English and Scottish Folk Songs

£13.50 [In Stock]

Product Details

Artist: The Rodolfus Choir
Conductor: Ralph Allwood
Label: Herald (Released: December 1995)

Sample Audio

Track 10: Bobby Shaftoe

Track 12: The oak and the ask

Track 14: The turtle dove

More Information

Interest in folk culture was a product of the Romantic movement. The first manifestations were in Germany-Arnim and Brentano began to collect the folk poetry of the Des Knaben Wunderhorn books as early as 1805-and England was not really affected until late in the nineteenth century. Before then, the term 'folk-song' was unknown in the British Isles, and the collecting of traditional songs and ballads was an eccentric pursuit left to antiquarians such as Bishop Percy, whose Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was one of the first anthologies of its kind. Everything changed around 1900. The English Folk Song Society was founded in 1898, and the systematic collection of folk-songs began. 'Literate' musicians such as Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger went out into the rural areas of Britain and noted down traditional songs from the lips of the singers who remembered them; Grainger even used an early phonograph to record the songs he heard. Many collections were issued: Cecil Sharp alone published over 3000 songs. More than this, composers, led by Vaughan Williams, felt their art revitalized by the influence of folk music. This took many forms. In Vaughan Williams's case, folk-songs, real or idealized, began to appear in his concert works and to influence his whole musical language. Linden Lea, his well-known song of 1901, is an early example of an 'imagined' folk-song.

Choral arrangements of the newly-gathered songs soon began to be made, in some cases by the collecters themselves. Percy Grainger (1882-1961) noted down Brigg Fair in 1905 'from the singing of Mr Joseph Taylor of Saxby All Saints, Lincolnshire' and published his haunting choral version in 1911, which he described as 'lovingly and reverently dedicated to the memory of Edvard Grieg'. Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) both collected and arranged The turtle dove, one of his best-loved folk settings, published in 1924. His Greensleeves setting-a byproduct of his opera Sir John in Love-dates from much later, 1945. Gustav Holst (1874-1934), who shared Vaughan Williams's enthusiasm for folk-song but was not himself a collector, made a number of memorable choral arrangements of songs collected by others. I love my love and Swansea Town were both collected by Holst's benefactor Balfour Gardiner, and included in a set of six Choral folk songs which Holst wrote in 1916. I love my love, a Cornish song, tells the harrowing tale of two lovers who are forciby parted by the boy's disapproving parents: he is sent away to sea, she is locked away in Bedlam. Eventually he returns and they are reunited, but Holst's imaginative setting of the final verse suggests that her sanity has for ever been affected by the dreadful ordeal she has endured.

Sir Edward Bairstow (1874-1946) was a cathedral organist and mainly associated with church music; yet his setting of The oak and the ash, dating from 1928, has real poignancy (Bairstow came from 'the north country; as did the sad maiden of the song), and shows the same skilled handling of the choral medium as the best of his anthems.

The next generation of English composers included several who were in different ways inspired by folk-song. E. J. Moeran (1894-1850) was brought up in Norfolk and had a strong feeling for the East Anglian countryside. The sailor and young Nancy is a Norfolk song-one of so many English folk-songs about sailors, their loved ones and their enforced partings. Moeran's lively setting was published in 1949. Peter Warlock (1894-1930) in general was more drawn towards Elizabethan art-song, but in 1925 he made a characteristically rollicking version for voice and piano (later transcribed for choir by Armstrong Gibbs) of the Norfolk folk-song Yarmouth Fair, which Moeran had collected. A note on the score records that 'permission to reprint the original words having been withheld by the publishers, the tune is here presented with new text and title by Hal Collins'. So much for authenticity! Edward Chapman (1902-81), a pupil of Charles Wood at Cambridge, later a schoolmaster, was an accomplished composer and arranger. The three ravens (1963) is a sombre, powerful setting of a Scottish ballad of great antiquity and richness of symbolic meaning. Also educated at Cambridge, Sir David Willcocks (b. 1919), Director of King's College Choir from 1957-74, made a number of carol and folk-song arrangements which have become classics of their kind. Early one morning and Bobby Shaftoe come from a set of five folk-songs originally arranged for the vocal group The Scholars in 1972. Afton Water, a lovely Scottish melody set to words by Robert Burns, dates from 1983.

Younger composers continue to make choral settings of folk-songs, though inevitably in a spirit tinged with nostalgia as the songs themselves become less known and sung. But who could deny the perennial freshness and charm of Among the leaves so green, O (collected by Cecil Sharp, imaginatively set by John Byrt) or the dance-like tunefulness of the Tyneside dialect song The keel row? Equally imperishable is O waly waly, one of the most moving of all lyric expressions of lost love, and, for all those over a certain age, Strawberry Fair, given a splendidly up-to-date reworking by Donald James, will for ever evoke class singing lessons from half-remembered schooldays. Songs such as these were once common currency; everybody knew them. Now they live on largely in the 'loving and reverent' choral versions which are ours to enjoy.

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