Programme Notes
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS 1872-
Suite, English Folk Songs, arr. Gordon Jacob
March: Seventeen Come Sunday
Intermezzo: My Bonny Boy
March: Folk Songs from Somerset
Ralph Vaughan Williams' zeal for English folk song hardly needs restating. It was one of the mainsprings of his work as a composer; and it was a major factor in the renewal of confidence in English music which began with Elgar, Holst, Stanford and Parry, and in the growth of the 'pastoral' tradition taken up by English composers in the middle years of the 20th century.
The folk music revival was founded on the deliberate collection of rural melodies, virtually ignored by serious composers since the 18th century. From one point of view, this was a means of emphasising the native music of England in contrast to the overblown opulence of late romanticism. But the pursuit of English folk music has also been interpreted as a response to national anxiety over England's decline as an imperial power, prompted by the German challenge and the beginnings of the American hegemony. Be that as it may, a landmark date in the movement was 1898, when the Folk Song Society was founded, and a charismatic figure was the Cambridge musician Cecil Sharp, who soon became the movement's most prominent figure. He saw in folk music 'the ungarbled and ingenuous expression of the human mind,' reflecting 'its essential and basic qualities.'
It was Sharp who drew the attention of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Butterworth and others to what one of his associates called 'living depositories of ancient history,' fragments of a lost England that had never been written down and which it was their duty to preserve. A follower of Sharp, the writer EV Lucas, wrote romantically of the 'exquisite freshness' of the vanished past which folk music could evoke. Relics of a sweet and simple culture could be unearthed through the artless songs painstakingly hunted down by working composers, as they tramped in tweeds through the English countryside with their notebooks, and even primitive recording apparatus, at the ready.
There is no question that Vaughan Williams, for one, used his discoveries to create sophisticated music of a high order. His first expedition in search of folk songs was in 1903, when he persuaded a retired farmhand in Essex to sing for him a number called Bushes and Briars. And where had the tune come from? he asked, and was thrilled by the man's reply: 'If you can get the words, the Almighty sends you a tune.' By 1909 Vaughan Williams had collected more than 800 songs, mainly in Norfolk, Essex and Sussex.
By 1923, when Vaughan Williams wrote his Suite of English Folk Songs, his 'open air'
idiom was well settled and he was well-
Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©
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