English Dance and Song Summer 2017
EDS, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, is the world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance. First published in 1936, EDS is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts. The following sample article is copyright. You are welcome to share it in the format supplied and accompanied by this title page, but you may not reproduce it, in full or in part, by any other means.
Folk song and the community choir
Sandra Kerr discusses the joy of folk singing as part of a choir
Readers of EDS and active members of the folk movement will need no reminding of the diversity and beauty of the folk song repertoire of these islands. Our ballads, lullabies, love songs and those that aid or describe work; our mouth music, lyrical lays, rollicking refrains and exotic modal melodies, are as rich, as complex, as time honoured as any other tradition.
Similarly, those with only half an ear to cultural trends will be aware of the huge growth in community choirs over the last quarter of a century or so. Should your taste take you there, you can find a community choir to exactly fit your musical and social needs. Gospel, West Gallery, campaign, shanty, choirs for homeless people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) choirs, male voice or women’s ensembles, Bulgarian, barbershop – the list goes on, and they are all out there and their participants are having a great time.
Similarly, those with only half an ear to cultural trends will be aware of the huge growth in community choirs over the last quarter of a century or so. Should your taste take you there, you can find a community choir to exactly fit your musical and social needs. Gospel, West Gallery, campaign, shanty, choirs for homeless people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) choirs, male voice or women’s ensembles, Bulgarian, barbershop – the list goes on, and they are all out there and their participants are having a great time.
However, the comment that resonates really strongly for me, made by one of these committed and bonded group of women, relates to the actual material with which they engage.
“Our unique repertoire of songs based on the folk tradition… sets us apart from many other choirs. Our singing has helped raise awareness of issues important to women, and we often make a real connection with audiences when we perform. We’ve been taught never to underestimate the power of song.” Brenda Poxton, choir member, Werca’s Folk.
This demonstrates the strength of identification that singers can feel for the folk song repertoire, especially if it reflects their local culture and their life experience. And looking for material which does that – material ‘to which the soul resonates’, as Tony MacMahon once put it – seems to me an important part of the work of the director/arranger. To paraphrase A L Lloyd’s comment in Folk Song In England, the folk song makers elevated the everyday to the imaginative so that when the singers return to reality, they are better fitted to cope with it.
Folk song as social glue, then. But where to find it, and how to fit it for purpose?
There have, of course, been many published anthologies of folk songs arranged for choirs before, but Paul Sartin’s Community Choir Collection – Folk (Faber Music Ltd 2016) is a more than welcome addition. The breadth of content, from Welsh language pieces to Manx songs, Scots waulking music, shanties, narrative ballads, songs from Northumberland to Northern Ireland, from Liverpool to London and all parts of the south, is impressive, and for almost each piece there are illustrations or photographs, useful background research on the songs, pronunciation guides and performance suggestions.
This last element is particularly important since one of the issues presented by, for instance, performing lengthy narrative ballads in choirs, is how to communicate the story and keep the audience with you. There are a number of ways, some of which Paul suggests. With mixed voices, it’s possible to alternate male/ female voices for variety or to reduce the number of parts, or give a particular verse to the altos or sing in unison at some point. For me, this is one of the most exciting challenges – ringing the changes on an arrangement, especially as I work exclusively with women’s voices and with a repertoire that includes Child Ballads and songs which tell stories of local heroines or events.
One has to find devices which can offer a range of musical choices, so that, for instance, in my setting of Whittingham Fair (Northumberland’s beautiful version of The Elfin Knight, Child 2), I make use of drones to imitate the small pipes, and at one point use the melody of Scarborough Fair as counterpoint (with a bit of tweaking). Incidentally, a version of Child 2 appears in Paul’s collection (An Acre of Land) in which, with interpolated harmonised refrains, he suggests the air might be taken by different voice parts, or combinations thereof – a satisfying arrangement accessible to singers with a wide range of abilities.
Paul tends to favour (though there are exceptions) three-part arrangements, not specific to soprano, alto, tenor, bass (SATB), which can be effectively taught by ear, and have been tried and tested on friends and family. And very pleasing they are, too. It’s good to find some really gritty pieces here, like the Miner’s Lifeguard, and I was surprised to find Danny Boy – couldn’t we have some fun discussing whether that’s a folk song or not?
To those who feel that to arrange folk songs for choirs is to do less than justice to style and traditional patterns of performance and dissemination, I would reassure them with a reminder of the amount of ‘authentic’ material that is now available to all in this digital era, should they wish to go back to first principles. Only today, I read that a new interactive website has put online thousands of field recordings made by Alan Lomax, and we are all aware of the material made available by EFDSS itself. I also know that many a singer has found the courage and the inspiration from their community choir experience to branch out as a solo singer. It’s all good.
As Ella Fitzgerald famously said: “There’s only one thing better than singing, and that’s – more singing”.
