Hamilton Harty

Herbert Hamilton Harty was born in Hillsborough in 1879, the fourth of ten children of a church organist who taught him piano and counterpoint before the boy became an organist himself at twelve. That small northern town gave him discipline and music, while later cities gave him fame as an accompanist, composer and conductor of Berlioz. A brain tumour took him in 1941, but the keyboard lesson from his father may have shaped every orchestra he later commanded.