Vaughan Williams: English Folk Song Suite (arr. for recorder quartet)

Описание: 0:00 I. March: “Seventeen Come Sunday”
3:48 II. Intermezzo: “My Bonny Boy”
7:14 III. March: Folk Songs from Somerset

Many cultures have long been interested in keeping records of folk songs from their countries and sometimes other countries as well, and folk melodies have found their way into just about every kind of music from the church to the opera house. Some of Martin Luther’s chorale tunes are based on German folk music, many great composers including Beethoven, Haydn, and Britten set large numbers of folk songs in beautifully ornate or expressive arrangements. Many English language hymns have their origin in English and Irish folk music as well. At the very end of the 19th century there was an invention that made the collecting of folk songs much easier than it had been previously, and this invention was the phonograph. Now musicologists and composers could go into an area and ask people to sing into the machine and then listen to it many times at home in order to transcribe it, rather than having to sit and listen and scribble it down all at once. In America the most famous collectors of folk songs were probably John Jacob Niles and Alan Lomax, Béla Bartók spent time going around Hungary with an Edison phonograph, and in England Ralph Vaughan Williams and others did the same. This is one of Vaughan Williams’ compositions that weaves nine different English folk songs into one three movement piece originally for military band, later arranged by one of his students for symphony orchestra. It was premiered in 1923 and has been fairly popular ever since. The names of the movements are above and all of the names of the songs are in the video itself. I could not find the name of whoever created the arrangement for recorders, but they use the name “BlankColour” on MuseScore and I think that they did a very nice job. Some of the top line lays rather high so I’ve switched to sopranino in a few places as it also sounds a bit more like a tin whistle.