Patricia Blomfield Holt

Patricia Blomfield Holt (15 September 1910 – 5 June 2003) was a Canadian composer, pianist and music educator. An associate of the Canadian Music Centre and a member of the Association of Canadian Women Composers, her compositions have been performed by notable musical ensembles throughout North America and Europe.
Life.
Born Patricia Blomfield in Lindsay, Ontario, Blomfield Holt began her career in her teenage years as a largely self-taught composer and pianist. She studied with privately before she entered The Royal Conservatory of Music at the age of 19 in 1928. She studied and taught concurrently for the next ten years. She was a pupil there of Norman Wilks, Hayunga Carman, Leo Smith, Ernest MacMillan and Healey Willan. She was a self-taught composer until she began studying with Willan in 1936. After marrying in 1939, she subsequently turned down a scholarship to Juilliard. She also left her teaching position at The Royal Conservatory of Music and did not return until 1954. Blomfield Holt taught music history, theory, composition and piano performance until she retired from the faculty in 1985.
Blomfield Holt's music is "tonally conservative and well crafted". The majority of her output consists of chamber and vocal works. In 1938 she won the Vogt Society Award for the best music composition for her "Suite No. 1 for Violin and Piano". Her "Suite No. 2" was described by London's Musical Times: "The language is frankly of the 19th century, and the forms are reminiscent of Schumann, but the material is handled with certainty and a nice sense of texture". Her "Lyric Piece No. 2" was recorded by Jeremy Findlay and Elena Braslavsky in 2002. Her orchestral work, "Legend of the North Woods" is "an evocation of a lake depicted in Canadian painter J.R. Seauvy’s picture of an unspoilt early Indian scene in the lake country" and was recorded by the University of Calgary Orchestra.