Two Eastern Pictures - Gustav Holst

Voorhees Choir, Women's Choir of Rutgers University.
Hingrid Kujawinski, Director.
Spring Concert, 2015
Gustav Holst was born in 1874 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in England. He started learning violin, piano, and trombone when was still a child and started to compose when he was twelve years old. He attended the Royal College of Music where he studied composition with Stanford. In 1895 Holst started to developed a great interest on Sanskrit literature and Hindu philosophy, then, he enrolled at University College London as a non-matriculate student to study Sanskrit. As a result of his interest for the language, he wrote several works using Hindu texts, which include the Two Eastern Pictures for women’s choir, which he wrote between 1909 and 1910, using two texts by the Indian poet Kalidasa who lived in the 5th century.