Samuels at Queen Margaret's School and then attended the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying composition with Julius Harrison. Poston also received encouragement from Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock. She graduated in 1925, and three years later, her Violin Sonata was broadcast on BBC radio. Several of her songs were published in the late '20s. Poston was influenced by the movement toward folk influences in British composition, and she went on folksong-collecting expeditions in several countries in the '30s. She remained active as a keyboardist, giving the premiere of Walter Leigh's Concertino for harpsichord and strings in 1934. Poston was a familiar voice as a broadcaster on the BBC from 1939 to 1945 (and again in 1947), overseeing music in support of the war effort during that period. She composed incidental music for John Milton's masque Comus for the inauguration ceremonies of the BBC 3 service. During the postwar period, Poston wrote dozens of scores for radio plays, some of them by noted writers such as poet Dylan Thomas, as well as several film scores. Poston was president of the Society of Women Musicians from 1955 to 1961. She wrote several Christmas carols that are still widely performed, including The Boar's Head Carol (1960) and Jesus Christ the Apple Tree (1967), as well as larger choral works. Poston edited or co-edited the two volumes of The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols, as well as The Penguin Book of American Folksongs, with Alan Lomax. She also edited the 1970 edition of The Cambridge Hymnal. She died at Rooks Nest House on March 18, 1987. Many of her some 300 compositions await rediscover, but the St. Albans Cathedral Girls Choir issued an album of her Carols and Anthems on the Naxos label in 2023.
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