Fare Ye Well, Lovely Nancy (from the George Gardiner Collection at the EFDSS and forming part of The Full English)

Learn more about England’s cultural heritage through folk song, from ballads to shanties. This study day -  to be held at the British Library on Saturday 21 September - explores the history, development and purpose of folk songs collected in England.

The day will be led by renowned folklorist Steve Roud with Julia Bishop - a superb opportunity to share their knowledge and insights into folk song and music. Steve and Julia are co-editors of the acclaimed New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs.

Learn more about the day and how to book via the What's On.

The event forms part of The Full English, a project by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), and supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Folk Music Fund and The Folklore Society. The Full English includes the most comprehensive free searchable digital archive in the world. Ralph Vaughan Williams' manuscripts of folk songs and other works, which were deposited after the composer's death in 1958, have been digitised as part of the project.

Vaughan Williams didn't only note folk songs down on paper, he also recorded the performances. You can listen to 3 folk songs recorded on wax cylinders by Ralph Vaughan Williams on the British Library's Sounds website:

Turtle Dove, sung by David Penfold, recorded 1907

The Trees They Do Grow High, sung by David Penfold, recorded 1907

Fare Ye Well, Lovely Nancy, sung by George Lovett, recorded 1909 (only a few years after George Gardiner noted it down on paper as in the image above)

The cylinders are owned by the EFDSS but housed at the British Library on their behalf.

At the heart of our exhibition ‘Poetry in Sound: The Music of Benjamin Britten’ is the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, Op. 31.  Arguably more than any other work in Britten’s output, the Serenade demonstrates his acutely sensitive response to the written word, to the extent that words and music often cohere with a natural simplicity that seems to encapsulate and transform the poetic intention.  The Serenade encompasses poetry by Keats, Tennyson, Blake, Cotton, and Jonson, together with an anonymous fifteenth-century text – each poem selected to fit an overall poetic conception that reflects on the approach of darkness as a metaphor for the journey from life into death.  It was composed in 1943, shortly after Britten returned to England from the US, and dedicated to the critic and novelist Edward Sackville-West (1901-65).  The work was first performed at the Wigmore Hall on 15 October 1943 by the great horn player Dennis Brain and the tenor Peter Pears. 

The Serenade opens with a prologue for solo horn, which at once sets a haunting tone for the work and introduces the instrument as an unspoken commentator on the sung text that follows.  For the first sung movement Britten selected four stanzas from the The Evening Quatrains by Charles Cotton (1630-87), which itself forms part of a cycle describing each part of the day: morning, noon, evening and night.  Cotton’s words appear in the 1689 edition of his Poems on Several Occasions, published in London by Hensman and Fox, a copy of which is on display in the exhibition.  The opening verse ‘The day’s grown old; the fainting sun / has but a little way to run’ sets the tone for Britten’s reflective setting, which is dominated by a descending musical theme echoed by the solo horn. 

In the second movement Britten’s music conveys the rapid shifts of emotion in Tennyson’s ‘Blow, bugle, blow’ from the narrative poem The Princess.  Here the sung text is punctuated by horn fanfares evoking the sound of a bugle echoing over an Arcadian landscape, an allegory for the inevitability of death followed by after-life.  The evidence of Britten’s manuscript demonstrates that he changed his mind about the title of the first and second movements: the original titles were ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Ballad’, but these were crossed through in red crayon and replaced with ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Nocturne’ respectively.  There were apparently no second thoughts concerning the title of the third movement, an ‘Elegy’ on William Blake’s famous ‘O Rose, thou art sick!’.  In this setting, which is dominated by the simple and unsettling motif of a descending semitone, the sung text is delivered to a sustained string accompaniment.  A lengthy introduction for horn and pulsating strings returns to form a suitably mournful postlude. 

Britten’s inspiration for the fourth movement was an anonymous fifthteenth-century poem, the Lyke-Wake Dirge, which continues the underlying theme of the Serenade by charting the journey undertaken by the soul from earth to purgatory.  Written in an old form of the Yorkshire dialect, the repetitive structure of the poem gave Britten the opportunity to create a setting that contrasts the jaunty rhythms of the vocal lines with an increasingly complex orchestral accompaniment – rather like a set of variations on a given theme. 

For the fifth movement Britten chose words from Cynthia’s Revels by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), a play first performed in 1600 which depicts Queen Elizabeth I as the virgin huntress Cynthia (elsewhere known as Diana). Britten selected the hymn, ‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair’, from Act V (shown on the right in the edition published in London in 1601), allowing him to deploy the solo horn in hunting style, thus providing the work with a lively scherzo movement.  The final movement, however, marks a return to the reflective and intensely lyrical tone that pervades much of the work, with a setting of John Keats’s sonnet To Sleep.  Britten’s masterpiece ends with the strains of the solo horn, now off stage, its melancholy fanfare gradually disappearing into silence.  

 

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The South African born composer Kevin Volans recorded a wide range of music in Lesotho and South Africa during the 1970s. His fieldwork focused on the Zulu, Swazi and Xhosa people. This collection is now available online on the BL Sounds website.

Close up of the quill portion of a lesiba, taken at the Drum Cafe in Johannesburg. (c) Jenny Buccos 2007.

There is a recording of a lesiba being played: this is a stringed-wind instrument which has a quill attached to a long string. The quill is blown across, causing the string to vibrate and resulting in a sound rather similar to a didgeridu. Other names for this type of instrument are gora (see here for an example on the Europeana portal), ugwali and ugwala.

Other highlights from the collection include songs sung by Princess Constance Magogo, accompanying herself on the ugubhu or musical bow. There are several other types of musical bows which feature in Volans' collection, including the segankuru which you can read about in an earlier blog.

As well as the broad range of musical recordings, Volans also recorded some very beautiful soundscapes of birdsong, cicadas, thunderstorms and other atmospheric recordings. 

 More information can be found about Kevin Volans on his website.

 

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Trevor Wiggins made extensive recordings in Ghana during the 1990s, focusing on the Dagaare people and their xylophone or "gyil" music, as well as recording various other instrumental and vocal music. These recordings are now available on the BL Sounds website.

A goge from the UCL Ethnography Collections

One such instrumental recording is of the gonje or goge, a Nigerian stringed instrument which is played with a bow. Here's an example from the UCL Ethnography Collections - you can see that the string is of horsehair and the main body is a hemispherical gourd with a skin covering.

Some of the xylophone or gyil recordings include demonstrations of the tuning of the xylophones and, also, the "signature tunes" of the performers. Here's the signature tune of Rallio Kpampul, followed by further music.

You can hear Trevor talking about his work when he was interviewed by Carolyn Landau in 2010. The interview is one of a group of interviews with leading ethnomusicologists.

 

 

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CALL FOR PAPERS: The Music of War: 1914–1918

30–31 August 2014

British Library, London

Papers are invited for a two-day international conference on the theme of music during the First World War. The forthcoming centenary of the war is a timely opportunity to reconsider the fundamental role of music and musicians during the exceptional circumstances of the period 1914–1918. The conference aims to provide a forum for discussion to explore the roles and uses of music during this extended period of worldwide conflict, considering why—against a backdrop of large-scale death and destruction—music mattered, whether as entertainment, weapon, tool, or emotional catalyst. We welcome papers from scholars working in any discipline and which engage with any aspect of music-making during the war, whether on the home or fighting fronts, or in combatant or non-combatant countries.

Themes for consideration include, but are not limited to:

- Music-making on the home-fronts

- Concert and theatrical life

- Music and the military

- Music and/as propaganda

- Music and patriotism

- National identities

- Cultural transmission and international exchange

- Music as entertainment

- Music and charity

- Music and its therapeutic uses

- Composer responses to the war

- Musicians' participation in the war

- Music and commemoration

- Intersections of music and other art forms

Proposals are invited for individual papers of 20 minutes, to be followed by 10 minutes of discussion. We also encourage submissions for themed panel sessions of three related papers.

Proposals consisting of a title, abstract (max. 300 words), and short biographical note, should be submitted by e-mail to the organising committee at [email protected] by 30 November 2013. For panel sessions, please include a 250-word (max.) summary of the session and up to 300 words for each session participant. Please include contact details and institutional affiliation (if any), along with details of anticipated AV requirements. Proposals should be in English only. The conference language will be English.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, London)

OTHER CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

Professor Rachel Cowgill (Cardiff University)

Professor Annette Becker (Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense)

CONFERENCE EVENTS: The conference runs in tandem with the British Library’s Centenary Exhibition and will include a concert of music from the years 1914–1918 and wine reception. Full details of these and other conference activities will be made available on the conference website www.themusicofwar.org in due course.

Held as part of the British Library's Centenary events programme, supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

Conference Organisers:

Jane Angell (Royal Holloway) and Dr Rachel Moore (University of Oxford)

Programme Committee:

Jane Angell (Royal Holloway, University of London) Dr Daniel Grimley (University of Oxford) Professor Barbara Kelly (University of Keele) Dr Stefan Manz (Aston University) Dr Rachel Moore (University of Oxford) Dr Rupert Ridgewell (British Library)

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS: 30 November 2013

SUCCESSFUL APPLICANTS NOTIFIED: 31 January 2014

'Music and Monarchy' is the theme of a new four-part television series, presented by Dr David Starkey, which 'reveals how British kings and queens shaped the story of the nation's music: as patrons and tastemakers, and even as composers and performers'. The series promises a refreshing approach, looking at the role played by music in some of the great moments of British history - but always primarily from a historian's point of view.

As with many of his earlier series, Dr Starkey draws heavily on the British Library's collections when telling his 'history of England written in music'. This post draws attention to some of the British Library manuscripts which feature in the first programme, all of which are freely available online.

Two pieces of music in the Old Hall Manuscript are attributed to 'Roy Henry': they are settings of the 'Gloria' and 'Sanctus' of the Mass, both composed in three parts. There has been a great deal of discussion about the true identity of this King Henry, much of it taking place while the manuscript was owned by St Edmund's College at Old Hall Green in Hertfordshire, from where the manuscript gained its modern name before entering the British Library's collections in 1973. Earlier scholars identified the composer as Henry VI or Henry IV, but the consensus is now firmly in favour of Henry V. The manuscript was compiled between about 1415 and 1421, but it is quite possible that Henry composed these pieces before acceding to the throne in 1413.

Images of the complete Old Hall Manuscript are available to view on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (diamm.ac.uk), together with a detailed description, list of contents and extensive bibliography about the manuscript. (This link leads directly to the Old Hall page.) DIAMM requires users to set up a user account before accessing high-resolution images, for reasons of copyright licensing, but this is a simple process.

A later king whose musical predilections are more widely known is Henry VIII. As with 'Roy Henry', music survives which is apparently composed by the king himself: the Henry VIII Songbook was probably compiled around 1518, and includes twenty songs and thirteen instrumental pieces ascribed to ‘The Kynge H. viij’, as well as 76 pieces by other musicians associated with the court. It is most likely that Henry composed this music while still a prince, though some pieces may date from the early years of his reign. The manuscript is not written by Henry himself, and was never part of the royal library: it appears to have been compiled for Sir Henry Guildford (1489-1532), controller of the royal household. It is now numbered as Add. MS 31922, and a description and images are available on DIAMM at this link.

Two other important music manuscripts presented to Henry VIII survived in the king's own library, which now forms part of the British Library's collections. One of them is a magnificent choirbook produced in the workshop of Petrus Alamire, a famous Flemish music scribe who made several similar choirbooks for other European courts. He also acted as a spy, informing Henry of the movements of Richard de la Pole, exiled pretender to the English crown. The opening pages are the most richly decorated, with various Tudor symbols as well as Catherine of Aragon’s pomegranate. This manuscript, Royal MS 8 G VII, is available on DIAMM at this link.

The other grand manuscript was prepared for Henry VIII in 1516 by a successful Flemish merchant named Petrus de Opitiis. It includes a canon (or round) for four voices: two voices sing the music as written and another two sing the same melody a perfect fourth higher, beginning when the first singers reach the points marked with a sign. The words praise the root that has brought forth the scarlet rose of the Tudor dynasty, and it may have been composed to commemorate the reunion of Henry and his two sisters for the first time in 13 years. Royal MS 11 E XI is available on DIAMM at this link, as well as on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website here.

David Starkey's series will be screened on BBC 2 starting on Saturday 20 July 2013. Future posts will feature some recent discoveries that shed light on the relationship between music and monarchy in later periods.

 

The Europeana portal is an aggregation of objects, images and manuscripts from over 2,200 content providers from all over Europe. This means that a search for a particular type of object can yield a large amount of data.

Take for example the African instrument, the mbira. The mbira is an instrument made of lamellae - long strips of wood, cane or metal - which are attached to a board or box and which vibrate when plucked. The same kind of effect can be achieved by holding a ruler over the edge of a table and plucking its free end.

The generic name for this instrument is lamellophone or lamellaphone, but often mbira is used as a generic name as well. A search for mbira on Europeana will yield around 90 objects from different collections around Europe. A search for lamellophone will yield even more - about 890 objects. The lamellophone we see here is courtesy of the Musik & Teater Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

Lulimba, courtesy of Musik & Teater Museet

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This lamellophone is from the region of South West Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia and is known as a lulimba or ulimba. Unlike other lamellophones, the lamellae are driven into solid wood rather than being fastened to the front of the instrument using a bridge. Once these lamellae have been driven into the wood, that's it - they can't be retuned. The tuning is usually pentatonic with the lamellae arranged in the shape of a v, with the lowest note at the centre.

To hear examples of different types of lamellophones being played, please go to the British Library "Sounds" website and try putting "lamellophone" into the search box. Or, you can search our Sound and Moving Catalogue for further details about ulimbas, ilimbas, kalimbas and other lamellophones.

 

In 1990 the British Library initiated its Oral History of Glyndebourne project.  For the next seven years 68 interviews were conducted, not just with singers, but with a whole range of people connected with Glyndebourne and the running of the annual opera festival.  Among the musicians can be found singers Janet Baker, Ian Wallace and Elisabeth Söderström as well as instrumentalists Philip Jones, Jack Brymer and Evelyn Barbirolli (Rothwell) who tells how she joined the very first orchestra in 1934.  The history of the running of the opera company is recounted by administrators, finance directors and producers while insights into other areas are provided by gardeners, stage technicians and day to day staff. 

Some of the interviewees recall their experiences before the War and, twenty years on, many of them are no longer with us, so this is not only a comprehensive record of the microcosm that is Glyndebourne Opera, but a record of some people who may not otherwise have been recorded in interview.