Interview, Vaughan Williams's folksong arrangements

Albion Records continue to unearth all-but-forgotten works by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). Vaughan Williams arranged 80 folk songs in English for voice (or unison voices) with piano or violin accompaniment. No less than 53 of these songs have never been recorded, and another 4 were only available in the ‘vinyl’ era. This is the first of four albums presenting all 80 songs, with plenty of world premiere recordings on all four of them.

The songs are performed by Mary Bevan, soprano, Nicky Spence, tenor, Roderick Williams, baritone and William Vann, piano. Jack Liebeck supplies two violin accompaniments on Volume 1 and there are incidental contributions from a chorus of 6.

I spoke to Roderick Williams and William Vann, as well as John Francis at Albion Records, who researched the project and wrote the detailed notes that accompany the recordings.

The history of Vaughan Williams collecting folksongs from singers all over Britain is well known – but how and why did he first start doing so, and what inspired him in what was, at the time, a relatively unprecedented project of documentation and preservation?

John: Ralph Vaughan Williams absorbed folk music from the age of 10, and infuriated Sir Charles Villiers Stanford with his ‘modal’ tendencies when studying under him. In 1902 he gave the first of a series of ‘Oxford Extension Lectures’ at Pokesdown, Bournemouth, on ‘History of English Folk Songs’. In fact he was one of the first to use the term ‘folk song’. However, he believed that such music belonged only to the past, writing that ‘My faith was not yet active’. The lectures were given again at Brentwood, early in 1903; this ultimately led to the composer attending a tea party at The Rectory at nearby Ingrave where somebody who had enjoyed the lectures had assembled a small group of local singers. Unfortunately, none of the singers would perform in front of the elderly widower Rector. Charles Potiphar, then 74, offered to sing for him next day at his own home; thus it was that Vaughan Williams collected his first folk song, ‘Bushes and Briars’, on Friday 4 December 1903. He was overwhelmed by its beauty; it felt like ‘something he had known all his life’. This revelation drove him to become a collector, ultimately collecting more than 800 songs.

These folksong arrangements have historically fallen between two stools – not ‘sophisticated’ enough to stand alongside Lieder, but not ‘authentic’ enough to satisfy traditionalist folk music lovers. Do you think Vaughan Williams was trying to bring British folksong into the recital-hall alongside the former – and if so why did his efforts fail?

William: There’s no clear answer to this, although the publication of the Folk Songs from Sussex in particular, and the sheer amount of high-end compositional output that he poured into the accompaniments, leads me to suspect that he wanted to create something that would elevate folk song into the concert hall. Why did it ‘fail’? Maybe because the Wigmore Hall-style ‘serious song recital’ took over as the style of delivering song recitals, arguably to the detriment of song recital in general, and any folk song performance would always be relegated to a quirky “and now for something completely different” slot. In this series we hope to reintroduce Vaughan Williams’s magnificent achievement into the recital repertoire, and encourage singers to take on these fascinating creations.

Some of these songs re-tell historical events – from the Napoleonic Wars and the Seven Years’ War to the exploits of famous bandits – which perhaps might not have otherwise been remembered among largely illiterate communities. Do you think the loss of that social role is partly why folk music has seemed to recede from importance in recent years?

Roderick: Historical events in folk song tend to be either selective, emphasising heroic deeds, or simply inaccurate, and should probably not be relied upon as history lessons! Volume 1 begins with an account of the death of General Wolfe while taking Quebec, and is probably just as much a fantasy as the many paintings that were made of that event. It was written to celebrate a topical news item. Later on, we celebrate the perhaps not so heroic deeds of the highwayman, Jeremiah Grant, but the song transports him from Ireland to Scotland. Folk songs were sung for entertainment, and sometimes to provide men and women with a working rhythm; it was the industrial revolution that caused their decline.

Vaughan Williams was quite happy to repurpose one folk-tune in multiple different ways; for instance, adapting Ulster’s traditional ‘Star of the County Down’ as both a robust hymn-tune (‘Kingsfold’) and a yearning fantasia for string orchestra (Five Variants of 'Dives and Lazarus'). How much difference do you think the arranger themselves can (or should) make to the spirit of the source-material they work with?

William: That is one of the most widely known folk song tunes, with variants found in all four countries of the UK and in the USA (‘Maria Martin in the Red Barn’). Some of the five variants used in the fantasia were collected by Vaughan Williams from Mr and Mrs Verral and Mr Booker in Kingsfold and Monks Gate, near Horsham in Sussex, in 1904; others came from Norfolk. Just as the tunes developed many variants, and were matched with a number of quite unrelated songs, I think Vaughan Williams’s adaptation of the tunes and their integration with other musical forms reflects the original spirit of folk song – which is one of constant evolution over time. Many folk singers insist that the songs should be sung freely and unaccompanied (eschewing, in particular, time signatures) – but, even in those musical circles, evolution has continued, encompassing folk-rock and even jazz forms. My view is that, if folk music can only be preserved as it was found at the moment of capture, then Vaughan Williams was right in his pre-1903 view, that it is a dead thing, fit only to be remembered. Fifty years later he was to talk on the radio about “we, the singing English” and our new series celebrates his contribution to that vision.

Some of these songs make use of affected accents – for instance to highlight the class distinction between the eponymous Thresherman and Squire in the third song on the album. How did you decide whether to use this ‘special effect’ in a given song?

Roderick: This is a decision we took without much discussion in the sessions. You will remember that Barnes’ original dialect poem ‘Linden Lea’, which we recorded some years ago, appears underneath a ‘modernised’ version. I recorded the ‘modern’ version for Naxos and the dialect version (with a Dorset accent) for Albion. It’s quite interesting to note how views of Received Pronunciation and dialects have changed over the decades. I would even hazard that the ‘modernisation’ of Barnes’ stated attempt to capture and preserve dialect could be seen in today’s sensitivities as, at best, patronising.

For this recording I made no attempts to seek out dialect coaching from professionals; nor did I research how a Sussex accent differs from Dorset or Norfolk. In that sense I am as guilty as anyone of a general, Home Counties patronising slant on any dialect that isn’t RP, using it just as a handy tool to denote class distinctions between characters, and highlight rural versus urban.

However, my goal in using different accents or dialects was not intended to patronise; it was rather the simplest aural method to make it clear to a listener that, although only one singer, I was sometimes depicting a conversation between two or more characters. This is especially tricky when a neutral narrator is involved as well as an extra ‘non-character’. In a song with many verses where I’m often depicting characters of different gender, let alone social standing, swapping conversations liberally, unless the listener is able to follow a written text, it is not immediately obvious who is singing what. I can’t even use a higher voice for a female character because the strophic nature of these songs means all characters sing in the same octave.

Therefore a strong, clear dialect is all I have left to make distinctions of character immediate to the listener. If sometimes these fall into cartoonish stereotypes, I think that’s partly because, in a lot of these songs, the characters tend to behave as stereotypes. I’m aware that this can sit awkwardly with current sensibilities but then there are several songs whose characters or subject matter are very much of their time.

Most people associate Vaughan Williams overwhelmingly with “English”, rather than British, folksong. This album, indeed, opens with fourteen songs from Sussex alone, and a further six described as English. Is this an accurate picture of his work, or did he work more widely across the British Isles?

John: The business of folk song collecting developed at different times around the UK. In particular, Scottish songs were collected earlier, and many thought either that there were no English folk songs, or that it was too late to collect them. Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp, Lucy Broadwood and (a little earlier) Sabine Baring-Gould were among those collectors who found that there was still a living folk song tradition in England, so Vaughan Williams’s own collecting activities all took place in England.

Other aspects of his work were more evenly spread: he adjudicated at music festivals (where these folk song settings were often used as test pieces) many times in all four countries of the UK, and had a particular affection for Welsh folk songs and hymn tunes.

The songs in this four-volume collection are by no means dominated by those collected by Vaughan Williams himself. He did not collect any of the Folk Songs from Sussex in Volume 1, and two further volumes celebrate songs collected by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the USA and in Newfoundland, Canada.

William: There is infinite variety of songs and ballads to be found in this collection (which will be completed over the next 18 months), contrasting cheerful and comical songs with romantic ballads; smiles and regrets in almost equal quantities. Our objective is to bring Ralph Vaughan Williams’s exquisitely beautiful and sensitive settings to a new audience.