Fw: NZ-Folk Digest, Vol 54, Issue 11
Sue Darby-O'Leary
From: <nz-folk...@kiwifolk.com>
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 10:00 AM
Subject: NZ-Folk Digest, Vol 54, Issue 11
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> Today's Topics:
> 1. ENGLAND'S HERITAGE OF FOLK SONGS "GIVEN BACK" TO THE NATION
> (Chris J Brady)
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 16:06:35 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Chris J Brady <chris...@yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Nz-folk] ENGLAND?S HERITAGE OF FOLK SONGS ?GIVEN BACK? TO
> THE NATION
> To: NZ Folk <nz-...@kiwifolk.com>
>
> Press Release
>
>>From the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Cecil Sharp House, 2
>>Regent's Park Road, Camden Town, London NW1 7AY
>
> Take 6 Archives Website Goes Live!
>
> ENGLAND'S HERITAGE OF FOLK SONGS "GIVEN BACK" TO THE NATION
>
>From a small room in London's Camden Town, a treasury of England's folk
>songs is made available online
>
> In 2007 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded ?154,000 to the English Folk
> Dance and Song Society EFDSS) for its Take 6 project.
>
> The aims of the project were to:
>
> * Catalogue, conserve and digitise six of its major manuscript collections
> of England's folk songs - those collected by Janet Blunt, George
> Butterworth, Francis Collinson, George Gardiner, Anne Geddes Gilchrist,
> and the Hammond Brothers
>
> * Make the collections freely accessible to all through a dedicated
> website
>
> * Give the songs back to the areas where they were first collected in the
> early twentieth century through projects with primary schools in
> Lancashire, Hampshire and London
>
> * Develop an interactive website designed especially for children to
> explore and
> learn folk-songs from the EFDSS archives, with additional tips and
> classroom materials for teachers (to be launched Thursday 2nd July 2009)
>
> * Raise community awareness of Take 6 and the songs and music collected in
> Lancashire and Hampshire through leaflets, displays and events
> The EFDSS is delighted to announce that 9th June 2009 sees the launch of a
> dedicated website for these six manuscript collections ? a first in the
> field of folklore in the UK. Access to 22,000 images of the actual
> documents, notebooks and letters of six major fieldworkers at the tips of
> your fingers, fully indexed and searchable.
>
> Go to:
>
> http://library.efdss.org/archives
>
> For further information please contact Jon Garlick at EFDSS Marketing
> Department on 020 7485 2206 ext. 22 or mark...@efdss.org
>
> NOTES TO EDITORS:
>
> * For nearly a century the English Folk Dance and Song Society have been
> preserving and disseminating our folk heritage. The Society aims to
> promote the best of folk arts through a range of mediums including dance,
> music, song, film, exhibitions, publications and our library collections;
> engage new generations with the folk arts through workshops, classes and
> study, and to ensure that the folk arts are a fundamental part of the
> cultural life of the UK. The EFDSS is a charity registered in England and
> Wales, No. 305999
>
> * The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is the internationally renowned
> multi-media library and archive of the English Folk Dance and Song Society
> (EFDSS). Recognised as England?s national repository for folk arts
> materials, it has evolved into an outstanding multi-media collection since
> its inception with the opening of Cecil Sharp House in 1930.
>
> * HLF The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) was set up by Parliament in 1994 to
> give grants to a wide range of projects involving the local, regional and
> national heritage of the United Kingdom. The fund distributes a share of
> the money raised by the National Lottery for Good Causes. HLF is
> administered by the Trustees of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF)
> which allocates around ?10 million per annum to our national heritage,
> acting as a fund of ?last resort?. http://www.hlf.org.uk/English
>
> * Janet Heatley Blunt (1859-1950) Born in India to a military family but
> settling at Halle Place, West Adderbury, Oxfordshire after the death of
> her mother, Janet initially became interested in folk song because they
> were like the songs her father had known as a boy in Hampshire. She was
> further inspired by the work of Cecil Sharp and other collectors
> associated with the Folk-Song Society and English Folk Dance Society.
> Concerned that the old songs were dying out, she spent many hours with
> local singers, writing down the words and music she found, sometimes
> inviting singers into her home so she could use the piano to help her
> notate the tunes accurately. One of her most important informants was a
> stonemason, shopkeeper and pub landlord, William 'Binx' Walton, who gave
> her both songs and also the dancing traditions of Adderbury Morris, of
> which he was the leader. These are significant in that the dances
> incorporated songs. She also had a keen interest in
> Basque music and dance. She noted down around 125 songs from forty-six
> singers, mainly from or around Adderbury, while friends and fellow
> collectors sent her an additional 80.
>
> * Francis James Montgomery Collinson (1898-1984) Born in Edinburgh to a
> musical family, after demobilization in 1919 he matriculated in music
> studies at the University of Edinburgh and gained a MusBac in 1923. He
> sought his fortune in the sphere of musical entertainment in London, where
> he met with some success and conducted for both Cole Porter and Richard
> Tauber. In 1941 Collinson took charge of the BBC's Country Magazine
> programmes. These programmes, many of them outside broadcasts, involved
> Collinson in the study, collection, and arrangement of folk-songs
> throughout Britain, Bob and James Copper from Sussex and Harry Cox from
> Norfolk being three of his 'finds'. He not only published these
> arrangements in a series with Francis Dillon from 1946 onwards but also
> issued three unique 78 r.p.m. recordings of folk songs in the Gramophone
> Company's Plum Label series. His manuscripts of music collected from
> English sources, principally in the southern
> counties, reside with VWML. They comprise six volumes of mainly
> handwritten notes, musical notation and letters, containing over 500
> items.
>
> * George Barnet Gardiner (c.1852-1910) Born in Kincardine-on-Forth,
> Perthshire, Gardiner learned of the burgeoning interest in folk song in
> England in the early years of the twentieth century and immediately joined
> the Folk-Song Society. Lucy Broadwood, then secretary of the Folk-Song
> Society, suggested to Gardiner that he concentrate his collecting on the
> county of Hampshire, which was largely unexplored and where composer
> Balfour Gardiner (no relation) lived and would assist with the noting of
> tunes. After an initial burst of activity there in 1905, Gardiner returned
> with two other collaborators, Charles Gamblin and C.F. Guyer, to work in a
> more concentrated manner. Of approximately 1100 songs noted up to December
> 1907, Gardiner copied out only 800, but another 600 or so songs remained
> in his notebooks, which he either felt were not good enough to copy or he
> simply didn't have the time or energy to work on them. Gardiner seems to
> have ceased his
> collecting activity in 1909 when the Folk-Song Society's Journal (no. 13)
> was devoted to his work. That year also saw the publication of a third
> volume of Folk-Songs of England, under the general editorship of Cecil
> Sharp, sixteen of Gardiner's collected songs being included as arranged
> for piano by Gustav Holst. But it was not until the work of James Reeves
> and Frank Purslow that his immensely important collection was fully
> re-appraised and its true worth realised and placed in context with his
> contemporaries.
>
> * Henry Edward Denison Hammond (1866-1910) Born at Priston, Somerset, his
> brother Robert Francis Frederick two years later, Henry met George
> Gardiner whilst on the staff of the Edinburgh Academy. Henry was appointed
> Director-General of Education in Rhodesia in 1899 until his health failed
> and he returned home after only a year. He then teamed up with George
> Gardiner for his first foray into folk song collecting in 1904 (Henry
> noting the tunes) and continued in a more serious manner with brother
> Robert (who noted the texts) the following year in Minehead, Somerset,
> where they were 'trying to collect some of the gleanings of Mr. Sharp's
> harvest'. Correspondence with Lucy Broadwood in June 1905 resulted in the
> brothers turning their attention to Dorset where, in August, September and
> October, they noted 193 songs. >From then until the end of 1907 they
> worked tirelessly, meeting a number of singers with impressive
> repertoires, including Mrs. Russell at Upwey
> in 1907, who finally gave them a hundred songs. Over 900 songs were noted
> in total from 193 singers in six counties, the vast majority from Dorset.
>
> * Anne Geddes Gilchrist (1863-1954) Anne Gilchrist was born in Manchester
> to Scottish parents and dedicated much of her life to collecting and
> studying folk music in England, specializing in songs and tunes from her
> home county of Lancashire. Known among folklorists of her time for her
> supporting role in England?s Folk Song Society, she was one of several
> independent-minded women active in folk music?s so-called First Revival
> between 1880 and 1914. Exposed to folk songs through her parents? singing,
> Gilchrist was also fond of church hymns and the singing games she learned
> as a child at her grandfather?s house in Cheshire during Christmas visits.
> Though as an adult she had ?put away childish things?, her chance
> attendance at a public lecture by an English folk song collector later
> re-awakened her childhood memories and Gilchrist began actively studying
> and collecting folk songs. Between 1898 and 1909, she used contacts from
> her daily life
> to locate likely singers and musicians, documenting singing games such as
> ?In and Out the Windows? and ?Sally Waters? that she found at an orphanage
> in Southport where she and her sisters did volunteer work, gathering songs
> like ?Barbara Allen? and ?Green Gravel? in Sussex during visits to her
> brother who was a minister there, and persuading her aunts and uncles to
> sing songs like ?The Barring of the Door? and ?Cuddy Alone? for her. As a
> collector, Gilchrist amassed a considerable number of broadsides, Child
> ballads, carols, street cries, nursery songs, hymns, and dance tunes,
> among other types of folk music. She was especially proud of the shanties
> and sea songs she collected from an old sailor in Southport (the first
> published in the Folk Song Society?s journal) and the seasonal Lancashire
> rush-cart and pace-egging songs. Though not as large as other collections
> from the period, Gilchrist?s work gained her the respect of
> her fellow folk music collectors.
>
> * George Sainton Kaye Butterworth (1885?1916) One of England?s most
> distinctive composers, Butterworth was born in London, the only child of
> Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth (1854?1946), a solicitor and later general
> manager of the North Eastern Railway Company, and his wife, Julia
> Marguerite (1849?1911), a professional soprano before her marriage. He
> first attended school in Yorkshire before entering Eton College as a
> King's scholar in 1899. Following a brief teaching post at Radley College
> he returned to London and from October 1910 to November 1911 he was
> enrolled at the Royal College of Music, where he studied organ and piano,
> as well as theory and composition. His involvement with English folk music
> and dance now began, and his intimate friendship and collaboration with a
> leading figure of this movement, Ralph Vaughan Williams, which had begun
> in his Oxford days, was central to this. He became a collector, noting
> down more than 450 items,
> including songs, dance tunes, and dances. In 1906 he joined the Folk-Song
> Society, and he was a prominent figure in the English Folk Dance Society,
> of which he was one of the founders in 1911, as well as a member of its
> dance demonstration team. He collected and arranged an album of Sussex
> folk songs and, in collaboration with Cecil Sharp, published several books
> of country and morris dances. Butterworth enlisted on the outbreak of war
> in August 1914 and was commissioned in the 13th Durham light infantry. He
> was three times recommended for, and was twice awarded, the Military
> Cross. The second decoration honoured conduct on the morning of his death,
> 5 August 1916, when he was killed by a bullet through the head at Pozi?res
> during the first battle of the Somme. He was buried at the front line.
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> End of NZ-Folk Digest, Vol 54, Issue 11
> ***************************************
>