Lectures

Library Lectures 2024

Sticks, Bells and Baldrics: Ball de Bastons – a Catalan tradition evolving with the times

by Stephen Rowley

Ball de Bastons is a dance tradition from Spain that has many similarities with morris dance. As the cohort of 1970s revivalists grew older they had to address the issue of how the tradition could sustain itself and keep bringing in new blood. The dancers of Vilanova i la Geltrú provide an example of how the traditional music and dance community work together to ensure continuation.

Seinn Spioradail: Sacred Soundscapes of Scotland's Highland and Island Communities

by Frances Wilkins

A discussion of the processes by which specific regional repertoires and styles have developed as a response to the cultural and occupational landscape, and as an expression of cultural memory through performance.

Shaping and Controlling Tradition: Charles Villiers Stanford’s Contributions to the Preservation and Reworking of Folk Melodies

by Adèle Commins

The Irish-born composer (1852–1924) was interested in folk music and, while some criticised him for not collecting folk melodies in the field, he was an editor of several collections and was selected became a vice-president of the English Folk Song Society in 1898. This paper highlighted the use of folk melodies in Stanford’s compositional output and his contribution to debates on folk music in education at the turn of the twentieth century.

Seeing Music: George Scharf and the Street Musicians of London

by Nigel Tallis

George Scharf (1788–1860) was a Bavarian artist who settled in London. As an outsider, and a keen observer of the ordinary, he noted and sketched daily life in all its aspects, including that which British artists might have thought mundane or undeserving of comment. His surviving annotated drawings preserve the bustle of late Georgian London, including the music and dance which he saw performed in the streets around him.

Library Lectures 2023

‘The poet John Clare as violinist and collector of folk melodies’

by Eugenia Russell

The poet John Clare (1793–1864) was also a musician and collector of folk melodies. Connecting with the music, dance and song of his village, his journals document the cultural goings on of his life and times. Clare’s literary personality is formed by this living tradition, and cannot be fully appreciated without it – the folk muse was the starting point for several of his poems. This talk will be illustrated by live musical examples. 

‘Harmer Fecit: the Songs and Dances in Sylvan Harmer's Song Book (1818–1821)’

by Sean Goddard

In 2021 Sean completed a MA at the University of Brighton on the History of English Folk Dancing using one gem of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: The Sylvan Harmer Song Book. This small handwritten book was compiled around 1820 and gives a glimpse into the songs and dances being performed in rural Sussex. This lecture considers the purpose of the book, and the possible origins of its 11 songs and 23 dances.

‘How to sing in the street’

by Oskar Cox Jensen

This lecture explores what it meant to sing on the streets of London and beyond in centuries past. Drawing on first-hand accounts of street singers, Oskar explores the art and adventures of the ballad-singer, the challenges they faced, the techniques they used, and the hidden musical histories their stories reveal. Songs will be sung, with ample opportunity to join in. Join us for new sense of history, and maybe a new side to your own singing too!

‘Distant Cousins: Cornish Christmas Carols in South Australia’

by Kate Neale

‘Wherever there’s a hole in the ground, you’re sure to find a Cornishman at the bottom of it, digging for metal’. And also, according to some, singing carols! The 19th century saw a sustained migration of Cornish miners to new mines across the world, and their traditions often continued under new skies. This lecture will trace how a new branch of Cornish carol repertoire flourished in Australia during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Library Lectures 2022

Cotswold Arts and Crafts and Folk Music

by Martin Graebe

Late in the Victorian era, the Arts and Crafts movement and the revival of interest in folk music both looked back to past ways of life. Meeting in these cross-currents, Cotswold villagers and the arts and crafts community sang and danced together, with the help of Mary Neal, Cecil Sharp and others.

‘Is local, traditional music dying?’

by Michael Church

A summary of the pitfalls and problems of field-recording, and some measures to arrest – or at least slow down – the process by which musics can wither and die.

‘All together in the dance’

by Matt Simons

Alec Hunter (1899–1958) was an artist, textile designer and Morris dancer. Raised on Arts and Crafts precepts, he perceived Morris dancing as a highly developed form of English ‘social art’, an apt panacea for an age of disenchantment and division. This illustrated lecture examined Hunter’s influence on the interwar Morris revival and will explore many of the threads woven throughout his life.

Library Lectures 2021

Folk choirs: Their Origins and Contribution to the Living Tradition

by Marilyn Tucker and Paul Wilson  

In the context of ancient folk traditions, the folk choir is a new phenomenon. With songs from a solo tradition, appropriated by an ensemble of singers with formalised harmonies, we have to face the question: is the ‘folk choir’ an oxymoron? The speakers examined the notion of ‘tradition’; the origins of ensemble singing; the social and political context from which folk choirs emerged; the bridges between folk choirs and other folk traditions; and the choir leader’s prerogative to preserve traditional melodies within choir arrangements.

Sweet and Ayry Activity: The Vernacular Dances of England c.1550–1700

by Anne Daye

What was the dance historical context for Playford’s dedication of The English Dancing Master to the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court in 1651? This talk will explore the genius of the English people in devising new and complex forms of dance, not only the country dance but the hornpipe, jig, morris and measures, resulting in a vernacular dance culture of great sophistication. With the young men of the Inns of Court at the centre of the discussion, the journey of such dances from the people to the gentry, to the theatre and to the court were traced.

Folk Arts, Blackface and Race

a conversation with Nate Holder and Shzr Ee Tan

Black British musician, author and educationist Nate Holder begins a dialogue with Singaporean ethnomusicologist Shzr Ee Tan about what the category of ‘folk’ might mean in British – and beyond British – contexts. Some historical discussion of the nationalist and romantic/ nostalgia-laced underpinnings of ‘folk’ as a category (and its applications in multicultural/ international scenes from Japan to Indigenous Taiwan to Eastern Europe and the U.S.) were considered. We also examined more recent debates on Blackface, Yellowface and race politics in contested expressions of ‘folk-as-Other’ and ‘Black-as-Other-within-Folk’.

Maud Karpeles, Adventurer and Folksong Collector: A Reconsideration of her 1929 and 1930 Newfoundland Field Explorations

by Anna Guigné

In 1929, Londoner Maud Karpeles, a proponent of the early twentieth century British folksong and folk-dance revival movement, journeyed to the Dominion of Newfoundland to document British folksongs in England’s oldest colony. From 14 weeks of fieldwork, carried out between 1929 and 1930, Karpeles acquired close to 200 songs and dances, later publishing her findings in a series of articles and the major publications Folksongs from Newfoundland (1930, 1931, 1934 & 1970). Karpeles has always been a controversial figure for scholars because of her colonialist status and her sole focus on collecting songs of British origin. In this presentation Anna Guigné will offer a new consideration of Karpeles as an adventurer with the stamina and determination to carry out her fieldwork in a most challenging environment. When her entire collection of British song material is taken into consideration, particularly the fifty-two songs she acquired from Newfoundland’s remote south coast, we can also discern how and why some of the British songs she so diligently acquired are now part of the Newfoundland song complex.

Library Lectures 2020

There’s method in the magic: the theory behind folk magic in medieval and early modern England

by Tabitha Stanmore

Magic in pre-modern England took many forms, but among the most common was 'practical' magic: spells and rituals which brought about useful solutions to everyday problems. This talk explores what people commonly used magic for, and interrogate the spells themselves: why were certain words or items used? Were the rituals non-sensical, as has previously been claimed, or was there a method to folk magic which gone unrecognised? We identify some of the theory which informed magical practice, and track how these practices evolved over generations of magic use.

Barn Dances, Ceilidhs and Knees Ups: Social Folk Dance in England, 1945–2020

by Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe

What has folk dancing got to do with Butlins holiday camps? Or the British Royal Family? Why do people think that folk dancing should be fun? Why are all the dances walked? Why are callers reluctant to call themselves teachers? Why is English folk dance not taught in schools anymore? What has any of this got to do with Englishness and national identity? In this illustrated talk Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe selects the most interesting and challenging stories from her PhD. Valiantly battling against years of academic marginalisation she presented an array of fascinating stories about the most theoretically neglected English ‘folk’ dance form.

John Malchair’s ‘Third Collection of Tunes’ and other 18th century tune books at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library

by Alice Little

John Malchair (1730-1812) was a violinist and artist in Oxford, who spent his ‘leasure howers’ collecting music from Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and further afield. His tunebooks contain over 500 tunes, mostly country dance tunes and the melodies for songs, many of which are still played today. His sources for his collection included printed books, friends, and street musicians. His collection comprises four volumes of tunes, the third of which is at the VWML.

Library Lectures 2019

How Percy Manning saved morris dancing

by Mike Heaney

Cecil Sharp’s encounter with the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers on Boxing Day 1899 is famous, but it did not spring out of nothing, and would probably not have happened at all if it hadn’t been for Percy Manning, the first serious researcher into morris dancing. This talk describes how he revived the Quarry dancers as the culmination of a decade-long journey of investigation and discovery, which underlies a lot of what we now know about the history of the dancing.

Percy Manning was an Oxford antiquary interested in all aspects of life in his county. He was a respected expert in local archaeology and history, but expanded his range into social history, custom, folklore and dialect. With the aid of his indefatigable agent Thomas Carter, he quartered the county looking for survivals of dying aspects of social life and custom, at first with an emphasis on collecting material remains but then turning to the more intangible aspects. He left his collections to the University of Oxford, where they now reside in its museums and libraries.

Cornish Folk Dance

by Merv and Alison Davey

Folk dance is more than just a collection of steps movement and music; it is a form of human expression and its essence lies within its community role and social context rather than purely commercial or artistic interests. The story of folk dance in Cornwall, from medieval roots, through narratives of the nineteenth Century folklorists, the activity of the Celtic revivalists and on to the present day, is a fascinating one that reflects the distinct cultural profile of Cornwall.

There are a number of different threads that can be followed in Cornish folk dance. This talk explores the arcane world of the Cornish Guise dancer, the intricate steps of “Scoot Dancing” the ubiquitous Furry dance, the serpent dance and the intriguing named “Snail Creep”. We took a look at the social context of folk dance from the Methodist Tea Treat and the rather less sober “troyls” of the fish cellars and how these relate to folk dance in Cornwall today.

Invisible Music: Angela Carter and Folk Song

by Polly Paulusma

It is a surprisingly little-known fact that the novelist Angela Carter was a folk singer in the 1960s second-wave folk revival. A newly unearthed archive reveals that she not only co-founded a folk club in the 1960s with her first husband, folk producer Paul Carter, but that she also sang there fortnightly for several years.

This lecture collated some of the evidence of Carter’s folk singing praxis through revealing some key details from the newly-discovered archive, as well as passages from Carter’s 1960s diaries, the album sleeve-notes she authored for Topic releases and recordings of her singing and playing.

We took a look at some extracts from her undergraduate dissertation on folk song’s relationship with medieval poetry, and her 1964 student article ’Now is the Time for Singing’ which was published in Bristol University’s student magazine Nonesuch, to get a picture of how she felt about folk song at that time, and how highly she regarded it as an art form.

We then went on to analyse some key extracts from her novels and short stories, to discuss how her intimate knowledge of folk song seeped not just into the subject matter of her writing but right down into the structure of it. We pay particular attention to the short story ’The Erl King’ which appears in the collection The Bloody Chamber, looking at how the greenwood is re-rendered there through rhythm and prosody, and look at ways in which her pronoun and tense shifts might correspond to perceived modal shifts in the folk songs she loved. We took a look at some key passages from her first novel Shadow Dance, to propose that Carter was inspired by folk song’s acceptance of men being able to sing women’s songs, and vice versa, to write herself into the life of a man – a cruel man, at that.

“I am longing for another voyage of discovery in the summer”: The Gill brothers and their collecting of folk songs from the Isle of Man (1894–98)

by Stephen Miller

The Gill brothers, W.H. Gill (1839–1923) and Deemster J.F. Gill (1842–99) have remained marginalised and neglected figures in the collecting of Manx folk song, overshadowed by A.W. Moore (1853–1909), whose own Manx Ballads and Music appeared in 1896, and by Dr John Clague (1842–1908), whose collection was published in large part in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society between 1924–26, edited by A.G. Gilchrist. Ironically, the Gills have left more manuscript material behind than any of these collectors, found amongst the personal papers of Deemster Gill when they were released in 2000. They are now known to have made three collecting tours overall, travelling over most of the Island, making use of a network of helpers to locate twenty-eight singers and taking down one hundred and one tunes as a result. The outcome was Manx National Songs (1896), the lesser-known Manx National Music (1898), and the unrealised Manx National Airs. The letters from the helpers survive, as do notes made in the field, the annotations to the tunes allow the identification of the singers in the 1891 census, and the detail overall allows for the reconstruction of their collecting tours. The letters between the brothers detail the compilation of Manx National Songs and the argument over Manx National Airs. “Music hunting sounds charming,” wrote WH Gill in 1895, and this “hunting” was the focus of this talk.

Library Lectures 2018

'They've done me, they've robbed me, but, thank God, I'm champion still': Dan Leno, Clog Dancing and the Victorian Music Hall

by Caroline Radcliffe

On the Banks of the Green Willow: George Butterworth—Dancer, Folk Song Collector and Composer

by Derek Schofield

'I have believed in spirits from that day unto this': The Ghostly Crew [Roud 1922], ghostlore and traditional song

by Paul Cowdell

Sabine Baring-Gould and his Search for the Folk Songs of Devon and Cornwall

by Martin Graebe

Library Lectures 2017

‘While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night’: A Paradigm of English Village Carolling for Three Centuries

by Ian Russell

Drink, Song and Politics in Early Modern England

by Angela McShane

'Witchcraft accusations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England'

by Owen Davies

The Heyday of the Dulcimer in East Anglia

by John and Katie Howson

Library Lectures 2016

Along with the Raggle Taggle Gypsies-O

by Keith Chandler

“It was mighty!”: Irish Traditional Music in London

by Reg Hall

Maypoles, Morris and Minuets: Restoring Old England’s Dances before the Folk Revival

by Theresa Buckland

Night Visit Songs Revisited

by Vic Gammon

 
Watch selected past Library Lectures on YouTube