Arthur Oldham

When he was age 14, his mother committed suicide by gassing herself in an oven,[1] and he was brought up in Wallington, at that time in Surrey.

[3][4] He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition under Herbert Howells.

[1] Until 1968 the only published vocal score of Britten's The Little Sweep was the piano duet and percussion version prepared by Arthur Oldham.

[9] In 1952, after Edmund Rubbra pulled out of the project, Oldham provided a variation for Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, a collaborative work with other contributions by Lennox Berkeley, Britten, Imogen Holst, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett and William Walton.

[3] He introduced Scottish pre-Reformation music such as Robert Carver's 19-part motet O Bone Jesu.

8 "Symphony of a Thousand" was scheduled for the opening night of the 1965 Edinburgh Festival, with the Scottish National Orchestra, but a suitable choir was lacking.

Lord Harewood and Alexander Gibson approached Oldham to create one and train the singers, and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus was born.

[2][5] Under his direction for the next 12 years, the chorus went on to participate in major works such as Verdi's Requiem (under Giulini), Tippett's A Child of Our Time (under Gibson), Bach's Magnificat (under Herbert von Karajan), Prokofiev's Seven, They are Seven (under Gennady Rozhdestvensky], Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony (under Leonard Bernstein), Brahms's A German Requiem (under Daniel Barenboim), and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms (under Claudio Abbado).

[12] Oldham was the recipient of the 1973 St Mungo Prize, awarded to the individual who has done most in the previous three years to improve and promote the city of Glasgow.