Vaughan Williams' Five English Folk songs

'There is no original version of any particular tune.' Ralph Vaughan Williams

Are Vaughan Williams' Five English Folk songs original pieces of art music or new arrangements of traditional folk songs?

In 1912 Ralph Vaughan Williams gave a lecture on English folk song where he described it as ‘an art by itself, quite different from the simplest of composers’ music… full of character, beauty and vitality… We must not venture to alter or ‘improve’ them. As we find them we must keep them.’[1] Then a year later in 1913 he published five English folk songs freely arranged for unaccompanied chorus. In this essay I will aim to explore whether these pieces, which are based on traditional tunes and songs and arranged into four part harmony, are still within the boundaries of folk song or if they have moved away from the traditions and forms at the heart of folk song and should be appreciated as art songs.

The 1980 Grove music dictionary defines Art song as 'A song of serious artistic purpose written by a professional composer, as opposed to folk song.' [2]For the definition of folk music it quotes the definition given by the Sao Paulo congress of the International Folk Music council in 1955 where folk was accepted as a separate category of music;

'Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission...the term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed by the community.'[3]

You could not say that these pieces are without serious artistic intention but their 'rudimentary beginnings,'  are the same as any other performance of the same songs. Therefore there should not be any distinction between them, however the Grove music dictionary clearly sets folk and art song as opposing forms of music. 

On the most basic level he chose the words and tunes of five of the songs from the huge number of folk songs he collected and arranged them in this volume. This means that they are being performed regularly which has popularised the songs: 'the dark eyed sailor,' 'the Spring time of the year,' 'Just as the tide was flowing,' 'the lover’s ghost' and 'wassail song' and brought them back into the living folk tradition. Essentially it could be said that just by being sung they are being revived where they would otherwise have eventually died out. However they are different from other, traditional, folk songs in that they have been arranged. I am interested as to where they fit; folk is usually melody based and here, naturally, there is a greater emphasis on harmony. Also, folk is usually performance led and arrangements are more fluid and impulsive. With the five English folk songs the arrangement is more intellectualised and has been carefully composed prior to, rather than during, the performance. I also want to see what this brings to the folk tradition; whether it improves or hinders it. While it is something different to your average set of folk songs, the basis or foundation of each song is a traditional song and tune and I would like to see what these arrangements bring to them. Howes comments that ‘the Vaughan Williams settings are so peculiarly sympathetic that they enhance the native quality of the tune.’[4] The modal harmonies that Vaughan Williams uses in much of his work lends itself so well to the nature of these folk songs and most traditional English music.

It may be seen that he was overcoming what he saw as one of folk songs shortcomings. He noted that ‘folk song is limited breadth ways; in that it is purely melodic in nature… the question of harmonies doesn’t enter into the scheme.’[5] In this collection of folk songs Vaughan Williams maintains the acapella form he saw in collecting the songs and then expanded it across the four or more voices.

It is similar to the traditional form; in that you still could get up and do an impromptu turn at a folk club, providing you have all the people and a good idea of the pitch. However, it does mean that you can’t have the same freedom of performance that a solo folk singer is allowed. Singers that are usually seen in the pubs and folk clubs of Britain can, and do, make changes to the dynamics, inflections and even the melody and words of any piece as they sing it. In this way the singer can sing to reflect their audience or just their present mood. One of the factors at the heart of folk is that there can be 'variation that springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group.'[6] When 3 or more other people are singing alongside you in harmony like in the five English folk songs there is no ability to make changes as you sing. Singing anything other than what is written will cause problems for the other singers. There are odd moments of solo singing, usually accompanied with long chords in the other voice parts, such as the first verse of the 'Wassail song,' where the tenor could have more freedom to sing and colour it as you would singing solo, over bare fifths in the other parts, but for the most part the close harmony and parts moving together restricts the ability to sing as you would present a solo unaccompanied folk song.

On the other hand there is a great benefit of having SATB arrangements, in that many ballads have both male and female voices in them. These can be separated between the voices to better distinguish who is speaking in the story. In 'dark eyed sailor,' he has arranged it so that men sing as ‘sweet William,’ the women sing as the ‘lady fair,’ and everyone sings together in harmony as the narrator who is an onlooker to the scene. Often it is unclear with whose voice each verse is sung in and this clears up any problems.

While it is clear that the songs are traditional ones, in most of the songs Vaughan Williams goes against his own advice to ‘alter,’ them and this brings up some interesting questions of how liberal you can be with folk song. In the 1800s folk music was essentially an entirely oral tradition and so songs evolved and were altered purely by accident. Most have many different versions with a wide variety of tunes and words.

Michael Kennedy commented that the tunes on which the pieces were based ‘were treated with great freedom so that the whole work becomes almost another fantasia…he practically reinvented the songs.’[7] However it may be seen that as every new singer performs folk songs he is given the right to sing them however they wish. Vaughan Williams is recorded as saying ‘in one sense any particular song is as old as the beginning of music; in another sense it is born afresh with the singer of today.’[8] This is definitely true of traditional singers who are accustomed to taking as many liberties with the music as they want as long as the tune and story is heard in some form and entertainment is paramount and dedication to the music secondary. Perhaps Vaughan Williams is another singer in the line passing on the stories and tunes and entertaining at the same time. I personally think that, despite musical changes, the spirit of the songs remains intact.

The tunes the composer chose for the five English songs is interesting. There seems to be no discernible link between them and perhaps the link is just the way in which he chooses to arrange them and the chosen songs that would lend themselves to the style. In an introduction to a collection of folk songs Vaughan Williams notes that ‘the mixolydian and Dorian tunes are more characteristic of agricultural districts, while Aeolian tunes belong more to towns.’[9] And it would have been an opportunity to explore the modality of the songs, however only 'The dark eyed sailor,' and 'The springtime of the year,' are particularly modal. 'The Dark eyed sailor,' is based on the Mixolydian scale and 'The springtime of the year,' is Aeolian. All the rest are in major keys ('just as the tide was flowing' and 'The wassail song' are in A major and 'The lovers ghost' is in E major.) 

Through the fantasia form the 5 English folk songs may also be overcoming another limitation. Vaughan Williams said ‘lengthways the folk song is limited by the extent of the poetic stanza or the dance figure to which it applies.’ Here we see that he adds more to it than it just being the ‘vehicle for the recitation of words.’ Most of the songs in the piece are extended well beyond the simple structure of the folk song it is based[10] around. In 'the springtime of the year.' the tune is sung separately to the song as an introduction over a hummed drone of a bare fifth with some chromatic movement which really makes the minor modal character of the tune stand out. It’s dark quality of sound seems to preface the tragedy of the story and seems very mournful and so seems an unusual introduction to the piece and stands alone from the main body of the actual piece, separated by a pause. Then again, at the end there is a coda which uses the tune, again without words, in the tenor part, this time with a question and answer section with the sopranos and the altos which sing ascending and descending harmonies between each phrase of the tune while the basses mostly continue the tune. It seems as though he is exploring the possibilities of the tune without having to stick to the boundaries of the words and having part of the arrangement to explore this beautiful modal tune and its’ harmonies. This is quite far removed from the usual idea of folk song being used to tell a story. He also uses almost the opposite idea in just as the tide was flowing when he uses the end of the catch line ‘just as the tide was flowing,’ and expands it into a rather difficult melismatic section to reflect the flowing of the tide as the higher and lower sections sing in contrary motion. This is effective because it not only brings variety by breaking up the strophic structure but also makes the tune reflect the words which is normally difficult in folk songs as the tune is the same in every verse and usually the chorus is the same tune as the verse, therefore if it works in one verse it probably will not in all the others.

Harmonising folk songs isn’t an unusual occurrence. Most collections of folk songs suggest chords for the accompaniment and it is more usual to see folk songs performed accompanied with a band now than without. acapella groups such as 'Devils interval,' and 'Peg leg ferret,' are also popular. But even these seem different in nature to the solo singing that is often seen as the most traditional existence of these songs. Vaughan Williams described one of his first experiences of seeing a solo performer in a village in Essex. ‘After tea we asked if any of them knew any of the old songs, whereupon an old man, a shepherd, began to sing a song which set all my doubts about folk song at rest.’[11] He said that the idea about folk song that struck him was that it was firstly ‘a thing by itself, apart both in nature and origin from the written music of definite composers; and, secondly, a form of art which is not mere antiquarian interest- not something which is merely quaint and old, but something that is beautiful and as vital now as it ever was.’[12]

When seeing performers which Vaughan Williams describes as ‘in the habit of singing,’ what is usually striking is the number of songs and stories that they have memorised. Usually a singer will be able to remember a huge amount of different pieces, and they will be ready to perform at any time, the reason being that performances will not have been arranged in advance so the singer will want to be ready to perform at any time in very informal settings. They will not be written down as this will restrict when they could be sung. These songs are gradually being lost as the tradition changes. The songs are dying along with the singers as the tradition is changing. While they do exist sing-arounds are uncommon and there are not the same opportunities to pass the songs onto the next generation of singers. The public performance of folk song seems to be decreasing with the increasing commercialisation and recording of folk. It takes longer to learn a song line by line from an actual person than a recorded song, and so this is how a lot of songs are learnt today. Also, advertising and commercial selling of particular bands is changing how songs are passed on. Folk singers and bands are becoming famous in similar ways to pop and rock bands through the media and the variety of singers that an individual can listen to is greater as you can often buy CDs or recordings anywhere now but the overall number of singers known to the whole country is decreasing. Therefore the way in which the songs exist is changing. Rather than just the simple melodic line with the story in lyrics, people are remembering harmonies and chordal arrangements which bands have used on the CDs. This is very much the same as arranging pieces and writing them down. A folk song can slowly dissolve over time if it is dull, or a better version takes it's place instead if it is kept to the oral tradition. However, if it is written down it will be learnt in that context. Performers will be influenced by that interpretation and the harmonic structure used will become less varied by new performers. The song ‘lovely on the water,’ was collected only once in this country from a Mr Hilton of south Walsham by Ralph Vaughan Williams. In his arrangement he even changes the title to ‘the springtime of the year,’ and reduces its 14 verses to just two. The tune it is based on is more or less exactly the same but the story is virtually lost. It is originally the story of the lover’s separation, where Nancy and Henry are parted when he enlists into the navy and she begs him to take her with him but it is not possible. With just two verses, it just becomes a song about two lovers singing ‘while the birds on spray and the meadows gay, that proclaimed the lovely spring.’ The tragedy and context of the story become completely different in a format that puts the emphasis on telling a story above all else. Also I think it is more likely that a singer will be encouraged to learn the arrangements for unaccompanied voice as part of a choir than finding the full version in the more obscure folk song collections of Vaughan Williams. This will mean that the other 12 verses will be performed much less and Vaughan Williams’ shortened version will be more common. Anyone learning it from them will only pick up two verses of the whole song and eventually it will seem as if these are the only form. Perhaps by doing this Vaughan Williams is intentionally creating a new song. Maybe he thought the tune most fit a pleasant song rather than a tragic ballad. Or maybe it is done for simplicity. It is much easier to arrange an interesting, varied composition of a shorter song with fewer verses. After many verses based around the same repeated tune there is the problem of it getting repetitive and in the stoic form of folk song there will be no variation in the melody. Traditionally it comes from the expression of the singer but through his arrangements he creates it in harmony and structure. Now this version exists on paper in this form it will be difficult for new performers to find ways of performing it which are unaffected by this arrangement. New singers will have to have learnt it from, or in a way that can be traced back to, this arrangement and the harmony given to it by Vaughan Williams. Even a solo unaccompanied voice will perform it in a way that is aware of the inflection and tone given to it by him. If it only existed as an unwritten piece passed orally then there would be more variety as it would get changed more but as it is written down it is a constant definite version that people will learn this song from.

With it being important to him that folk songs are ‘dateless-they belong to every age,’[13] then this idea is reflected in his treatment of the tunes and applying harmonies. He does try to add to the tunes without them seeming to have been modernised and having contemporary harmonies as other composers such as Britten does. His harmonies are all very modal and fit the timeless style of the tunes.

It is difficult to know how true to the original tune to be when recording folk songs and each collector seems to have differing levels of exactness with which they note down folk songs. For example, George Butterworth often wrote his to fit into a regular time signature as best he could and wrote the simple tune as well as some versions with variations and ornaments he heard from the singer, whereas Cecil sharp would take the tune down with incredible accuracy where singers would shorten bars and sing out of tune! Looking at a number of versions of one folk song therefore shows how singers alter the tune and change them, this is very obvious with the song 'Dark eyed sailor.' The last line which Vaughan Williams puts into 2/4 is often still in 3 beats in a bar. It is very unusual for folk songs to change time signature within a verse but here it is useful to show the chorus line and separate it from the main verse which is probably why he chose this version. It is also often in 3 minim beats.

Another way of looking at these pieces is that they are just another interpretation of the songs in the same way a folk singer would adapt them for their voice or to express the meaning of the song as they understand it and would like to perform it for their audience. As Vaughan Williams said: ‘There is no Original version of any particular tune… in one sense any particular tune is as old as the beginning of time, in another sense it is born afresh with the singer of today,’[14] Michael Kennedy believed that through this piece he became the ‘singer of today,’  making it his own, leaving his finger prints on the songs and passing them on as the next in a chain of performances that shape a piece that is ‘as old as the beginning of time.’ It is difficult to assess if  this is entirely the case as this idea of the singer of today relies on it existing in a moment of time and moving on with another singer taking his ideas and making them their own. However, with the nature of choral music and art music there is a need to be true to the composers intentions. If we are adjusting the score for our own style of performance then it ceases to be Vaughan Williams’ voice and becomes that f the choir that is performing it. For the 'five English folk songs,' to be a new Voice in the chain it must be outside of time and now becomes a piece of historical evidence of that performance of these pieces.

Vaughan Williams noted that ‘the art of folk-song lives, but the art of the folk singer is dead.’[15] He collected folk songs in an attempt to ensure that the folk song didn’t also die with the singers as did other collectors of the 'English folk dance and song society,' founded by Cecil sharp. Cecil Sharp ‘was not the first to collect folk songs, it is he who saw and proclaimed their value as a guide and stimulus to the musicians of England.’[16] He was convinced that the beauty of folk songs shouldn’t be allowed to disappear and so for most of his life led the society in its preservation of the tunes and songs of England. For Vaughan Williams it was a form of pure musicality that existed in all the social classes of England. Its accessibility was a major part of its charm and character. It amazed him that it explored ‘how much of our musical nature is spontaneous and un-self concious.’[17] The typical folk singer of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries will have had very little education and therefore would be unlikely to read or write and would definitely be unable to read a musical score, but folk music belonged to them despite this lack of any other musical background or knowledge. He was very keen also to say, ‘ this music is not just clownish nonsense, but has in it the germ of all those principles of beauty, of expression, of form, climax and proportion which we are accustomed to look for in the highly developed compositions of all the great masters.’[18] It does make me wonder whether, by writing it down in musical score, the art is taken away from the uneducated masses and preserving it as an art to be only appreciated by those with the education to decipher the musical score it is written in. Indeed you can’t force people to learn songs in the same way you can’t force them to learn to read music but it does make one wonder whether the art that was appreciated by all classes has become restricted to the educated classes by the way it has been passed on. Maybe this is why most popular performances that are seen of folk songs today are accompanied by bands. It is necessary for a person with musical knowledge, more likely to be an instrumentalist, to teach the tune to a singer who, though in possession of natural ability for expression and vocal talent, may lack musical knowledge. In the 'five English songs,' there is no instrumentation. The singers must be able to read their parts, harmonise, count rests; in short, they require a lot of musical background to perform the songs. Furthermore, as the work of a great composer, the audience it will attract will be predominantly upper class rather than enjoyed across all class boundaries. This is not through any fault of Vaughan Williams’ composition. All the songs have an accessible harmonic structure unlike other folk song arrangements that are more dissonant and harder to listen to. But more by the very fact that he did compose them,it moved them from a piece that can be enjoyed by anyone (particularly the working class people who most likely wrote the original songs,) to a collection of songs to be heard in a recital of classical repertoire rather than popular song or folk song.

Throughout my research I have found myself considering and comparing audiences opinions and prejudices towards both folk and art song and how the 'five English folk songs,' fit within classification boundaries whereas I do not think Ralph Vaughan Williams would have done the same thing. Out of all the folk songs he collected with his work for the 'English folk dance and song society,' he chose these five to put into this set obviously because he felt he could arrange these particular songs well in this style for unaccompanied chorus. The completed piece being a timeless arrangement based on timeless songs.  It would seem that they manage to be in a style that belongs to traditional folk song, as well as being undeniably in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ particular compositional style. Rather than just ‘judge them by playing them through with one finger on the piano,’ he expresses his passion for the pieces by presenting them in a new way that uses his talent as a composer to show new performers and audiences what he saw in the words and tunes. While he may have condensed the songs and expanded the form outside what many would consider to be truly traditional folk song into something else, it feels like the other verses would have been superfluous and the pieces always gained from the way he expanded them for effect.

'To write rhapsodies on folk-tunes is a very good exercise for the composer, and the results may often be delightful, but to garnish our ordinary English hotchpotch of every modern composer from Brahms to Debussy with a few English folk-tunes by way of ornament will not make a national style. It is not a question (as Mrs Newmarch has wisely said) of ‘playing with local colour.’ The matter lies deeper than this. Let me give you an example-Die Meistersinger, by Richard Wagner. Here is a work using to the full all the resources of colour, of harmony, of form, of expression, which go to make up the completest art, without a touch of archaism, and alive from beginning to end with the spirit of German folk-song. In art, as I suppose in every activity, the best results are obtained by developing one’s natural faculties to the highest. If an Englishman tries to pose as a Frenchman or a German, he will not only make a bad Englishman but also a bad foreigner.

If the English spirit is capable of being expressed in music, let it be so expressed; if not, let us honestly give up the attempt.''[19]

Here Vaughan Williams shows his pessimism for the arrangement of folk song along with a great example of how it can be done to amazing effect. It seems to me that this piece of five English folk songs is an example closer to this. He uses his own talents as a contemporary English composer to add all his resources of colour, form, harmony and expression to make put extend some of his nation’s folk songs. He is an English artist presenting English songs in a new way to the best of his abilities and the result is effective and honest whether it belongs to the folk tradition or art song. To view them as an original work by a composer then they would have to be seen as a piece of art music, different to folk music in its' intention to display his artistic abilities. However using the confining structure of folk song is a deliberate choice and therefore it should be seen as a new performance of a set of traditional folk songs. Not completely original but his own envisioning of the possibilities old folk songs provide to modern  composers.

Bibliography

• The new Grove dictionary of Music and Musicians [ed]Sadie,Stanley (Macmillan, London, 1980)
• Kennedy, Michael, The works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, (Clarendon press, Oxford, 1964)
• Vaughan Williams, Ralph, Vaughan Williams on Music [ed]Manning David,(Oxford, New York, 2008)
• Dickinson,A.E.F, Vaughan Williams (Faber and Faber, London, 1963)
• Vaughan Williams, Ralph, Five English Folk Songs (Stainer and Bell, London)
• Vaughan Williams, Ralph, Folk songs collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams [ed]Palmer, Roy (J.M. Dent and sons, London, 1983)
• http://library.efdss.org/archives/
• http://library.efdss.org/cgi-bin/home.cgi