title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: "Indiana"s keel was laid on 20 September 1939 at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Newport News, Virginia. She was launched on 21 November 1941; during the fitting out process, the former battleship , which had been rebuilt as a crane ship, lowered the 16-inch guns into their turret mountings. "Indiana" was commissioned into the fleet on 30 April 1942. After shakedown operations, she was sent directly to the Solomon Islands; "Indiana" arrived off Guadalcanal on 9 November 1942 and replaced her sister "South Dakota", which was in need of repairs. "Indiana"s operations off Guadalcanal consisted primarily of shore bombardment in support of the Marines fighting on the island.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: In November 1943, "Indiana" took part in the invasion of Tarawa, alongside her sister "South Dakota". During this operation, "Indiana" shot down her first aircraft. The ship also participated in the invasion of the Marshall Islands; on 1 February 1944, the battleship "Washington" collided with "Indiana" on her starboard side. 13 of the voids between the torpedo protection system and 13 fuel tanks were flooded, and the longitudinal bulkheads were severely damaged. The starboard outboard propeller was damaged, along with the shaft upon which it was mounted. Two quad-mount 40 mm guns and nine 20 mm guns were destroyed, along with two of the mounts for the 20 mm guns. "Indiana"s starboard catapult was torn from the ship, along with the Kingfisher float plane that had been sitting on it. The ship suffered a list to starboard, which was corrected by flooding compartments on the port side. "Indiana" sailed to Majuro Lagoon to be repaired enough to make the voyage back to Pearl Harbor; the resulting work was the largest single repair handled at Pearl Harbor other than the battleships damaged during the attack that started the war.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: After "Indiana" returned to active duty, she participated in the invasion of Hollandia in western New Guinea. The ship then returned to the central Pacific and bombarded Truk, and subsequently took part in operations off the Marianas Islands. On 19 June 1944 a Japanese torpedo bomber attempted to attack the ship, but "Indiana"s anti-aircraft gunners managed to destroy both the aircraft and the torpedo it had dropped, with no damage to the ship. Shortly thereafter, a second Japanese plane was shot down, but a third managed to crash into the ship. The aircraft disintegrated upon striking the side armor plates and scattered pieces of the plane across the stern. Five men were injured, but the ship suffered only very slight damage.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: "Indiana" returned to Puget Sound naval yard for a needed overhaul. The work lasted until January 1945; the ship returned to active duty on the 24th of that month. "Indiana" took part in the bombardment of Iwo Jima, as well as in attacks on the Japanese home islands. Following the shore bombardments, "Indiana" joined the task force that had assembled to invade Okinawa; the ship provided ground support fire as well as anti-aircraft defense against the increasing number of Kamikazes that were attacking the invasion fleet. "Indiana" continued in these duties until the end of the war in August 1945.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: In 1947, "Indiana" was put into the reserve fleet at Puget Sound. She was finally struck from the Navy List on 1 June 1962, and sold for scrapping on 6 September 1963 for $418,387. The ship breaking was finished in 1964. The battleship's mast was given to Indiana University at Bloomington, and her anchor is on display in Fort Wayne.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: "Massachusetts", the third ship of the class, was laid down on 20 July 1939 at the Fore River Shipyard of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was launched on 23 September 1941 and commissioned on 12 May 1942. After a shakedown cruise, the battleship departed Casco Bay, Maine on 24 October 1942 to support the Allied invasion of Africa, Operation Torch, as flagship of the Western Naval Task Force. Along with the heavy cruisers and and four destroyers, "Massachusetts" sailed to Casablanca on the evening of 7 November. The incomplete French battleship , missing one of her quadruple 380 mm/45 caliber gun turrets, was in the harbor, having traveled there in 1940 to escape the German invasion of France. American planes were fired upon and two French submarines were spotted leaving the harbor; at 07:03 the coastal battery at El Hank opened fire on "Massachusetts". It was mistakenly assumed that the gunfire had come from "Jean Bart", so the order to neutralize the battleship was given. "Massachusetts" hit "Jean Bart" five times, and in the process disabled the one active main battery turret. "Massachusetts" also severely damaged the destroyer , which subsequently had to be beached. Four merchant ships and a floating crane were also destroyed.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: During this engagement, seven French destroyers managed to escape the harbor and attempted to make their way to the invasion beaches. At 08:55, "Massachusetts" increased speed in order to attack the destroyers. The battery at El Hank continued to fire on the ship, and at 10:00, one of the 7.6-inch shells from the coastal battery struck her on the port side between the two forward main gun turrets. The shell penetrated the deck armor and started a small fire that was quickly extinguished. At this time, the French cruiser and another two destroyers left the port. "Massachusetts" and "Tuscaloosa" sank the destroyer , and at 10:05 a 16-inch shell from "Massachusetts" struck the destroyer "Milan", and put her out of action. "Primaguet" was forced to retire after she was hit by a 16-inch shell from "Massachusetts" and a number of smaller caliber shells from the American cruisers and . During the operations off the North African coast on 8 November, "Massachusetts" fired 786 main battery shells and 221 rounds from her 5-inch guns.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: Following her successful operations off North Africa, "Massachusetts" was taken in for an overhaul in the Boston Navy Yard. After the refitting, the ship sailed for the Pacific theater, and arrived in Nouméa on 4 March. The battleship supported operations in the South Pacific over the next months, including guarding convoy lanes, escorting aircraft carriers, and bombarding Japanese positions on various islands, including Nauru (8 December 1943) and Kwajalein (30 January 1944). Returning to carrier protection after the latter bombardment, "Massachusetts" provided anti-aircraft defense while Allied air attacks were sent against Saipan, Tinian and Guam; she also supported later invasions of the Caroline Islands and Hollandia. After bombarding Ponape Island on 1 May, the ship set course for the Puget Sound Navy Yard for an overhaul and to have her gun barrels relined, as they had worn out.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: Back on active duty, "Massachusetts" departed Pearl Harbor on 1 August. Joining Task Force 38, she supported forces landing around Leyte Gulf, and provided cover for task groups attacking Japanese warships in the Battle for Leyte Gulf, Okinawa, and Formosa. Moving to the Philippines, the battleship protected Allied ships and troops during the Battle of Mindoro and was part of a force that struck Manila. "Massachusetts", along with the rest of TF 38, ran into Typhoon Cobra, which had winds of around . She continued to operate with TF 38 from 30 December and 23 January 1945; the ships struck Formosa and Okinawa, provided cover for an amphibious assault on Lingayen, and made forays into the South China Sea to attack Japanese shipping and airfields.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: In February–early March 1945, "Massachusetts" provided anti-aircraft cover for airborne raids on Honshū, Iwo Jima and Kyushu. On 24 March, the ship bombarded Okinawa; for the remainder of that month and a majority of April, "Massachusetts" once again provided anti-aircraft defense, this time for Allied ships massed near Okinawa. On 5 June, she suffered through another typhoon, Louise, this one with winds. Five days later, she bombarded Minamidaitō. 1 July saw the Third Fleet and "Massachusetts" set course for Japan; the battleship protected carriers while they launched raids on Tokyo, then moved closer to land to hit targets with gunfire. "Massachusetts" attacked Japan's second largest iron and steel center, Kamaishi on Honshū, on 14 July; Hamamatsu on 28 July; and Kamaishi on 9 August. The latter bombardment was probably the last 16-inch shell fired during World War II.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: With the war over, "Massachusetts" voyaged to the Puget Sound Navy Yard once more for an overhaul; once completed, she left on 28 January 1946 and operated off the California coast before setting course for Hampton Roads via the Panama Canal. After she arrived on 22 April, "Massachusetts" was decommissioned on 27 March 1947 and entered the Atlantic Reserve Fleet; she was struck from the Naval Register on 1 June 1962, but not scrapped. Instead, the battleship was given to the Massachusetts Memorial Committee on 8 June 1965 to become a museum ship in Fall River, Massachusetts; she has been located in "Battleship Cove" ever since.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: Construction work on "Alabama", the fourth and final member of the "South Dakota" class, began on 1 February 1940 in the Norfolk Navy Yard with the keel laying. She was launched on 16 February 1942 and commissioned into service six months later, on 16 August. "Alabama" sailed on her shakedown cruise from the Chesapeake Bay on 11 November, which culminated in Casco Bay, Maine. Minor repairs were carried out in Norfolk, after which the big ship returned to Casco Bay to conduct training maneuvers with her sister, "South Dakota". Beginning in March 1943, "Alabama" was assigned to the British Home Fleet, and tasked with convoy escort duties on the route to the Soviet Union. She was relieved of these duties in July so that she could return to Norfolk for a brief overhaul in August.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: Later in August, "Alabama" departed for the Pacific theater; the ship was assigned to the US Third Fleet during the amphibious operations in the Gilbert islands, particularly Kwajalein in early 1944. During the night of 21 February 1944, "Alabama"s 5-inch guns were firing upon Japanese aircraft in the area. The ship turned in the direction of the Japanese aircraft in order to better engage them, but the rearmost turret was masked behind the amidships mount. The gunner in the rearmost turret accidentally overrode the safety mechanism that prevented the gun from firing in that circumstance, and when the gun was fired, it hit the 5-inch turret in front of it. Five men were killed and 11 wounded in the incident; an investigation revealed that the override switch was faulty and prone to accidental operation.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: "Alabama" shot down her first Japanese aircraft the following month, in March 1944. The ship conducted anti-aircraft defense operations during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. After that, she joined other battleships that were providing gunfire support to the ground troops in the Marianas islands. She was assigned to Task Force 34 during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. In early 1945, "Alabama" returned for repair and refit work at the Puget Sound naval yard; the work consisted primarily of improvements to her guns and radar equipment. By early May the ship returned to fleet operations. She was tasked with providing anti-aircraft support to the fast carrier groups that were launching air strikes on the Japanese main island of Kyushu. In July 1945, she shelled a number of areas in Japan, including Kamaishi on the 14th, Hitachi on the 18th, and Hamamatsu on the 29th and 30th. These turned out to be her last offensive operations of the war. Her last duty in the Far East was to assist in the landing of occupation forces in Japan, after which she departed for the United States.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: On 9 January 1947, "Alabama" was placed into the reserve fleet in Bremerton, Washington, where she remained until 1 June 1962, when she was removed from the Navy List. "Alabama" was transferred to the USS "Alabama" Battleship Commission, which had acquired the ship in order to turn her into a memorial. She was towed out of Bremerton on 2 July 1964, to Mobile, Alabama, where she currently resides as a museum ship, the main attraction of Battleship Memorial Park.


title: South Dakota-class battleship (1939)

text: On 26 July 1954, a conversion proposal for the "South Dakota"-class ships was ordered by the Chairman of the Ship Characteristics Board. The request was made for the ships' speed to be increased to at least 31 knots. To do so, the design staff decided to remove the after turret and use the weight and space gained to install either a set of improved steam turbines or a set of gas turbines. Either system would have to produce at least 256,000 shaft horsepower (190 MW)—the minimum requirement to achieve 31 knots on the "South Dakota" hull. Unfortunately, this would have necessitated alterations to the hull form, particularly in the rear of the ship. Larger propellers were also required, and all four shafts would have had to have been completely rebuilt to accommodate the changes. Estimates for the project ran as high as $40,000,000 per ship, and this did not include the cost of reactivating the ship and upgrades to its electrical and combat systems. As a result, the conversion program was halted.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Gustav Theodore Holst (born Gustavus Theodore von Holst; 21 September 1874 – 25 May 1934) was an English composer, arranger and teacher. Best known for his orchestral suite "The Planets", he composed many other works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success. His distinctive compositional style was the product of many influences, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss being most crucial early in his development. The subsequent inspiration of the English folksong revival of the early 20th century, and the example of such rising modern composers as Maurice Ravel, led Holst to develop and refine an individual style.


title: Gustav Holst

text: There were professional musicians in the previous three generations of Holst's family and it was clear from his early years that he would follow the same calling. He hoped to become a pianist, but was prevented by neuritis in his right arm. Despite his father's reservations, he pursued a career as a composer, studying at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford. Unable to support himself by his compositions, he played the trombone professionally and later became a teacher—a great one, according to his colleague Ralph Vaughan Williams. Among other teaching activities he built up a strong tradition of performance at Morley College, where he served as musical director from 1907 until 1924, and pioneered music education for women at St Paul's Girls' School, where he taught from 1905 until his death in 1934. He was the founder of a series of Whitsun music festivals, which ran from 1916 for the remainder of his life.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's works were played frequently in the early years of the 20th century, but it was not until the international success of "The Planets" in the years immediately after the First World War that he became a well-known figure. A shy man, he did not welcome this fame, and preferred to be left in peace to compose and teach. In his later years his uncompromising, personal style of composition struck many music lovers as too austere, and his brief popularity declined. Nevertheless, he was an important influence on a number of younger English composers, including Edmund Rubbra, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten. Apart from "The Planets" and a handful of other works, his music was generally neglected until the 1980s, when recordings of much of his output became available.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the elder of the two children of Adolph von Holst, a professional musician, and his wife, Clara Cox, "née" Lediard. She was of mostly British descent, daughter of a respected Cirencester solicitor; the Holst side of the family was of mixed Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, with at least one professional musician in each of the previous three generations.


title: Gustav Holst

text: One of Holst's great-grandfathers, Matthias Holst, born in Riga, Latvia, was of German origin; he served as composer and harp-teacher to the Imperial Russian Court in St Petersburg. Matthias's son Gustavus, who moved to England with his parents as a child in 1802, was a composer of salon-style music and a well-known harp teacher. He appropriated the aristocratic prefix "von" and added it to the family name in the hope of gaining enhanced prestige and attracting pupils.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's father, Adolph von Holst, became organist and choirmaster at All Saints' Church, Cheltenham; he also taught, and gave piano recitals. His wife, Clara, a former pupil, was a talented singer and pianist. They had two sons; Gustav's younger brother, Emil Gottfried, became known as Ernest Cossart, a successful actor in the West End, New York and Hollywood. Clara died in February 1882, and the family moved to another house in Cheltenham, where Adolph recruited his sister Nina to help raise the boys. Gustav recognised her devotion to the family and dedicated several of his early compositions to her. In 1885 Adolph married Mary Thorley Stone, another of his pupils. They had two sons, Matthias (known as "Max") and Evelyn ("Thorley"). Mary von Holst was absorbed in theosophy and not greatly interested in domestic matters. All four of Adolph's sons were subject to what one biographer calls "benign neglect", and Gustav in particular was "not overburdened with attention or understanding, with a weak sight and a weak chest, both neglected—he was 'miserable and scared'."


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst was taught to play the piano and the violin; he enjoyed the former but hated the latter. At the age of twelve he took up the trombone at his father's suggestion, thinking that playing a brass instrument might improve his asthma. Holst was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School between 1886 and 1891. He started composing in or about 1886; inspired by Macaulay's poem "" he began, but soon abandoned, an ambitious setting of the work for chorus and orchestra. His early compositions included piano pieces, organ voluntaries, songs, anthems and a symphony (from 1892). His main influences at this stage were Mendelssohn, Chopin, Grieg and above all Sullivan.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Adolph tried to steer his son away from composition, hoping that he would have a career as a pianist. Holst was oversensitive and miserable. His eyes were weak, but no one realized that he needed to wear spectacles. Holst's health played a decisive part in his musical future; he had never been strong, and in addition to his asthma and poor eyesight he suffered from neuritis, which made playing the piano difficult. He said that the affected arm was "like a jelly overcharged with electricity".


title: Gustav Holst

text: After Holst left school in 1891, Adolph paid for him to spend four months in Oxford studying counterpoint with George Frederick Sims, organist of Merton College. On his return, Holst obtained his first professional appointment, aged seventeen, as organist and choirmaster at Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire. The post brought with it the conductorship of the Bourton-on-the-Water Choral Society, which offered no extra remuneration but provided valuable experience that enabled him to hone his conducting skills. In November 1891 Holst gave what was perhaps his first public performance as a pianist; he and his father played the Brahms "Hungarian Dances" at a concert in Cheltenham. The programme for the event gives his name as "Gustav" rather than "Gustavus"; he was called by the shorter version from his early years.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In 1892 Holst wrote the music for an operetta in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, "Lansdown Castle, or The Sorcerer of Tewkesbury". The piece was performed at Cheltenham Corn Exchange in February 1893; it was well received and its success encouraged him to persevere with composing. He applied for a scholarship at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London, but the composition scholarship for that year was won by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Holst was accepted as a non-scholarship student, and Adolph borrowed £100 to cover the first year's expenses. Holst left Cheltenham for London in May 1893. Money was tight, and partly from frugality and partly from his own inclination he became a vegetarian and a teetotaller. Two years later he was finally granted a scholarship, which slightly eased his financial difficulties, but he retained his austere personal regime.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's professors at the RCM were Frederick Sharpe (piano), William Stephenson Hoyte (organ), George Case (trombone), Georges Jacobi (instrumentation) and the director of the college, Hubert Parry (history). After preliminary lessons with W. S. Rockstro and Frederick Bridge, Holst was granted his wish to study composition with Charles Villiers Stanford.


title: Gustav Holst

text: To support himself during his studies Holst played the trombone professionally, at seaside resorts in the summer and in London theatres in the winter. His daughter and biographer, Imogen Holst, records that from his fees as a player "he was able to afford the necessities of life: board and lodging, manuscript paper, and tickets for standing room in the gallery at Covent Garden Opera House on Wagner evenings". He secured an occasional engagement in symphony concerts, playing in 1897 under the baton of Richard Strauss at the Queen's Hall.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Like many musicians of his generation, Holst came under Wagner's spell. He had recoiled from the music of "Götterdämmerung" when he heard it at Covent Garden in 1892, but encouraged by his friend and fellow-student Fritz Hart he persevered and quickly became an ardent Wagnerite. Wagner supplanted Sullivan as the main influence on his music, and for some time, as Imogen put it, "ill-assimilated wisps of "Tristan" inserted themselves on nearly every page of his own songs and overtures." Stanford admired some of Wagner's works, and had in his earlier years been influenced by him, but Holst's sub-Wagnerian compositions met with his disapprobation: "It won't do, me boy; it won't do". Holst respected Stanford, describing him to a fellow-pupil, Herbert Howells, as "the one man who could get any one of us out of a technical mess", but he found that his fellow students, rather than the faculty members, had the greater influence on his development.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In 1895, shortly after celebrating his twenty-first birthday, Holst met Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became a lifelong friend and had more influence on Holst's music than anybody else. Stanford emphasised the need for his students to be self-critical, but Holst and Vaughan Williams became one another's chief critics; each would play his latest composition to the other while still working on it. Vaughan Williams later observed, "What one really learns from an Academy or College is not so much from one's official teachers as from one's fellow-students ... [we discussed] every subject under the sun from the lowest note of the double bassoon to the philosophy of "Jude the Obscure". In 1949 he wrote of their relationship, "Holst declared that his music was influenced by that of his friend: the converse is certainly true."


title: Gustav Holst

text: The year 1895 was also the bicentenary of Henry Purcell, which was marked by various performances including Stanford conducting "Dido and Aeneas" at the Lyceum Theatre; the work profoundly impressed Holst, who over twenty years later confessed to a friend that his search for "the (or a) musical idiom of the English language" had been inspired "unconsciously" by "hearing the recits in Purcell's "Dido"".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Another early influence was William Morris. In Vaughan Williams's words, "It was now that Holst discovered the feeling of unity with his fellow men which made him afterwards a great teacher. A sense of comradeship rather than political conviction led him, while still a student, to join the Socialist League which met at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith." At Kelmscott House, Morris's home, Holst attended lectures by his host and Bernard Shaw. His own socialism was moderate in character, but he enjoyed the club for its good company and his admiration of Morris as a man. His ideals were influenced by Morris's but had a different emphasis. Morris had written, "I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few. I want all persons to be educated according to their capacity, not according to the amount of money which their parents happen to have". Holst said, "'Aristocracy in art'—art is not for all but only for the chosen few—but the only way to find those few is to bring art to everyone—then the artists have a sort of masonic signal by which they recognise each other in the crowd." He was invited to conduct the Hammersmith Socialist Choir, teaching them madrigals by Thomas Morley, choruses by Purcell, and works by Mozart, Wagner and himself. One of his choristers was (Emily) Isobel Harrison (1876–1969), a beautiful soprano two years his junior. He fell in love with her; she was at first unimpressed by him, but she came round and they were engaged, though with no immediate prospect of marriage given Holst's tiny income.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In 1898 the RCM offered Holst a further year's scholarship, but he felt that he had learned as much as he could there and that it was time, as he put it, to "learn by doing". Some of his compositions were published and performed; the previous year "The Times" had praised his song "Light Leaves Whisper", "a moderately elaborate composition in six parts, treated with a good deal of expression and poetic feeling".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Occasional successes notwithstanding, Holst found that "man cannot live by composition alone"; he took posts as organist at various London churches, and continued playing the trombone in theatre orchestras. In 1898 he was appointed first trombonist and "répétiteur" with the Carl Rosa Opera Company and toured with the Scottish Orchestra. Though a capable rather than a virtuoso player he won the praise of the leading conductor Hans Richter, for whom he played at Covent Garden. His salary was only just enough to live on, and he supplemented it by playing in a popular orchestra called the "White Viennese Band", conducted by Stanislas Wurm.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst enjoyed playing for Wurm, and learned much from him about drawing rubato from players. Nevertheless, longing to devote his time to composing, Holst found the necessity of playing for "the Worm" or any other light orchestra "a wicked and loathsome waste of time". Vaughan Williams did not altogether agree with his friend about this; he admitted that some of the music was "trashy" but thought it had been useful to Holst nonetheless: "To start with, the very worst a trombonist has to put up with is as nothing compared to what a church organist has to endure; and secondly, Holst is above all an orchestral composer, and that sure touch which distinguishes his orchestral writing is due largely to the fact that he has been an orchestral player; he has learnt his art, both technically and in substance, not at second hand from text books and models, but from actual live experience."


title: Gustav Holst

text: With a modest income secured, Holst was able to marry Isobel; the ceremony was at Fulham Register Office on 22 June 1901. Their marriage lasted until his death; there was one child, Imogen, born in 1907. On 24 April 1902 Dan Godfrey and the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra premiered Holst's symphony "The Cotswolds" (Op. 8), the slow movement of which is a lament for William Morris who had died in October 1896, three years before Holst began work on the piece. In 1903 Adolph von Holst died, leaving a small legacy. Holst and his wife decided, as Imogen later put it, that "as they were always hard up the only thing to do was to spend it all at once on a holiday in Germany".


title: Gustav Holst

text: While in Germany, Holst reappraised his professional life, and in 1903 he decided to abandon orchestral playing to concentrate on composition. His earnings as a composer were too little to live on, and two years later he accepted the offer of a teaching post at James Allen's Girls' School, Dulwich, which he held until 1921. He also taught at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, where among other innovations he gave the British premieres of two Bach cantatas. The two teaching posts for which he is probably best known were director of music at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, from 1905 until his death, and director of music at Morley College from 1907 to 1924.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Vaughan Williams wrote of the former establishment: "Here he did away with the childish sentimentality which schoolgirls were supposed to appreciate and substituted Bach and Vittoria; a splendid background for immature minds." Several of Holst's pupils at St Paul's went on to distinguished careers, including the soprano Joan Cross, and the oboist and cor anglais player Helen Gaskell.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Of Holst's impact on Morley College, Vaughan Williams wrote: "[A] bad tradition had to be broken down. The results were at first discouraging, but soon a new spirit appeared and the music of Morley College, together with its offshoot the 'Whitsuntide festival' ... became a force to be reckoned with". Before Holst's appointment, Morley College had not treated music very seriously (Vaughan Williams's "bad tradition"), and at first Holst's exacting demands drove many students away. He persevered, and gradually built up a class of dedicated music-lovers.


title: Gustav Holst

text: According to the composer Edmund Rubbra, who studied under him in the early 1920s, Holst was "a teacher who often came to lessons weighted, not with the learning of Prout and Stainer, but with a miniature score of "Petrushka" or the then recently published Mass in G minor of Vaughan Williams". He never sought to impose his own ideas on his composition pupils. Rubbra recalled that he would divine a student's difficulties and gently guide him to finding the solution for himself. "I do not recall that Holst added one single note of his own to anything I wrote, but he would suggest—if I agreed!—that, given such and such a phrase, the following one would be better if it took such and such a course; if I did not see this, the point would not be insisted upon ... He frequently took away [because of] his abhorrence of unessentials."


title: Gustav Holst

text: As a composer Holst was frequently inspired by literature. He set poetry by Thomas Hardy and Robert Bridges and, a particular influence, Walt Whitman, whose words he set in "Dirge for Two Veterans" and "The Mystic Trumpeter" (1904). He wrote an orchestral "Walt Whitman Overture" in 1899. While on tour with the Carl Rosa company Holst had read some of Max Müller's books, which inspired in him a keen interest in Sanskrit texts, particularly the Rig Veda hymns. He found the existing English versions of the texts unconvincing, and decided to make his own translations, despite his lack of skills as a linguist. He enrolled in 1909 at University College, London, to study the language.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Imogen commented on his translations: "He was not a poet, and there are occasions when his verses seem naïve. But they never sound vague or slovenly, for he had set himself the task of finding words that would be 'clear and dignified' and that would 'lead the listener into another world'". His settings of translations of Sanskrit texts included "Sita" (1899–1906), a three-act opera based on an episode in the "Ramayana" (which he eventually entered for a competition for English opera set by the Milan music publisher Tito Ricordi); "Savitri" (1908), a chamber opera based on a tale from the "Mahabharata"; four groups of "Hymns from the Rig Veda" (1908–14); and two texts originally by Kālidāsa: "Two Eastern Pictures" (1909–10) and "The Cloud Messenger" (1913).


title: Gustav Holst

text: Towards the end of the nineteenth century, British musical circles had experienced a new interest in national folk music. Some composers, such as Sullivan and Elgar, remained indifferent, but Parry, Stanford, Stainer and Alexander Mackenzie were founding members of the Folk-Song Society. Parry considered that by recovering English folk song, English composers would find an authentic national voice; he commented, "in true folk-songs there is no sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity". Vaughan Williams was an early and enthusiastic convert to this cause, going round the English countryside collecting and noting down folk songs. These had an influence on Holst. Though not as passionate on the subject as his friend, he incorporated a number of folk melodies in his own compositions and made several arrangements of folk songs collected by others. The "Somerset Rhapsody" (1906–07), was written at the suggestion of the folk-song collector Cecil Sharp and made use of tunes that Sharp had noted down. Holst described its performance at the Queen's Hall in 1910 as "my first real success". A few years later Holst became excited by another musical renaissance—the rediscovery of English madrigal composers. Weelkes was his favourite of all the Tudor composers, but Byrd also meant much to him.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst was a keen rambler. He walked extensively in England, Italy, France and Algeria. In 1908 he travelled to Algeria on medical advice as a treatment for asthma and the depression that he suffered after his opera "Sita" failed to win the Ricordi prize. This trip inspired the suite "Beni Mora", which incorporated music he heard in the Algerian streets. Vaughan Williams wrote of this exotic work, "if it had been played in Paris rather than London it would have given its composer a European reputation, and played in Italy would probably have caused a riot."


title: Gustav Holst

text: In June 1911 Holst and his Morley College students gave the first performance since the seventeenth century of Purcell's "The Fairy-Queen". The full score had been lost soon after Purcell's death in 1695, and had only recently been found. Twenty-eight Morley students copied out the complete vocal and orchestral parts. There were 1,500 pages of music and it took the students almost eighteen months to copy them out in their spare time. A concert performance of the work was given at The Old Vic, preceded by an introductory talk by Vaughan Williams. "The Times" praised Holst and his forces for "a most interesting and artistic performance of this very important work".


title: Gustav Holst

text: After this success, Holst was disappointed the following year by the lukewarm reception of his choral work "The Cloud Messenger". He again went travelling, accepting an invitation from H. Balfour Gardiner to join him and the brothers Clifford and Arnold Bax in Spain. During this holiday Clifford Bax introduced Holst to astrology, an interest that later inspired his suite "The Planets". Holst cast his friends' horoscopes for the rest of his life and referred to astrology as his "pet vice".


title: Gustav Holst

text: In 1913, St Paul's Girls' School opened a new music wing, and Holst composed "St Paul's Suite" for the occasion. The new building contained a sound-proof room, handsomely equipped, where he could work undisturbed. Holst and his family moved to a house in Brook Green, very close to the school. For the previous six years they had lived in a pretty house overlooking the Thames at Barnes, but the river air, frequently foggy, affected his breathing. For use at weekends and during school holidays, Holst and his wife bought a cottage in Thaxted, Essex, surrounded by mediaeval buildings and ample rambling opportunities. In 1917 they moved to a house in the centre of the town, where they stayed until 1925.


title: Gustav Holst

text: At Thaxted, Holst became friendly with the Rev Conrad Noel, known as the "Red Vicar", who supported the Independent Labour Party and espoused many causes unpopular with conservative opinion. Noel also encouraged the revival of folk-dancing and processionals as part of church ceremonies, innovations which caused controversy among traditionally-minded churchgoers. Holst became an occasional organist and choirmaster at Thaxted Parish Church; he also developed an interest in bell-ringing. He started an annual music festival at Whitsuntide in 1916; students from Morley College and St Paul's Girls' School performed together with local participants.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's "a cappella" carol, "This Have I Done for My True Love", was dedicated to Noel in recognition of his interest in the ancient origins of religion (the composer always referred to the work as "The Dancing Day"). It received its first performance during the Third Whitsun Festival at Thaxted in May 1918. During that festival, Noel, who would become a staunch supporter of Russia's October Revolution, demanded in a Saturday message during the service that there should be a greater political commitment from those who participated in the church activities; his claim that several of Holst's pupils (implicitly those from St Paul's Girls' School) were merely "camp followers" caused offence. Holst, anxious to protect his students from being embroiled in ecclesiastical conflict, moved the Whitsun Festival to Dulwich, though he himself continued to help with the Thaxted choir and to play the church organ on occasion.


title: Gustav Holst

text: At the outbreak of the First World War, Holst tried to enlist but was rejected as unfit for military service. He felt frustrated that he could not contribute to the war effort. His wife became a volunteer ambulance driver; Vaughan Williams went on active service to France as did Holst's brother Emil; Holst's friends the composers George Butterworth and Cecil Coles were killed in battle. He continued to teach and compose; he worked on "The Planets" and prepared his chamber opera "Savitri" for performance. It was first given in December 1916 by students of the London School of Opera at the Wellington Hall in St John's Wood. It attracted no attention at the time from the main newspapers, though when professionally staged five years later it was greeted as "a perfect little masterpiece." In 1917 he wrote "The Hymn of Jesus" for chorus and orchestra, a work which remained unperformed until after the war.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In 1918, as the war neared its end, Holst finally had the prospect of a job that offered him the chance to serve. The music section of the YMCA's education department needed volunteers to work with British troops stationed in Europe awaiting demobilisation. Morley College and St Paul's Girls' School offered him a year's leave of absence, but there remained one obstacle: the YMCA felt that his surname looked too German to be acceptable in such a role. He formally changed "von Holst" to "Holst" by deed poll in September 1918. He was appointed as the YMCA's musical organiser for the Near East, based in Salonica.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst was given a spectacular send-off. The conductor Adrian Boult recalled, "Just before the Armistice, Gustav Holst burst into my office: 'Adrian, the YMCA are sending me to Salonica quite soon and Balfour Gardiner, bless his heart, has given me a parting present consisting of the Queen's Hall, full of the Queen's Hall Orchestra for the whole of a Sunday morning. So we're going to do "The Planets", and you've got to conduct'." There was a burst of activity to get things ready in time. The girls at St Paul's helped to copy out the orchestral parts, and the women of Morley and the St Paul's girls learned the choral part in the last movement.


title: Gustav Holst

text: The performance was given on 29 September to an invited audience including Sir Henry Wood and most of the professional musicians in London. Five months later, when Holst was in Greece, Boult introduced "The Planets" to the general public, at a concert in February 1919; Holst sent him a long letter full of suggestions, but failed to convince him that the suite should be played in full. The conductor believed that about half an hour of such radically new music was all the public could absorb at first hearing, and he gave only five of the seven movements on that occasion.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst enjoyed his time in Salonica, from where he was able to visit Athens, which greatly impressed him. His musical duties were wide-ranging, and even obliged him on occasion to play the violin in the local orchestra: "it was great fun, but I fear I was not of much use". He returned to England in June 1919.


title: Gustav Holst

text: On his return from Greece, Holst resumed his teaching and composing. In addition to his existing work he accepted a lectureship in composition at the University of Reading and joined Vaughan Williams in teaching composition at their "alma mater" the RCM. Inspired by Adrian Boult's conducting classes at the RCM, Holst tried to further pioneer music education for women by proposing to the High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School that he should invite Boult to give classes at the school: "It would be glorious if the SPGS turned out the only women conductors in the world!" In his soundproof room at SPGS he composed the "Ode to Death", a setting of a poem by Whitman, which according to Vaughan Williams is considered by many to be Holst's most beautiful choral work.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst, in his forties, suddenly found himself in demand. The New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra vied to be the first to play "The Planets" in the US. The success of that work was followed in 1920 by an enthusiastic reception for "The Hymn of Jesus", described in "The Observer" as "one of the most brilliant and one of the most sincere pieces of choral and orchestral expression heard for some years." "The Times" called it "undoubtedly the most strikingly original choral work which has been produced in this country for many years."


title: Gustav Holst

text: To his surprise and dismay Holst was becoming famous. Celebrity was something wholly foreign to his nature. As the music scholar Byron Adams puts it, "he struggled for the rest of his life to extricate himself from the web of garish publicity, public incomprehension and professional envy woven about him by this unsought-for success." He turned down honours and awards proffered to him, and refused to grant interviews or sign autographs.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's comic opera "The Perfect Fool" (1923) was widely seen as a satire of "Parsifal", though Holst firmly denied it. The piece, with Maggie Teyte in the leading soprano role and Eugene Goossens conducting, was enthusiastically received at its premiere in the Royal Opera House. At a concert in Reading in 1923, Holst slipped and fell, suffering concussion. He seemed to make a good recovery, and he felt up to accepting an invitation to the US, lecturing and conducting at the University of Michigan. After he returned he found himself more and more in demand, to conduct, prepare his earlier works for publication, and, as before, to teach. The strain caused by these demands on him was too great; on doctor's orders he cancelled all professional engagements during 1924, and retreated to Thaxted. In 1925 he resumed his work at St Paul's Girls' School, but did not return to any of his other posts.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's productivity as a composer benefited almost at once from his release from other work. His works from this period include the "Choral Symphony" to words by Keats (a "Second Choral Symphony" to words by George Meredith exists only in fragments). A short Shakespearian opera, "At the Boar's Head", followed; neither had the immediate popular appeal of "A Moorside Suite" for brass band of 1928.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In 1927 Holst was commissioned by the New York Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony. Instead, he wrote an orchestral piece "Egdon Heath", inspired by Thomas Hardy's Wessex. It was first performed in February 1928, a month after Hardy's death, at a memorial concert. By this time the public's brief enthusiasm for everything Holstian was waning, and the piece was not well received in New York. Olin Downes in "The New York Times" opined that "the new score seemed long and undistinguished". The day after the American performance, Holst conducted the City of Birmingham Orchestra in the British premiere. "The Times" acknowledged the bleakness of the work but allowed that it matched Hardy's grim view of the world: ""Egdon Heath" is not likely to be popular, but it says what the composer wants to say, whether we like it or not, and truth is one aspect of duty." Holst had been distressed by hostile reviews of some of his earlier works, but he was indifferent to critical opinion of "Egdon Heath", which he regarded as, in Adams's phrase, his "most perfectly realized composition".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Towards the end of his life Holst wrote the "Choral Fantasia" (1930) and he was commissioned by the BBC to write a piece for military band; the resulting prelude and scherzo "Hammersmith" was a tribute to the place where he had spent most of his life. The composer and critic Colin Matthews considers the work "as uncompromising in its way as "Egdon Heath", discovering, in the words of Imogen Holst, 'in the middle of an over-crowded London ... the same tranquillity that he had found in the solitude of Egdon Heath'". The work was unlucky in being premiered at a concert that also featured the London premiere of Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast", by which it was somewhat overshadowed.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst wrote a score for a British film, "The Bells" (1931), and was amused to be recruited as an extra in a crowd scene. Both film and score are now lost. He wrote a "jazz band piece" that Imogen later arranged for orchestra as "Capriccio". Having composed operas throughout his life with varying success, Holst found for his last opera, "The Wandering Scholar", what Matthews calls "the right medium for his oblique sense of humour, writing with economy and directness".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Harvard University offered Holst a lectureship for the first six months of 1932. Arriving via New York he was pleased to be reunited with his brother, Emil, whose acting career under the name of Ernest Cossart had taken him to Broadway; but Holst was dismayed by the continual attentions of press interviewers and photographers. He enjoyed his time at Harvard, but was taken ill while there: a duodenal ulcer prostrated him for some weeks. He returned to England, joined briefly by his brother for a holiday together in the Cotswolds. His health declined, and he withdrew further from musical activities. One of his last efforts was to guide the young players of the St Paul's Girls' School orchestra through one of his final compositions, the "Brook Green Suite", in March 1934.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst died in London on 25 May 1934, at the age of 59, of heart failure following an operation on his ulcer. His ashes were interred at Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, close to the memorial to Thomas Weelkes, his favourite Tudor composer. Bishop George Bell gave the memorial oration at the funeral, and Vaughan Williams conducted music by Holst and himself.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's absorption of folksong, not only in the melodic sense but in terms of its simplicity and economy of expression, helped to develop a style that many of his contemporaries, even admirers, found austere and cerebral. This is contrary to the popular identification of Holst with "The Planets", which Matthews believes has masked his status as a composer of genuine originality. Against charges of coldness in the music, Imogen cites Holst's characteristic "sweeping modal tunes mov[ing] reassuringly above the steps of a descending bass", while Michael Kennedy points to the 12 Humbert Wolfe settings of 1929, and the 12 Welsh folksong settings for unaccompanied chorus of 1930–31, as works of true warmth.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Many of the characteristics that Holst employed — unconventional time signatures, rising and falling scales, ostinato, bitonality and occasional polytonality — set him apart from other English composers. Vaughan Williams remarked that Holst always said in his music what he wished to say, directly and concisely; "He was not afraid of being obvious when the occasion demanded, nor did he hesitate to be remote when remoteness expressed his purpose". Kennedy has surmised that Holst's economy of style was in part a product of the composer's poor health: "the effort of writing it down compelled an artistic economy which some felt was carried too far". However, as an experienced instrumentalist and orchestra member, Holst understood music from the standpoint of his players and made sure that, however challenging, their parts were always practicable. According to his pupil Jane Joseph, Holst fostered in performance "a spirit of practical comradeship ... none could know better than he the boredom possible to a professional player, and the music that rendered boredom impossible".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Although Holst wrote a large number of works—particularly songs—during his student days and early adulthood, almost everything he wrote before 1904 he later classified as derivative "early horrors". Nevertheless, the composer and critic Colin Matthews recognises even in these apprentice works an "instinctive orchestral flair". Of the few pieces from this period which demonstrate some originality, Matthews pinpoints the G minor String Trio of 1894 (unperformed until 1974) as the first underivative work produced by Holst. Matthews and Imogen Holst each highlight the "Elegy" movement in "The Cotswold Symphony" (1899–1900) as among the more accomplished of the apprentice works, and Imogen discerns glimpses of her father's real self in the 1899 "Suite de ballet" and the "Ave Maria" of 1900. She and Matthews have asserted that Holst found his genuine voice in his setting of Whitman's verses, "The Mystic Trumpeter" (1904), in which the trumpet calls that characterise Mars in "The Planets" are briefly anticipated. In this work, Holst first employs the technique of bitonality—the use of two keys simultaneously.


title: Gustav Holst

text: At the beginning of the 20th century, according to Matthews, it appeared that Holst might follow Schoenberg into late Romanticism. Instead, as Holst recognised afterwards, his encounter with Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" prompted his searching for a "musical idiom of the English language"; the folksong revival became a further catalyst for Holst to seek inspiration from other sources during the first decade or so of the new century.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's interest in Indian mythology, shared by many of his contemporaries, first became musically evident in the opera "Sita" (1901–06). During the opera's long gestation, Holst worked on other Indian-themed pieces. These included "Maya" (1901) for violin and piano, regarded by the composer and writer Raymond Head as "an insipid salon-piece whose musical language is dangerously close to Stephen Adams". Then, through Vaughan Williams, Holst discovered and became an admirer of the music of Ravel, whom he considered a "model of purity" on the level with Haydn, another composer he greatly admired.


title: Gustav Holst

text: The combined influence of Ravel, Hindu spiritualism and English folk tunes enabled Holst to get beyond the once all-consuming influences of Wagner and Richard Strauss and to forge his own style. Imogen Holst has acknowledged Holst's own suggestion (written to Vaughan Williams): "[O]ne ought to follow Wagner until he leads you to fresh things". She notes that although much of his grand opera, "Sita", is "'good old Wagnerian bawling' ... towards the end a change comes over the music, and the beautifully calm phrases of the hidden chorus representing the Voice of the Earth are in Holst's own language."


title: Gustav Holst

text: According to Rubbra, the publication in 1911 of Holst's Rig Veda Hymns was a landmark event in the composer's development: "Before this, Holst's music had, indeed, shown the clarity of utterance which has always been his characteristic, but harmonically there was little to single him out as an important figure in modern music." Dickinson describes these vedic settings as pictorial rather than religious; although the quality is variable the sacred texts clearly "touched vital springs in the composer's imagination". While the music of Holst's Indian verse settings remained generally western in character, in some of the vedic settings he experimented with Indian "raga" (scales).


title: Gustav Holst

text: The chamber opera "Savitri" (1908) is written for three solo voices, a small hidden female chorus, and an instrumental combination of two flutes, a cor anglais and a double string quartet. The music critic John Warrack comments on the "extraordinary expressive subtlety" with which Holst deploys the sparse forces: "... [T]he two unaccompanied vocal lines opening the work skilfully convey the relationship between Death, steadily advancing through the forest, and Savitri, her frightened answers fluttering round him, unable to escape his harmonic pull." Head describes the work as unique in its time for its compact intimacy, and considers it Holst's most successful attempt to end the domination of Wagnerian chromaticism in his music. Dickinson considers it a significant step, "not towards opera, but towards an idiomatic pursuit of [Holst's] vision". Of the Kālidāsa texts, Dickinson dismisses "The Cloud Messenger" (1910–12) as an "accumulation of desultory incidents, opportunistic dramatic episodes and ecstatic outpourings" which illustrate the composer's creative confusion during that period; the "Two Eastern Pictures" (1911), in Dickinson's view, provide "a more memorable final impression of Kālidāsa".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's settings of Indian texts formed only a part of his compositional output in the period 1900 to 1914. A highly significant factor in his musical development was the English folksong revival, evident in the orchestral suite "A Somerset Rhapsody" (1906–07), a work that was originally to be based around eleven folksong themes; this was later reduced to four. Observing the work's kinship with Vaughan Williams's "Norfolk Rhapsody", Dickinson remarks that, with its firm overall structure, Holst's composition "rises beyond the level of ... a song-selection". Imogen acknowledges that Holst's discovery of English folksongs "transformed his orchestral writing", and that the composition of "A Somerset Rhapsody" did much to banish the chromaticisms that had dominated his early compositions. In the "Two Songs without Words" of 1906, Holst showed that he could create his own original music using the folk idiom. An orchestral folksong fantasy "Songs of the West", also written in 1906, was withdrawn by the composer and never published, although it emerged in the 1980s in the form of an arrangement for wind band by James Curnow.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In the years before the First World War, Holst composed in a variety of genres. Matthews considers the evocation of a North African town in the "Beni Mora" suite of 1908 the composer's most individual work to that date; the third movement gives a preview of minimalism in its constant repetition of a four-bar theme. Holst wrote two suites for military band, in E flat (1909) and F major (1911) respectively, the first of which became and remains a brass-band staple. This piece, a highly original and substantial musical work, was a signal departure from what Short describes as "the usual transcriptions and operatic selections which pervaded the band repertoire". Also in 1911 he wrote "Hecuba's Lament", a setting of Gilbert Murray's translation from Euripides built on a seven-beat refrain designed, says Dickinson, to represent Hecuba's defiance of divine wrath. In 1912 Holst composed two psalm settings, in which he experimented with plainsong; the same year saw the enduringly popular "St Paul's Suite" (a "gay but retrogressive" piece according to Dickinson), and the failure of his large scale orchestral work "Phantastes".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst conceived the idea of "The Planets" in 1913, partly as a result of his interest in astrology, and also from his determination, despite the failure of "Phantastes", to produce a large-scale orchestral work. The chosen format may have been influenced by Schoenberg's "Fünf Orchesterstücke", and shares something of the aesthetic, Matthews suggests, of Debussy's "Nocturnes" or "La mer". Holst began composing "The Planets" in 1914; the movements appeared not quite in their final sequence; "Mars" was the first to be written, followed by "Venus" and "Jupiter". "Saturn", "Uranus" and "Neptune" were all composed during 1915, and "Mercury" was completed in 1916.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Each planet is represented with a distinct character; Dickinson observes that "no planet borrows colour from another". In "Mars", a persistent, uneven rhythmic cell consisting of five beats, combined with trumpet calls and harmonic dissonance provides battle music which Short asserts is unique in its expression of violence and sheer terror, "... Holst's intention being to portray the reality of warfare rather than to glorify deeds of heroism". In "Venus", Holst incorporated music from an abandoned vocal work, "A Vigil of Pentecost", to provide the opening; the prevalent mood within the movement is of peaceful resignation and nostalgia. "Mercury" is dominated by uneven metres and rapid changes of theme, to represent the speedy flight of the winged messenger. "Jupiter" is renowned for its central melody, "Thaxted", in Dickinson's view "a fantastic relaxation in which many retain a far from sneaking delight". Dickinson and other critics have decried the later use of the tune in the patriotic hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country"—despite Holst's full complicity.


title: Gustav Holst

text: For "Saturn", Holst again used a previously-composed vocal piece, "Dirge and Hymeneal", as the basis for the movement, where repeated chords represent the relentless approach of old age. "Uranus", which follows, has elements of Berlioz's "Symphonie fantastique" and Dukas's "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", in its depiction of the magician who "disappears in a whiff of smoke as the sonic impetus of the movement diminishes from fff to ppp in the space of a few bars". "Neptune", the final movement, concludes with a wordless female chorus gradually receding, an effect which Warrack likens to "unresolved timelessness ... never ending, since space does not end, but drifting away into eternal silence". Apart from his concession with "I Vow to Thee..."', Holst insisted on the unity of the whole work, and opposed the performance of individual movements. Nevertheless, Imogen wrote that the piece had "suffered from being quoted in snippets as background music".


title: Gustav Holst

text: During and after the composition of "The Planets", Holst wrote or arranged numerous vocal and choral works, many of them for the wartime Thaxted Whitsun Festivals, 1916–18. They include the "Six Choral Folksongs" of 1916, based on West Country tunes, of which "Swansea Town", with its "sophisticated tone", is deemed by Dickinson to be the most memorable. Holst downplayed such music as "a limited form of art" in which "mannerisms are almost inevitable"; the composer Alan Gibbs, however, believes Holst's set at least equal to Vaughan Williams's "Five English Folk Songs" of 1913.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst's first major work after "The Planets" was "The Hymn of Jesus", completed in 1917. The words are from a Gnostic text, the apocryphal Acts of John, using a translation from the Greek which Holst prepared with assistance from Clifford Bax and Jane Joseph. Head comments on the innovative character of the "Hymn": "At a stroke Holst had cast aside the Victorian and Edwardian sentimental oratorio, and created the precursor of the kind of works that John Tavener, for example, was to write in the 1970s". Matthews has written that the "Hymn"s "ecstatic" quality is matched in English music "perhaps only by Tippett's "The Vision of Saint Augustine""; the musical elements include plainsong, two choirs distanced from each other to emphasise dialogue, dance episodes and "explosive chordal dislocations".


title: Gustav Holst

text: In the "Ode to Death" (1918–19), the quiet, resigned mood is seen by Matthews as an "abrupt volte-face" after the life-enhancing spirituality of the "Hymn". Warrack refers to its aloof tranquillity; Imogen Holst believed the "Ode" expressed Holst's private attitude to death. The piece has rarely been performed since its premiere in 1922, although the composer Ernest Walker thought it was Holst's finest work to that date.


title: Gustav Holst

text: The influential critic Ernest Newman considered "The Perfect Fool" "the best of modern British operas", but its unusually short length (about an hour) and parodic, whimsical nature—described by "The Times" as "a brilliant puzzle"—put it outside the operatic mainstream. Only the ballet music from the opera, which "The Times" called "the most brilliant thing in a work glittering with brilliant moments", has been regularly performed since 1923. Holst's libretto attracted much criticism, although Edwin Evans remarked on the rare treat in opera of being able to hear the words being sung.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Before his enforced rest in 1924, Holst demonstrated a new interest in counterpoint, in his "Fugal Overture" of 1922 for full orchestra and the neo-classical" Fugal Concerto" of 1923, for flute, oboe and strings. In his final decade he mixed song settings and minor pieces with major works and occasional new departures; the 1925 "Terzetto" for flute, violin and oboe, each instrument playing in a different key, is cited by Imogen as Holst's only successful chamber work. Of the "Choral Symphony" completed in 1924, Matthews writes that, after several movements of real quality, the finale is a rambling anticlimax. Holst's penultimate opera, "At the Boar's Head" (1924), is based on tavern scenes from Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Parts 1" and "2". The music, which is largely derived from old English melodies gleaned from Cecil Sharp and other collections, has pace and verve; the contemporary critic Harvey Grace discounted the lack of originality, a facet which he said "can be shown no less convincingly by a composer's handling of material than by its invention".


title: Gustav Holst

text: "Egdon Heath" (1927) was Holst's first major orchestral work after "The Planets". Matthews summarises the music as "elusive and unpredictable [with] three main elements: a pulseless wandering melody [for strings], a sad brass processional, and restless music for strings and oboe." The mysterious dance towards the end is, says Matthews, "the strangest moment in a strange work". Richard Greene in "Music & Letters" describes the piece as "a larghetto dance in a siciliano rhythm with a simple, stepwise, rocking melody", but lacking the power of "The Planets" and, at times, monotonous to the listener. A more popular success was "A Moorside Suite" for brass band, written as a test piece for the National Brass Band Festival championships of 1928. While written within the traditions of north-country brass-band music, the suite, Short says, bears Holst's unmistakable imprint, "from the skipping 6/8 of the opening Scherzo, to the vigorous melodic fourths of the concluding March, the intervening Nocturne bearing a family resemblance to the slow-moving procession of "Saturn"". 'A Moorside Suite' has undergone major revisionism in the article 'Symphony Within: rehearing Holst's 'A Moorside Suite' by Stephen Arthur Allen in the Winter 2017 edition of 'The Musical Times'. As with 'Egdon Heath' – commissioned as a symphony – the article reveals the symphonic nature of this brass-band work.


title: Gustav Holst

text: After this, Holst tackled his final attempt at opera in a cheerful vein, with "The Wandering Scholar" (1929–30), to a text by Clifford Bax. Imogen refers to the music as "Holst at his best in a scherzando (playful) frame of mind"; Vaughan Williams commented on the lively, folksy rhythms: "Do you think there's a "little" bit too much 6/8 in the opera?" Short observes that the opening motif makes several reappearances without being identified with a particular character, but imposes musical unity on the work.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst composed few large-scale works in his final years. "A Choral Fantasia" of 1930 was written for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester; beginning and ending with a soprano soloist, the work, also involving chorus, strings, brass and percussion, includes a substantial organ solo which, says Imogen Holst, "knows something of the 'colossal and mysterious' loneliness of "Egdon Heath"". Apart from his final uncompleted symphony, Holst's remaining works were for small forces; the eight "Canons" of 1932 were dedicated to his pupils, though in Imogen's view that they present a formidable challenge to the most professional of singers. The "Brook Green Suite" (1932), written for the orchestra of St Paul's School, was a late companion piece to the "St Paul's Suite". The "Lyric Movement" for viola and small orchestra (1933) was written for Lionel Tertis. Quiet and contemplative, and requiring little virtuosity from the soloist, the piece was slow to gain popularity among violists. Robin Hull, in "Penguin Music Magazine", praised the work's "clear beauty—impossible to mistake for the art of any other composer"; in Dickinson's view, however, it remains "a frail creation". Holst's final composition, the orchestral scherzo movement of a projected symphony, contains features characteristic of much of Holst's earlier music—"a summing up of Holst's orchestral art", according to Short. Dickinson suggests that the somewhat casual collection of material in the work gives little indication of the symphony that might have been written.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Holst made some recordings, conducting his own music. For the Columbia company he recorded "Beni Mora", the "Marching Song" and the complete "Planets" with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in 1922, using the acoustic process. The limitations of early recording prevented the gradual fade-out of women's voices at the end of "Neptune", and the lower strings had to be replaced by a tuba to obtain an effective bass sound. With an anonymous string orchestra Holst recorded the "St Paul's Suite" and "Country Song" in 1925. Columbia's main rival, HMV, issued recordings of some of the same repertoire, with an unnamed orchestra conducted by Albert Coates. When electrical recording came in, with dramatically improved recording quality, Holst and the LSO re-recorded "The Planets" for Columbia in 1926.


title: Gustav Holst

text: In the early LP era little of Holst's music was available on disc. Only six of his works are listed in the 1955 issue of "The Record Guide": "The Planets" (recordings under Boult on HMV and Nixa, and another under Sir Malcolm Sargent on Decca); the "Perfect Fool" ballet music; the "St Paul's Suite"; and three short choral pieces. In the stereo LP and CD eras numerous recordings of "The Planets" were issued, performed by orchestras and conductors from round the world. By the early years of the 21st century most of the major and many of the minor orchestral and choral works had been issued on disc. The 2008 issue of "The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music" contained seven pages of listings of Holst's works on CD. Of the operas, "Savitri", "The Wandering Scholar", and "At the Boar's Head" have been recorded.


title: Gustav Holst

text: Warrack emphasises that Holst acquired an instinctive understanding—perhaps more so than any English composer—of the importance of folksong. In it he found "a new concept not only of how melody might be organized, but of what the implications were for the development of a mature artistic language". Holst did not found or lead a school of composition; nevertheless, he exercised influences over both contemporaries and successors. According to Short, Vaughan Williams described Holst as "the greatest influence on my music", although Matthews asserts that each influenced the other equally. Among later composers, Michael Tippett is acknowledged by Short as Holst's "most significant artistic successor", both in terms of compositional style and because Tippett, who succeeded Holst as director of music at Morley College, maintained the spirit of Holst's music there. Of an early encounter with Holst, Tippett later wrote: "Holst seemed to look right inside me, with an acute spiritual vision". Kennedy observes that "a new generation of listeners ... recognized in Holst the fount of much that they admired in the music of Britten and Tippett". Holst's pupil Edmund Rubbra acknowledged how he and other younger English composers had adopted Holst's economy of style: "With what enthusiasm did we pare down our music to the very bone".


title: Gustav Holst

text: Short cites other English composers who are in debt to Holst, in particular William Walton and Benjamin Britten, and suggests that Holst's influence may have been felt further afield. Above all, Short recognises Holst as a composer for the people, who believed it was a composer's duty to provide music for practical purposes—festivals, celebrations, ceremonies, Christmas carols or simple hymn tunes. Thus, says Short, "many people who may never have heard any of [Holst's] major works ... have nevertheless derived great pleasure from hearing or singing such small masterpieces as the carol 'In the Bleak Midwinter'".


title: Gustav Holst

text: On 27 September 2009, after a weekend of concerts at Chichester Cathedral in memory of Holst, a new memorial was unveiled to mark the 75th anniversary of the composer's death. It is inscribed with words from the text of "The Hymn of Jesus": "The heavenly spheres make music for us". In April 2011 a BBC television documentary, "Holst: In the Bleak Midwinter", charted Holst's life with particular reference to his support for socialism and the cause of working people. Holst's birthplace, 4 Pittville Terrace (later known as 4 Clarence Road) in Pittville, Cheltenham, is now a Holst museum and is open to visitors.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Economic liberalism is a political and economic ideology that supports a market economy based on individualism and private property in the means of production. Adam Smith is considered one of the primary initial writers on economic liberalism, and his writing is generally regarded as representing the economic expression of 19th-century liberalism up until the Great Depression and rise of Keynesianism in the 20th century. Historically, economic liberalism arose in response to feudalism and mercantilism.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Economic liberalism is associated with markets and private ownership of capital assets. Economic liberals tend to oppose government intervention and protectionism in the market economy when it inhibits free trade and competition, but tend to support government intervention where it protects property rights, opens new markets or funds market growth, and resolves market failures. An economy that is managed according to these precepts may be described as a liberal economy or operating under liberal capitalism. Economic liberals commonly adhere to a political and economic philosophy that advocates a restrained fiscal policy and a balanced budget through measures such as low taxes, reduced government spending, and minimized government debt. Free trade, deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, labour market flexibility, and opposition to trade unions are also common positions.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Economic liberalism can be contrasted with protectionism because of its support for free trade and an open economy, and is considered opposed to planned economies and non-capitalist economic orders, such as socialism. As such, economic liberalism today is associated with classical liberalism, neoliberalism, right-libertarianism, and some schools of conservatism like liberal conservatism and fiscal conservatism. Economic liberalism follows the same philosophical approach as classical liberalism and fiscal conservatism.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Developed during the Age of Enlightenment, particularly by Adam Smith, economic liberalism was born as the theory of economics of liberalism, which advocates minimal interference by government in the economy. Arguments in favor of economic liberalism were advanced by Smith and others during the age of enlightenment, opposing feudalism and mercantilism. It was first analyzed by Adam Smith in "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (1776), which advocated minimal interference of government in a market economy, although it did not necessarily oppose the state's provision of basic public goods. In Smith's view, if everyone is left to his own economic devices instead of being controlled by the state, the result would be a harmonious and more equal society of ever-increasing prosperity. This underpinned the move towards a capitalist economic system in the late 18th century and the subsequent demise of the mercantilist system. Private property and individual contracts form the basis of economic liberalism.


title: Economic liberalism

text: The early theory of economic liberalism was based on the assumption that the economic actions of individuals are largely based on self-interest (invisible hand) and that allowing them to act without any restrictions will produce the best results for everyone (spontaneous order), provided that at least minimum standards of public information and justice exist, so that no one is allowed to coerce, steal, or commit fraud, and there should be freedom of speech and press. This ideology was well reflected in English law; Lord Ackner, denying the existence of a duty of good faith in English contract law, emphasised the "adversarial position of the parties when involved in negotiations".


title: Economic liberalism

text: Initially, the economic liberals had to contend with arguments from the supporters of feudal privileges for the wealthy, traditions of the aristocracy and the rights of monarchs to run national economies in their own personal interests. By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, this opposition was largely defeated in the primary capital markets of Western countries.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Historian Kathleen G. Donohue argues that classical liberalism in the United States during the 19th century had distinctive characteristics as opposed to Britain: "[A]t the center of classical liberal theory [in Europe] was the idea of "laissez-faire". To the vast majority of American classical liberals, however, "laissez-faire" did not mean no government intervention at all. On the contrary, they were more than willing to see government provide tariffs, railroad subsidies, and internal improvements, all of which benefited producers. What they condemned was intervention in behalf of consumers."


title: Economic liberalism

text: In its initial formation, economic liberalism was focused on promoting the idea of private ownership and trade; however, due to a growing awareness of concerns regarding policy, the rise of economic liberalism paved the way for a new form of liberalism, known as social liberalism. This promoted an accommodation for government intervention in order to help the poor. As subsequent authors picked up and promoted widespread appeal of a subset of Smith's economic theories to support their own work — of free trade, the division of labour, and the principle of individual initiative — this contributed to obscuring other aspects of the rich body of political liberalism to be found in Smith's work. For example, his work promoted the ideal that the everyday man could hold ownership of his own property and trade, which Smith felt would slowly allow for individuals to take control of their places within society.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Economic liberalism is a much broader concept than fiscal liberalism, which is called fiscal conservatism or economic libertarianism in the United States. The ideology that highlighted the financial aspect of economic liberalism is called fiscal liberalism, which is defined as support for free trade.


title: Economic liberalism

text: Economic liberalism opposes government intervention in the economy when it leads to inefficient outcomes. They are supportive of a strong state that protects the right to property and enforces contracts. They may also support government interventions to resolve market failures. Ordoliberalism and various schools of social liberalism based on classical liberalism include a broader role for the state but do not seek to replace private enterprise and the free market with public enterprise and economic planning. A social market economy is a largely free-market economy based on a free price system and private property that is supportive of government activity to promote competition in markets and social welfare programs to address social inequalities that result from market outcomes.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: The Catholic Church is "the Catholic Communion of Churches, both Roman and Eastern, or Oriental, that are in full communion with the Bishop of Rome (the pope)." The church is also known by members as the People of God, the Body of Christ, the "Temple of the Holy Spirit", among other names. According to Vatican II's , the "church has but one sole purpose–that the kingdom of God may come and the salvation of the human race may be accomplished."


title: Catholic Church by country

text: This communion of churches comprises the Latin Church (or the Roman or Western Church) as well as 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, canonically called "sui juris" churches, each led by either a patriarch or a major archbishop in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Historically, these bodies separated from Eastern Christian communions, either to remain in or to return to full communion with the Catholic Church. Vatican II decree on Eastern Catholic Churches, however, explicitly recognizes Eastern Catholic communities as "true Churches" and not just rites within the Catholic Church. This Communion of Churches "exists among and between the individual Churches and dioceses of the universal Catholic Church. Its structural expression is the College of Bishops, each of whom represents and embodies his own local church." In addition to Eastern Catholic Churches, the Catholic Church oversees the Catholic Charismatic renewal, the largest Charismatic movement of a single institution in 2020, with over 100 million members, primarily in the Global South. The Catholic Church is also described as an "amalgam of parts" (i.e., thousands of individual dioceses, religious orders, etc.) globally dispersed, but in communion with Rome.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: The Catholic Church is the "world's oldest continuously functioning "international" institution." It is also the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world, while the diplomatic status of the Holy See facilitates the access of its vast international network of charities. Some of these entities include 5,000 hospitals, 10,000 orphanages, 95,000 elementary schools, and 47,000 secondary schools.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: Most of the figures are taken from the CIA Factbook or PEW Research Center Surveys. In Latin American countries, Latinobarometro is often cited. In Germany and other German speaking regions of Europe, there are official membership statistics due to the fact that the government collects a church tax based on these membership lists. One's baptismal certificate or any other religious document is secondary to church statistics. This method might explain the discrepancy between Pew's figures on Germany and the church figures.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: According to the CIA Factbook and the Pew Research Center, the five countries with the largest number of Catholics are, in decreasing order of Catholic population :


title: Catholic Church by country

text: The country where the membership of the church is the largest percentage of the population is Vatican City at 100%, followed by East Timor at 97%.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: According to the Census of the 2020 "Annuario Pontificio" (Pontifical Yearbook), the number of baptized Catholics in the world was about 1.329 billion at the end of 2018. The research initiative Catholics & Cultures compiles data on Catholic demographics, including from the Annuario Pontificio, by country.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: Conflicting numbers can be found in 2013 research conducted by the Brazilian polling institute Datafolha. This report states that the percentage of the population in Brazil of Catholic religion, over the age of 16 years, is just 57%, in contrast to the 64.63% published by CIA and to the 68.6% of Pew Research Center. Also, the 2010 Mexican Census showed this percentage to be 83.9%against a 91.89% number in the CIA World Factbook.


title: Catholic Church by country

text: These percentages were calculated by using the above numbers. The first percentage, 4th column, is the percentage of population that is Catholic in a region (number in the region x 100 / total population of the region). The last column shows the national Catholic percentage compared to the total Catholic population of the world (number in the region x 100 / total RC population of the world).


title: Peter DeLuise

text: Peter John DeLuise (born November 6, 1966) is an American actor, television director, television producer, and screenwriter. He is known for his role as Officer Doug Penhall in the Fox TV series "21 Jump Street", and for directing and writing episodes of science fiction television shows, particularly in the "Stargate" franchise. He is the son of actors Dom DeLuise and Carol Arthur.


title: Peter DeLuise

text: DeLuise made his film debut in the 1979 film "Hot Stuff". He landed his best known acting role, as Officer Doug Penhall, in the 1987 Fox series "21 Jump Street", alongside other promising actors including Johnny Depp. His brother Michael came on the show in the fifth season where he played his younger brother, Officer Joey Penhall. DeLuise is also well known for his role as Dagwood on the NBC science fiction television series "SeaQuest DSV" from 1994 to 1996.


title: Peter DeLuise

text: DeLuise has made guest appearances on the television shows "The Facts of Life", "21 Jump Street" spin-off "Booker", "Friends", "Supernatural", "", "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda", and "Stargate SG-1".


title: Peter DeLuise

text: In 1997, he began working on the series "Stargate SG-1", serving as producer, writer, director, and creative consultant. He has appeared, normally as an extra, in every episode of the series he has directed. He went on to work as executive producer, director and writer for the "Stargate SG-1" spin-off "Stargate Atlantis", and directed eight episodes of the spin-off "Stargate Universe". His father, Dom DeLuise, made a guest appearance in the "Stargate SG-1" episode "Urgo", which Peter directed. Peter also made a cameo in the episode as the "Urgo" character transformed to be a young man in a United States Air Force uniform.


title: Peter DeLuise

text: DeLuise directed the CBC television series "jPod", based on the novel of the same name by Douglas Coupland, which debuted in January 2008 and directed the fantasy film "Beyond Sherwood Forest".


title: Peter DeLuise

text: He made a brief cameo appearance alongside Johnny Depp in the 2012 film adaptation, "21 Jump Street". Depp, DeLuise and Holly Robinson reprised their roles as Tom Hanson, Doug Penhall and Judy Hoffs, respectively.


title: Peter DeLuise

text: DeLuise was previously married to Gina Nemo; they divorced in 1992. He later married actress Anne Marie Loder on June 7, 2002; together they have one child.


title: History of agriculture

text: Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa. At least eleven separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin.


title: History of agriculture

text: The development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming.


title: History of agriculture

text: Wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 105,000 years ago. However, domestication did not occur until much later. The earliest evidence of small-scale cultivation of edible grasses is from around 21,000 BC with the Ohalo II people on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. By around 9500 BC, the eight Neolithic founder crops – emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas, and flax – were cultivated in the Levant. Rye may have been cultivated earlier, but this claim remains controversial. Rice was domesticated in China by 6200 BC with earliest known cultivation from 5700 BC, followed by mung, soy and azuki beans. Rice was also independently domesticated in West Africa and cultivated by 1000 BC. Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 11,000 years ago, followed by sheep. Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and India around 8500 BC. Camels were domesticated late, perhaps around 3000 BC.


title: History of agriculture

text: In subsaharan Africa, sorghum was domesticated in the Sahel region of Africa by 3000 BC, along with pearl millet by 2000 BC. Yams were domesticated in several distinct locations, including West Africa (unknown date), and cowpeas by 2500 BC. Rice (African rice) was also independently domesticated in West Africa and cultivated by 1000 BC. Teff and likely finger millet were domesticated in Ethiopia by 3000 BC, along with noog, ensete, and coffee. Other plant foods domesticated in Africa include watermelon, okra, tamarind and black eyed peas, along with tree crops such as the kola nut and oil palm. Plantains were cultivated in Africa by 3000 BC and bananas by 1500 BC. The helmeted guineafowl was domesticated in West Africa. Sanga cattle was likely also domesticated in North-East Africa, around 7000 BC, and later crossbred with other species.


title: History of agriculture

text: In South America, agriculture began as early as 9000 BC, starting with the cultivation of several species of plants that later became only minor crops. In the Andes of South America, the potato was domesticated between 8000 BC and 5000 BC, along with beans, squash, tomatoes, peanuts, coca, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Cassava was domesticated in the Amazon Basin no later than 7000 BC. Maize ("Zea mays") found its way to South America from Mesoamerica, where wild teosinte was domesticated about 7000 BC and selectively bred to become domestic maize. Cotton was domesticated in Peru by 4200 BC; another species of cotton was domesticated in Mesoamerica and became by far the most important species of cotton in the textile industry in modern times. Evidence of agriculture in the Eastern United States dates to about 3000 BCE. Several plants were cultivated, later to be replaced by the Three Sisters cultivation of maize, squash, and beans.


title: History of agriculture

text: Sugarcane and some root vegetables were domesticated in New Guinea around 7000 BC. Bananas were cultivated and hybridized in the same period in Papua New Guinea. In Australia, agriculture was invented at a currently unspecified period, with the oldest eel traps of Budj Bim dating to 6,600 BC and the deployment of several crops ranging from yams to bananas.


title: History of agriculture

text: The Bronze Age, from c. 3300 BC, witnessed the intensification of agriculture in civilizations such as Mesopotamian Sumer, ancient Egypt, ancient Sudan, the Indus Valley civilisation of the Indian subcontinent, ancient China, and ancient Greece. From 100 BC to 1600 AD, world population continued to grow along with land use, as evidenced by the rapid increase in methane emissions from cattle and the cultivation of rice. During the Iron Age and era of classical antiquity, the expansion of ancient Rome, both the Republic and then the Empire, throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Western Europe built upon existing systems of agriculture while also establishing the manorial system that became a bedrock of medieval agriculture. In the Middle Ages, both in Europe and in the Islamic world, agriculture was transformed with improved techniques and the diffusion of crop plants, including the introduction of sugar, rice, cotton and fruit trees such as the orange to Europe by way of Al-Andalus. After the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Columbian exchange brought New World crops such as maize, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc to Europe, and Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips, and livestock including horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the Americas.


title: History of agriculture

text: Irrigation, crop rotation, and fertilizers were introduced soon after the Neolithic Revolution and developed much further in the past 200 years, starting with the British Agricultural Revolution. Since 1900, agriculture in the developed nations, and to a lesser extent in the developing world, has seen large rises in productivity as human labour has been replaced by mechanization, and assisted by synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and selective breeding. The Haber-Bosch process allowed the synthesis of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on an industrial scale, greatly increasing crop yields. Modern agriculture has raised social, political, and environmental issues including overpopulation, water pollution, biofuels, genetically modified organisms, tariffs and farm subsidies. In response, organic farming developed in the twentieth century as an alternative to the use of synthetic pesticides.


title: History of agriculture

text: Scholars have developed a number of hypotheses to explain the historical origins of agriculture. Studies of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies indicate an antecedent period of intensification and increasing sedentism; examples are the Natufian culture in the Levant, and the Early Chinese Neolithic in China. Current models indicate that wild stands that had been harvested previously started to be planted, but were not immediately domesticated.


title: History of agriculture

text: Localised climate change is the favoured explanation for the origins of agriculture in the Levant. When major climate change took place after the last ice age (c. 11,000 BC), much of the earth became subject to long dry seasons. These conditions favoured annual plants which die off in the long dry season, leaving a dormant seed or tuber. An abundance of readily storable wild grains and pulses enabled hunter-gatherers in some areas to form the first settled villages at this time.


title: History of agriculture

text: Early people began altering communities of flora and fauna for their own benefit through means such as fire-stick farming and forest gardening very early.


title: History of agriculture

text: Wild grains have been collected and eaten from at least 105,000 years ago, and possibly much longer. Exact dates are hard to determine, as people collected and ate seeds before domesticating them, and plant characteristics may have changed during this period without human selection. An example is the semi-tough rachis and larger seeds of cereals from just after the Younger Dryas (about 9500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent. Monophyletic characteristics were attained without any human intervention, implying that apparent domestication of the cereal rachis could have occurred quite naturally.


title: History of agriculture

text: Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe and included a diverse range of taxa. At least 11 separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin. Some of the earliest known domestications were of animals. Domestic pigs had multiple centres of origin in Eurasia, including Europe, East Asia and Southwest Asia, where wild boar were first domesticated about 10,500 years ago. Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC. Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan around 8500 BC. Camels were domesticated late, perhaps around 3000 BC.


title: History of agriculture

text: It was not until after 9500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) sites in the Levant, although wheat was the first to be grown and harvested on a significant scale. At around the same time (9400 BC), parthenocarpic fig trees were domesticated.


title: History of agriculture

text: Domesticated rye occurs in small quantities at some Neolithic sites in (Asia Minor) Turkey, such as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (c. 7600 – c. 6000 BC) Can Hasan III near Çatalhöyük, but is otherwise absent until the Bronze Age of central Europe, c. 1800–1500 BC. Claims of much earlier cultivation of rye, at the Epipalaeolithic site of Tell Abu Hureyra in the Euphrates valley of northern Syria, remain controversial. Critics point to inconsistencies in the radiocarbon dates, and identifications based solely on grain, rather than on chaff.


title: History of agriculture

text: By 8000 BC, farming was entrenched on the banks of the Nile. About this time, agriculture was developed independently in the Far East, probably in China, with rice rather than wheat as the primary crop. Maize was domesticated from the wild grass teosinte in southern Mexico by 6700 BC.


title: History of agriculture

text: The potato (8000 BC), tomato, pepper (4000 BC), squash (8000 BC) and several varieties of bean (8000 BC onwards) were domesticated in the New World.


title: History of agriculture

text: Agriculture was independently developed on the island of New Guinea. Banana cultivation of "Musa acuminata", including hybridization, dates back to 5000 BC, and possibly to 8000 BC, in Papua New Guinea.


title: History of agriculture

text: Bees were kept for honey in the Middle East around 7000 BC. Archaeological evidence from various sites on the Iberian peninsula suggest the domestication of plants and animals between 6000 and 4500 BC. Céide Fields in Ireland, consisting of extensive tracts of land enclosed by stone walls, date to 3500 BC and are the oldest known field systems in the world. The horse was domesticated in the Pontic steppe around 4000 BC. In Siberia, Cannabis was in use in China in Neolithic times and may have been domesticated there; it was in use both as a fibre for ropemaking and as a medicine in Ancient Egypt by about 2350 BC.


title: History of agriculture

text: In northern China, millet was domesticated by early Sino-Tibetan speakers at around 8000 to 6000 BC, becoming the main crop of the Yellow River basin by 5500 BC. They were followed by mung, soy and azuki beans.


title: History of agriculture

text: In southern China, rice was domesticated in the Yangtze River basin at around 11,500 to 6200 BC, along with the development of wetland agriculture, by early Austronesian and Hmong-Mien-speakers. Other food plants were also harvested, including acorns, water chestnuts, and foxnuts. Rice cultivation was later spread to Island Southeast Asia by the Austronesian expansion, starting at around 3,500 to 2,000 BC. This migration event also saw the introduction of cultivated and domesticated food plants from Taiwan, Island Southeast Asia, and New Guinea into the Pacific Islands as canoe plants. Contact with Sri Lanka and Southern India by Austronesian sailors also led to an exchange of food plants which later became the origin of the valuable spice trade. In the 1st millennium AD, Austronesian sailors also settled Madagascar and the Comoros, bringing Southeast Asian and South Asian food plants with them to the East African coast, including bananas and rice. Rice was also spread southwards into Mainland Southeast Asia by around 2000 to 1500 BC by the migrations of the early Austroasiatic and Kra-Dai-speakers.


title: History of agriculture

text: In the Sahel region of Africa, sorghum was domesticated by 3000 BC in Sudan and pearl millet by 2500 BC in Mali. Kola nut and coffee were also domesticated in Africa. In New Guinea, ancient Papuan peoples began practicing agriculture around 7000 BC, domesticating sugarcane and taro. In the Indus Valley from the eighth millennium BC onwards at Mehrgarh, 2-row and 6-row barley were cultivated, along with einkorn, emmer, and durum wheats, and dates. In the earliest levels of Merhgarh, wild game such as gazelle, swamp deer, blackbuck, chital, wild ass, wild goat, wild sheep, boar, and nilgai were all hunted for food. These are successively replaced by domesticated sheep, goats, and humped zebu cattle by the fifth millennium BC, indicating the gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.


title: History of agriculture

text: Maize and squash were domesticated in Mesoamerica; potato in South America, and sunflower in the Eastern Woodlands of North America.