Dulcie Sybil HollandAM was an Australian composer and music educator. Best known for her contributions to music education through her involvement with the Australian Music Examinations Board, Holland has in recent decades gained greater recognition as a composer. She is now regarded by some critics as one of the more significant Australian composers of her generation.
After returning to Australia from the Royal College in 1939, Holland embarked on a career as a recitalist and freelance composer. In 1940 she married the Australian conductorAlan Bellhouse, with whom she would have two children. During the 1940s, in addition to her childrearing and composing, she wrote a number of children's books, under her married name of Dulcie Bellhouse. She also began to write music for the North Shore Symphony Orchestra, an association that would continue for 25 years. In the 1950s, Holland was commissioned to write musical scores for the Department of the Interior, which was then producing a number of documentary films about Australian life for the new wave of migrants entering the country. She eventually wrote the scores for forty of these films. In 1967, Holland joined the Australian Music Examinations Board as an examiner. During her long association with the Board, her prolific output of musical studies and pieces for students at all levels of development, along with her authorship of numerous music theory books, were eventually to make her a familiar name in thousands of Australian households. Sales of her didactic writings made her Australia's most celebrated music author. After her retirement from AMEB in 1983, Holland continued to compose, but chose to focus more on the writing of music text books, on the ground that she believed "making new converts to music" to be more important than adding to the volume of existing music. In 1977, she was made a Member of the Order of Australia. In 1993, along with Miriam Hyde, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Macquarie University.
Music
Throughout the course of her seventy-year career, Holland produced a considerable body of serious music. Her work includes orchestral pieces, vocal and choral works, a large output of chamber music featuring different combinations of instruments, and many pieces for piano and other solo performance. She wrote in both the contemporary and neo-classical genres.
Style
Dulcie Holland has been described as "less conservative and more appealing than many of her contemporaries". Her music is generally "melodic, optimistic and sunny", and even her darker moods are "reflective and lyrical". She employs "non-traditional key relationships and swiftly changing tonal centres", and is "fond of the pentatonic scale with its built-in ambiguities, and the possibilities thus given to modulate to unexpected keys". Overall however, her music is said to convey a "sense of balance, of confidence, of individuality of formal structure".
Major works
In addition to the symphony and string quartet, Holland's Piano Sonata has been called "undoubtedly a landmark work in the Australian oeuvre", while her 1944 Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano has been described as "one of the greatest treasures of Australian music". Reflecting Holland's difficulty in gaining recognition as a serious composer through much of her lifetime, the latter work did not receive its first public performance until 1991, 47 years after it was first written.
