A. H. Fox Strangways

Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (14 September 18592 May 1948) was an English musicologist, translator, editor and music critic.

After a career as a schoolmaster, Fox Strangways developed an interest in Indian music, and in the years before the First World War he did much to bring Rabindranath Tagore to wider attention. Fox Strangways wrote music criticism for The Times, was chief music critic of The Observer, and founded the quarterly magazine Music and Letters.

Together with the tenor Steuart Wilson, Fox Strangways made English translations of the lieder of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann.

Life and career Fox Strangways was born in Norwich, the first son of Walter Aston Fox Strangways, an army officer, and his wife, Harriet Elizabeth née Buller. He was educated at Wellington College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a third-class degree in Classics in 1882. For the following two years he was a student at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.

For the next twenty-six years, Fox Strangways was a schoolmaster, first at Dulwich College (1884–86) and then at his old school, Wellington (1887–1910), where he was the music master from 1893 to 1901, and a housemaster from 1901 to 1910. During his time at Wellington he visited India, and became interested in Indian music. After he left Wellington he returned to India for eight months in 1911, collecting material for a book, The Music of Hindostan (India Society, 1914), which Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians described in 2013 as "still a classic on its subject". He contributed concert reviews to The Times and later joined the staff of the paper. He financed and edited Music and Letters, a quarterly publication. The first edition contained a controversial article about Elgar by Bernard Shaw praising him at the expense of Hubert Parry, to which Elgar responded in the next issue strongly defending Parry. Fox Strangways recruited what The Times described as "a brilliant group of contributors [who] packed its pages with good writing and good sense".

He retired to Dinton, Wiltshire, where he died at the age of 88. He was unmarried.

Books Advanced Passages for German Unseen Translation (1899) The Music of Hindostan (1914) with Steuart Wilson: Schubert's Songs Translated (1924) with Steuart Wilson: Schumann's Songs Translated (1929) with Maud Karpeles: Cecil Sharp – His Life and Work (1933) ed. Steuart Wilson: Music Observed (1936) – collected articles from The Observer