Letter: What Gustav Holst taught Elliott Carter

In 1932 the British composer Gustav Holst taught at Harvard, where one of his pupils was the 24-year-old Elliott Carter. Carter helped Holst in writing out some of his scores, although Holst's biographer Michael Short records that he did not then have much admiration for the "pompous works like Holst's Hymn of Jesus" . But the older composer did convince the younger that free counterpoint was more interesting than strict imitation, an idea which was to radically influence his work.