150 years of crossover

Jackie Boy!

Master?

Sing ye well?

Very well!

Hey down

Ho down

Derry derry down

Among the leaves so green-O

To my Hey down down

To my Ho down down

Hey down

Ho down

Derry derry down

Among the leaves so green-O

The Call and Response folk song was not the experience most of us expected when we joined the Chamber Choir. Nor was it the obvious way to be celebrating the 150th birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams (on the actual date of his birth, 12 October). But our very first concert as a choir led us into cooperation with folk ensembles Coracle and Broomdasher and to an exploration of the Folk influences on RVW, as well as his use in hymns and choral music of folk songs that he collected.

A packed cathedral, with audience members seated under Luke Jerram’s arresting Earth installation, Gaia, heard the choir sing choral pieces by Vaughan Williams and also by composers he influenced and who influenced him.

Contributions from the folk ensembles followed, showing increasing technical complexity as well as increasing pathos as one tale of doom succeeded to another. Fortunately an interval drink dispelled the gloom and then we were back for the Call and Response section. It took a while to get our ‘Ho’s, our ‘Hey’s and all those ‘Derry’s into place – after all, we were improvising, not spending the several weeks of rehearsal that our own ‘set’ had required. But we got it together eventually and so did the willing audience, now fully in the Folk groove.

The Grand Finale was the most revealing and possibly most moving part of the evening. Broomdasher started off each of three sections with a performance of a folk song that RVW had ‘collected’, their (largely unaccompanied) vocal lines interweaving to great and varied effect as each of the tales developed. Coracle then worked magic in performing (and in some cases improvising) an instrumental meditation on, and elaboration of, the song, demonstrating, I felt, the inherent strength of each of the melodies. Then the Cathedral’s Willis organ sounded an introduction to the singing of the hymn tune which Vaughan Williams based on the folk melody we had just heard (and, for the most part, included in the English Hymnal – now a staple of Anglican worship but banned on its publication in 1906 by the then Archbishop of Canterbury). The entire Cathedral joined in I heard the voice of Jesus say which followed The Murder of Maria Marten; The Brisk Young Farmer mutated into ‘Tis winter now (to the less familiar tune Danby). To finish, many of us imagined ourselves back at school as we belted out He who would valiant be, having had our hearts wrenched with the parting of the sailors in Our Captain Cried.

We enjoyed the preparation for this, our first concert, and the performance was exhilarating. To be sure, the main objective of the Choir is to support the liturgical worship of the Cathedral and we will continue to devote ourselves to this, enjoying the riches of church music. But we have now tasted other fruits (even Shakespeare in RVW’s amazing miniature The cloud-capp’d towers) and our appetite has been stimulated. We will be back!