Joy Finzi

She was born Joyce Black in Hampstead, London. She studied music and art, and married Finzi in 1933. They had two sons, Christopher and Nigel.

Together with her husband, Finzi played an important part in founding the Newbury String Players. She devoted much time to preserving the work of composer-poet Ivor Gurney, continuing her husband's work after his premature death in 1956. She sketched portraits of contemporary musicians including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Adrian Boult, Howard Ferguson and Sir Arthur Bliss, and writers including Edmund Blunden, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Jones.

In 1969, she founded the Finzi Trust to finance the recording of her husband Gerald's work and that of other composers, and was instrumental in the formation of Finzi Friends in 1982, a society furthering the work of the Trust. She continued to draw and sculpt, and published two volumes of poetry A Point of Departure and Twelve Months of a Year. A collection of her portrait drawings was published in an edition of 300 by Libanus Press in 1987, with the title In That Place.

• Finzi, Joy. In That Place (Libanus Press, 1987) ISBN 0-948021-15-2
• Jordan, Rolf. The Clock of the Years: A Gerald and Joy Finzi Anthology (Chosen Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0-9556373-0-8
• McVeagh, Diana. Gerald Finzi: His Life and Music (Boydell, 2006) ISBN 1-84383-170-8

• Biography page at MusicWeb International
• The Finzi Trust, visit the official Finzi Trust web site to listen to Gerald Finzi's music and read about his life and the Finzi Trust's work.
• Joy Finzi, read about Joy Finzi's life, her art, music, sculpture and poetry.
• Finzi Friends