1 - Part 1
" ... Vaughan Williams was more interested in the song than the singer, in the melody than the message." Roy Palmer: Folk Songs Collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1983.
"The father of modern folksong studies was Thomas Edison." Bela Bartok.
In order to study the advent of the second folk revival in Britain, we need a brief historical contextualisation of the first. Both, in their different ways, were occasions when modernist thought, in the shape of an 'alternative' interest in the music of the 'vulgus in populo', infiltrated musicology. Tagg has described this, with reference to the first revival, as musicology's 'ethno' phase. 2 Its leading figure was:
Many have cited the day in Autumn 1903 when Sharp first heard the gardener [John England] at the vicarage where he was staying sing The Seeds of Love as the beginning of the folk revival [e.g. Harker 1985 p.178]; in truth, the dance revival had already begun by Boxing Day, 1899 when Sharp first heard William Kimber, jnr, play concertina and seen quarrymen dance the Morris at Sandfield Cottage, Headington Quarry, Oxford. His life's work became one of collecting and disseminating English folk dance and song, collecting not only in this country, but also in the Southern Appalachian mountains in the USA, where, accompanied by his assistant Maud Karpeles, he spent two periods late in his life.
Between 1903 and 1907, assisted by the Rev Marson, Sharp collected ,in Somerset alone, 1,500 songs, many of which he subsequently published in the five volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset. From the Appalachians he asserted to have found and gathered together another 1,500 songs, declaring many to be of English origin.
He also turned his enthusiasm to the revival of folk dancing in England, apparently searching-out and [certainly] reconstructing Morris dances and Sword dances, publishing and teaching them to others. Three years before the First World War he founded the English Folk Dance Society. He died at the age of 64, and nine years after his death Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work written by Arthur H Fox Strangeways in collaboration with Maud Karpeles was published [1933]. This work was updated twice by Karpeles, in 1955 and 1968. The foundation stone for Cecil Sharp House, the London headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, was laid on 24 June 1929.
Sharp and his devotees regarded folksong and dance as a powerful regenerative prescription for modern culture. By adopting an older, more authentic form of music [something they considered all-but obliterated by the march of automation and the semi-literate masses] they expected society to experience a musical and spiritual re-awakening. Indeed, the use of the word 'revival' [indicating both a restoration and tonic] stems from this period [eg. the rival Association for the Revival and Practice of Folk Music inaugurated in 1907 (without Sharp)]. Despite Sharp's inclination to "give back to the people the songs and dances of their country" 3 it has also been argued that this first revival was maintained rather like a form of latter-day esoteric gnosticism. There appears to have been a 'knowledge' passed among an 'elevated' few, those who wished to preserve a peasant purity in music from the vulgarisations of the workers, at least until such a time when the lower classes were educated enough to appreciate what they had almost lost via the impropriety of the 'popular'. Cecil Sharp:
A lover of Beethoven's music must feel the same if ever he thought of the way his favourite composer's music is being rendered in Crouch End, Hornsey etc. If anything good is to be made popular, many things will happen which will shock the ears of the elect ... I believe so sincerely in the innate beauty and purity of folk-music that I am sure it cannot really be contaminated ...However it has been subsequently argued that one cannot lose what one has never actually had. As folklorist and singer Fred McCormick has observed:
... the dances, the costumes were all constructions. There is no hard evidence to show that any of Sharp's dances were authentic survivals at all. Then they went out and taught them as if they were traditional.Certainly Bampton, Eynsham and Headington were the only villages in which Sharp witnessed complete morris teams perform; elsewhere, according to Fox Strangeways, single individuals "many of them past their prime"
6 were responsible for passing on the movements of the dancers.
The revival came to concentrate heavily upon [arranging and orchestrating] dance rather than song and along with Cecil Sharp and Maud and Helen Karpeles, included such notables as Percy Grainger, Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth [until his early death on the Western Front in 1916], Iolo Williams, Douglas Kennedy and a select group of others who, in forming the Folk Song Society [1899] and the English Folk Dance Society [1911] believed that a distillation of pure, authentic English culture would re-emerge. Sharp's archetypes of tradition, as laid out in the Morris Books 1&2, were 'necessarily' strict and precise:
My greatest desire is that at the outset these songs and dances shall be introduced to the present generation in the purest form possible - the next generation will have to take care of itself.Perhaps this last comment alludes to what Fox Strangeways summarises as the "dangers of popularisation".
8 Sharp's tradition would be uncontaminated by capitalism, commerce, German lieder [despite Sharp modelling two of his own printed compositions on Schumann] and their 'dastardly' effects upon English culture. For example, Vaughan Williams penned this in National Music and other Essays:
... what is the classical style? It is nothing more or less than the teutonic style. It so happened that for nearly a hundred years, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the great composers ... were all German or Austrian.Richard Sykes
10 has suggested that the word 'teutonic' remains enticing. Vaughan Williams propounded that far too much had been made of the associations of progress and genius with an Anglo-Saxon and, ultimately, 'teutonic' heritage. According to Sharp, a new understanding of Englishness was necessary because England had disassociated herself from a nation which had become a competitor and a caveat: an assault on the 'classical' tradition was an assault on the Germanic. The evidence for this nationalistic mood is strong; not only in the writings of Vaughan Williams and Sharp, but also in the decrees of the state Board of Education which in 1906 officially sanctioned the teaching of folksongs 11because they reflected the "expression in the idiom of the people of their joys and sorrows, their unaffected patriotism."
Nevertheless, Sharp was not over-impressed with the list of fifty songs suggested by the Board, fearing that folksong was being confused with national and popular songs. In reply to this criticism, Sir Charles Stanford of the Board claimed 12 that he had merely included "songs of the people" and songs that had stood "the test of a long life in the public ear" ... in other words, popular song "which have long been acknowledged as the backbone of national music". Sharp, however, remained convinced that there was a significant difference between the folk idiom and the popular and replied: "The distinction is not academic; nor is it archaeological. It is intrinsic, for it distinguishes between two kinds of music that are fundamentally different from one another". 13 Fox Strangeways and Karpeles were to comment:
The whole thing reads to us, perhaps, like a tilting at windmills ... He was convinced now, that such a song as 'Barbara Allen' - in a mode, multiform, anonymous - was different in quality from 'Tom Bowling' - in a key, uniform, of definite authorship; and he believed that in the strength of this quality the former would, and the latter would not, win its way permanently to the heart of the singer.Despite the pedantic overtones of Sharp's polemic, the idea of recycling a degree of modality remains interesting from a compositional perspective. After all, right across Europe the boundaries of defining musical composition and the sources upon which it was possible to draw were being stretched in the late 19th century, and the Germanic grasp upon composition was already being loosened by composers such as Bartok, Grieg, Kodaly, Janacek, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky amongst others. George Butterworth's song cycle A Shropshire Lad can also be viewed as a fine example of this strain of thought. There is evidently a shifting of musical horizons in this work with little in common with German composition of the day. There is a concentration upon an idealised national style, a move away from the European classical model.
One might say the same for Sharp's approach to dance, for the boundaries of dancing per se were being extended to include that which had thus far been written-off by certain levels of society. Sharp did aim to transmit song and dance from one strata in society to the broader community and, according to Fox Strangeways:
It was never in Sharp's mind to discard all but the best. The important thing to him was the establishment and recognition of a standard, not the uniform conformity to that standard.However, although Butterworth's melodies do owe their inspiration to English song and are sensitive in dealing with Housman's melancholy poetry, the music does not reveal the English people’s "true self" [Antony Murphy: The Times, August, 1996], but divulges that very idea as an [albeit contextual] middle-class idealistic construction. For all of their good intentions, neither Butterworth nor Sharp knew much about the history of working-class entertainment.
Perhaps we can draw similarities between Butterworth's and Sharp's conceptualisations of English idyll and those discussed by Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson. They have drawn attention to a particular form of nationalism in England at the beginning of the century that was " ... non-aggressive, sometimes non-militaristic ... invested in ideas of the national character, its traditions and a unifying love of the country." 16
This is a rather bucolic construction based around a class-ridden concept of Englishness and the bond between citizen and nation that still reverberates today, perhaps what Fox Strangeways described as Sharp's "spiritual sixth sense". 17 Butterworth was, indeed, a wonderful composer. His most famous piece, the Idyll The Banks of Green Willow is exceptional, but displays a naive class-related romanticism which was soon to dissolve on the killing fields of Flanders. The musical theme running throughout The Banks of Green Willow suggests shared experiences between all Englanders, a perpetuity that would continue throughout every epoch. But all that was being shared by 1916 was dirt and death. Vaughan Williams, however, concurred with the sentiments of Butterworth:
The art of music ... is the expression of the soul of a nation, and by a nation I mean ... any community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history and common ideals, and above all, a continuity with the past.It must also be stressed that, in search for this spiritually bound community, the folksong was still only "raw material" rather than "a finished product" from "our standpoint" [Harker quoting Sharp lecture of 1905]. These binding national musical motifs were still regarded by collectors and composers as 'primitive' because all things primitive were seen as impervious to change. The people from whom Sharp collected were "out of touch with modern improvements" and "untouched by modern civilisation".
19 And yet, since the criterion of this authenticity was also oral transmission, it was actually a contemporary culture that was transmitting the stuff! Douglas Kennedy was to later question his mentor’s methodologies:
Cecil Sharp felt he had to resort to arranging and publishing his notations, and to teaching the songs and dances to school teachers who would teach them to coming generations. Looking back, I find it difficult to think what else he could have done at the time, yet the method itself was essentially not traditional.But what was? Sadly, little effort was made by Grainger or Sharp to maintain any contact with living singers. In fact, according to Peter Kennedy, writing in 1959, 'most people at the time presumed that all the good young singers must have been killed in the war and the old ones passed-on.'
21
It might have even suited the purposes of composers for people to presume this. 'Their' music then came to represent a plaintive folk myth "a source of quiet strength in the face of adversity". 22 In this case, the idea of a folk revival could be viewed as existing within a greater fashionable middle/upper-class group of concepts, part of a restoration of ideas concerning [bohemian, but eventually deep-thinking] 'organic' communities, drawing upon the spirit of 'merrye England'. This was not disconnected from the eugenics movement who proffered a theory that urban life had issued an inbred erosion of the national constitution. Boer War recruitment had been seriously damaged by urban medical failures, while Marie Stopes [a supporter of eugenics] wished to keep the birth rate down in urban areas. The 'answer' to this expanding problem was thought to lie in the maintainance of rural communities, untainted by the inherent problems of urbanites. Sharp's presumptions and presuppositions about folksong flowed from a similar source. He saw song as having spiritually regenerative qualities. The Hon Sec of the Folk Song Society, Lucy Broadwood, even described the effects of urban culture as an "enervating slow poison."
Yet, one of the classic contradictions for these Edwardian collectors was that they also believed that the pre-industrial rural English were rather too uninhibited with their sexual attitudes. While Sharp and Stopes were advocating a return to 'country ways', they were also concerned about pastoral habits! Therefore, it has been alleged that many of 'Sharp's' songs were 'milk and water' versions, thus filtrating a degree of bawdiness. Gammon now suggests that Edwardian interpretations of rural songs were incongruous, in any case:
The physical and social environment in which a text is received can modify the meaning that is produced ... between individuals of the same social and cultural background the communication of identical or similar meaning may be difficult. Between individuals of different social and cultural backgrounds the communication of identical meanings is totally impossible ... People in England in the two and a half centuries before 1850 certainly made love, sometimes illicitly, but surely it is naive to view the songs of encounter as a celebration of an everyday sort of occurence.However, whatever class origins, fealties or motivations, the work of Sharp and other early collectors at least began to draw serious study of music away from the conservatory canons of European society, showing that music and the masses [past and present] required earnest consideration. By the study of a 'hidden soundtrack' Sharp brought an 'other' music onto the agenda, even if it was only for a small sector of society, and he broadened the scope for discovering 'value' in music. This was a considerable challenge to the musical 'givens' of the day. Nevertheless, Sharp's 'pure' folk culture [if it ever existed in the first place] was still subjected to considerable reconstruction in order to appeal to prim young middle-class ladies seated at the pianoforte in their front parlours. There were too many examples of a priori modal corrections
24 and too few constructive conclusions drawn about how the 'peasants' had previously used this music. Texts were doctored for a 'refined' public and, as Harker ascertains, mediation rather than restoration took place.
Unlike Harker [Fakesong,1985], however, I have no objections to mediation. Oppositions to mediation only further the concept of musical apartheid. All song is mediated as soon as somebody sings it, never mind collects it. Rather, the passing-off of this music as 'pure' and 'authentic' [more English than other kinds of Englishness?] was an unforgivable petty-bourgeois postulation, and ever since there has been a presumption that folk music can, indeed, be both 'pure' and 'authentic'. It is in this period that it could be said that twentieth century folk music hagiography began. Having introduced 'this' music to 'our' ears, explanations were needed as to why it was supposed to be different. But the historical absolutism of Sharp was insubstantial while it claimed an over-arching authenticity for one 'type' of music which could only be validated by using another [popular] as an 'anti-christ'. Sadly, the British capacity for escapist whimsy can never be underestimated, and the only sure thing about discovering any evidence for Sharp's 'organic' community was that it had conveniently disappeared!
Mike Brocken
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