September 2, 2017 | Brian Coffill
English Folk Song Suite
I. Seventeen Come Sunday
II. My Bonny Boy
III. Folk Songs From Somerset
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Born: October 12, 1872, Down Ampney, United Kingdom
Died: August 26, 1958, London, United Kingdom
Composed: 1923
Duration: 12 minutes
At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a general interest in the recording and utilization of folk musics led by a number of European composers and musicologists. This list that includes such musical luminaries as Béla Bartók, Edvard Grieg, Zoltán Kodály, Percy Grainger, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, many of whom were assisted in their folk song “collection” by newly invented portable recording devices. Folk songs from the British Isles became particularly fruitful foundations for new compositions, many of which were compiled by members of the English Folk Song Society, whose members included the aforementioned Vaughan Williams and Grainger, as well as collectors and composers Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp, and George Butterworth, among others. The wind band has been a primary beneficiary of this English folk revival, with many masterworks composed in the first half of the twentieth century relying on these collected folk melodies.
Vaughan Williams’ English Folk Song Suite is a work in three movements that weaves nine folk songs into what Grainger would later call a “posy,” or “collection of musical wildflowers.” At first, the suite included an additional movement, Sea Songs, which was performed as the second movement, but composer removed it after the premiere at Kneller Hall (the Royal Military School of Music) and published on its own.
The first movement, March – Seventeen Come Sunday, features the eponymous folk song (which was also set by both Grainger and Holst) in British march style. The melody to Seventeen Come Sunday, telling the story of a soldier enticing a pretty maid, serves as the first theme, and is followed by the contrasting, lyrical Pretty Caroline, where a sailor returns from war to his beloved. The third strain of the march, is a full, marcatoarrangement of Dives and Lazarus, a retelling of the Biblical story and a favorite subject of Vaughan Williams, who also wrote a set of orchestral variations on the melody. The march then returns to Pretty Caroline before restating Seventeen Come Sunday with a final fanfare.
Next follows a slow, haunting arrangement of My Bonny Boy, a painful song of unrequited love first sung by a solo oboe, and subsequently joined by other instrumental colors. Later, a beautiful, swirling arrangement ofGreen Bushes, another song of unanswered passion, enters in the woodwinds, before giving way again to the original theme.
The final movement of the suite, March – Folk Songs from Somerset, includes four songs, each presented as successive, contrasting themes in march style, all taken from the titular county on the southwestern peninsula of England. It begins with a light, jaunty melody entitled Blow Away the Morning Dew, also known traditionally as The Baffled Knight, which tells the story of a soldier enticed by a fair maiden, only to be teasingly tricked at the last minute. The second folk song, perhaps providing an answer to the first, is a rousing war ballad dating from the War of the Spanish Succession entitled High Germany, where a soldier attempts to entice another fair maiden to accompany him to war on the Continent. The Trio of the march,The Tree So High, tells the story of an arranged marriage between two children, in a conversation between the unhappy daughter and her father. This is answered by the famous tune, John Barleycorn, a tale of a knight battling, in some versions, a miller or a group of drunkards, all of whom want to “chop him down,” which can be interpreted as an allegorical telling of the events in the cultivation and harvesting of barley. Finally, the march repeats da capo, repeating the first two melodies before closing with a flourish.
Muhamad Yusri 
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