Elizabeth Poston

English composer, pianist and writer

Elizabeth Poston (24 October 1905 – 18 March 1987) was an English composer, pianist and writer.

Poston was born in Highfield House in Pin Green, which is now the site of Hampson Park in Stevenage. In 1914 she moved with her mother, Clementine Poston, to nearby Rooks Nest House where E. M. Forster had lived as a child. Poston and Forster subsequently became good friends. After attending Queen Margaret's School, York and studying with pianist Harold Samuel, she attended the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London, where both Peter Warlock and Ralph Vaughan Williams encouraged her talents and where she studied composition with Julius Harrison. She won a prize from the RAM for her one movement Violin Sonata, which was subsequently broadcast by the BBC on 9 July 1928, with Antonio Brosa as soloist and Victor Hely Hutchinson piano. When she graduated from the RAM in 1925 seven of her songs were published, and in 1928 she published five more. Poston went abroad between 1930 and 1939, where she studied architecture and collected folksongs. She was also a respected performer, premiering Walter Leigh’s Concertino for harpsichord and strings in 1934. During the war she also played the piano at the National Gallery lunchtime concerts organised by Myra Hess. She subsequently became one of the youngest composers to be represented on the network at its opening, with her incidental music for John Milton's Comus.

Poston composed scores for radio and television productions – over 40 for radio alone – and collaborated with C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Terence Tiller and other writers. She wrote the score for the 1970 BBC television production of Howards End (broadcast on 26 December 1970 as Play of the Month, now lost) while living in Rooks Nest House, which was the setting for the novel. Her carols, especially Jesus Christ the Apple Tree (1967) and The Boar's Head Carol (1960), remain widely performed. The Nativity (1950), a sequence of newly composed carols and adaptations from folk songs or Medieval manuscripts retelling the Christmas Story, was premiered as a radio feature produced by Terence Tiller, but had an afterlife as an extended choral work for concert performance. It's one of two extended choral works of hers to have been recorded. The other is An English Day Book, a 20 minute sequence of sacred and profane poetry settings relating to different times of the day and year. It includes a setting of Sweet Suffolk Owl by Thomas Vautor that has achieved separate popularity. There are also anthems, mostly dating from the 1950s, such as the four movement Song of Wisdom (1956), written for Yardley Grammar School in Birmingham. A Swiss radio broadcast of her 1960 Trio for flute, viola and harp can be heard on YouTube, and a new recording of the Trio by the Korros Ensemble was released in 2021. A six minute work for string orchestra, Blackberry Fold: Requiem for a Dog, received its first broadcast in February 1976. In total there are over 300 compositions, some still to be discovered. Poston's extensive archives are now housed at the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies in Hertford.

In addition to composing, Poston was an academic, writer and editor. In 1947 she created a five part lecture series on Peter Warlock for the BBC. Much later, she defended his reputation in a very personal broadcast talk. She wrote articles and programme notes for the Arts Council of Great Britain and was the editor of a number of vocal music anthologies, including The Children's Song Book (1961), which was described as "a little autobiography, reflecting her own delight in songs since the earliest she remembers from the age of two". There were also three Penguin collections – The Penguin Book of Christmas Carols (two volumes, 1965 and 1971), and (with Alan Lomax) The Penguin Book of American Folksongs (1964) – as well as (with David Holbrook) The Cambridge Hymnal (1970).

Poston was the president of the Society of Women Musicians 1955–61. She continued to live at Rooks Nest House until her death at the age of 81 in 1987.