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Vaughan Williams Folk Song Album
VRS-1055, original LP cover

This program of folk songs in arrangements by Ralph Vaughan Williams (October 12, 1872 – August 26, 1958) has a two-fold appeal. To the lover of folk song, it offers nineteen of the loveliest of English and Scottish songs, affectionately sung. But it also affords a luminous insight into the heart, mind and imagination of one of the very great and most lovable composers of our time.

Although he was widely respected in the last decades, it was only when the news of his death came, in 1958, when he was eighty-six, and with the deep sense of loss this engendered, that the full realization began to grow of how precious and lasting had been his contribution to music of the twentieth century. And an important aspect of his personality is contained in this recording. We have first the songs which served as inspiration for his own original and yet distinctly "English" idiom. And secondly, the setting of many of the songs is so richly creative that, while remaining always faithful to the melody and spirit of the original song, these free arrangements rank with his most beautiful compositions in short forms. For example, with the third song on this program, The Lover's Ghost, we have, so to speak, an "unfolding" of the song, with a fine harmonization, part writing, polyphonic weaving of voices and variety of vocal coloring that justifies our calling it a recreation of the great Elizabethan part-song and madrigal art, of a Dowland, Weelkes and Wilbye. Yet it also has a twentieth century sensibility. The same is true of more than half the songs on this program.

The fact that these arrangements for all their freedom are so touching and sound so authentic comes out of the paradoxical nature of folk song itself. For if folk song is music of great antiquity, it is at the same time always subject to change.

Folk song is by its very nature a living and growing musical organism. This every gifted folk singer understands instinctively when he makes a performance his own expression, and sometimes gives birth to a variant that in the long run will become a new song. Vaughan Williams defined folk song as "an individual flowering on a common stem." He added,

And it is somewhat in this spirit that he created his own free arrangements, with his harmonic and polyphonic texture disclosing and expanding upon hidden beauties in the song itself, thus being "faithful" to the song in a most creative way.

Such settings of folk songs require special qualities, including a love not only for the music but also for the people who created or preserved it. This is apparent in Vaughan Williams' own words, when lecturing in the United States on how a composer uses folk material as the basis for his own creative work.

And so this recorded program lets us into some of the secrets of the composing process of a remarkable genius. For if some of these folk song settings are direct and simple, the others with their polyphonic "fantasia" quality bring us to the verge of such cherishable original works as the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and the Serenade to Music.

Eleven of the folk song settings included here come from the years 1912-13, when the composer already had major musical achievements behind him, and was carrying forward his aim of writing musical works that were linked to the life of the common man of England, past and present. Born in Gloucestershire on October 12, 1872, it was in 1903 that he began collecting folk songs and, as he writes, "boring my friends with them." In 1905 he produced Toward the Unknown Region and in 1905-10 A Sea Symphony, both of which are choral-orchestral works using Walt Whitman's poetry for their texts. In 1910 came the Tallis Fantasia. Then he embarked on the opera Hugh the Drover (1911-14), which not only uses many original yet folk-style melodies but also has a boxing match as a main scene, and in 1914 he wrote A London Symphony. In 1912 he published a number of English folk songs, in relatively simple and straightforward arrangements, six of which are included here. Five of them are sung by Alfred Deller with lute accompaniment: The Jolly Ploughboy, My Boy Billy, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The Painful Plough, and Down by the Riverside. The sixth is Ward the Pirate, for four men's voices. Then in 1913 came the remarkable set of Five English Folk Songs, which deserves to rank with the major creative works of this period. For here in the polyphonic writing for mixed voices we have the full flowering of the composer's part-song style, each of the settings being a little "fantasia." All five are included here; The Dark Eyed Sailor, The Spring Time of the Year, Just as the Tide was Flowing, The Lover's Ghost, and Gloucestershire Wassail. They were made famous in performance by the celebrated English Singers, in the 1920's. It may be said in passing that the Deller Consort is generally regarded as the foremost inheritor, in folk song and madrigal, of the tradition of this notable group.

At the outbreak of the great war of 1914-18, Vaughan Williams, aged forty-two, enlisted as a common soldier, served in Macedonia, and then received a commission as lieutenant in Artillery, seeing action in France. One of his major works of the 1920's was the Pastoral Symphony (1922), in which there are no actual folk tunes but the whole texture is suffused with the spirit of English countryside song, and there is a haunting wordless soprano part in the last movement. Much in the same spirit are the fine folk-song settings of the period, distinguished by their fine interplay of solo voices and contrasting choirs. They are Ca' the Yowes (1922), a Scottish folk song with words by Robert Burns, for tenor solo and four mixed voices; that most tender of love songs, The Turtle Dove (1924), set for six voices, and Bushes and Briars, of the same year, with its beautiful separation of soprano and alto voices against tenor, baritone and bass. This last-named song, which the composer took down in 1903 from the singing of an Essex shepherd, was one of those that had deeply affected him and helped shape his style in its formative years. In 1926 came A Farmer's Son So Sweet, arranged for six voices from the version in Cecil Sharp's Folk-songs from Somerset.

At this time Vaughan Williams was working on an opera, Sir John in Love (1924-29), based on Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the third act of this opera the composer inserted the song Greensleeves, which had been the most popular of all songs in the age of Queen Elizabeth. It is sung in the opera by Mrs. Page, with lute accompaniment, to Sir John Falstaff, as part of her pretense of being enamored of the boastful old rake. This rediscovery of the old song gave it a new twentieth century popularity. The present setting, for mixed voices, appeared in 1945. The setting of the Scottish song, Loch Lomond, dates from 1931. John Dory, with its sparkling polyphonic texture, and the blithe An Acre of Land, with its "riddle" words, date from 1934.

– Sidney Finkelstein

English Lute Songs
BG-576, original LP cover

2

In the move away from a music primarily devoted to church liturgy, the development of the "art song," for solo voice, may be said to have been "on the order of business" in all Western Europe. During the 16th century songs for solo voice with lute accompaniment appeared in Italy, Flanders and Spain. But these tended to be either isolated experiments, or songs in madrigal style with the lute simply taking to itself all the vocal parts but that of the one remaining voice. In England arose the first extensive body of song genuinely conceived for the one singer, with accompaniment by lute.

The genius of this forward step, not its inventor but the first to apply himself to it as a major art form, was John Dowland (c.1563-c.1626). His birthplace is not known but there is evidence to indicate that it may have been in Ireland. He was a cosmopolitan figure who served with the English ambassador in Paris, travelled to Germany, then went to Italy where he aimed to study with the madrigalist Luca Marenzio, and was appointed lutenist to the King of Denmark. 1n 1597 appeared his First Booke of Songes or Ayres of Four Partes with Tableture for the Lute, the popularity of which is attested to by the fact that new editions of it appeared in 1600, 1606, 1608 and 1613. It inspired a stream of such song books, which appeared in the next quarter century, and Dowland himself published three further collections.

Thomas Morley (c.1556-c.1603) is distinguished by the lively, dance-inspired and popular tone of his melodies. Primarily a madrigal composer, his solo songs are found in his The First Book of Ayres or Little Short Songs (1600).Thomas Campian (1567-1620) was as famous a poet as a song composer. He contributed twenty-one of the songs, as well as probably all of the poetry, in the Booke of Ayres (1601) published by Philip Rosseter (c.1568-1623), and followed this by other publications totalling 118 songs.

Originally released as Vanguard VRS-1055 (tracks 1-19) and Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-576

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