Folksongs (2019-21)
Piano
Duration:
24′
First Performance:
26 January 2020 [‘The Oak and The Ash’]
Michelle Assay, Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Manchester, UK
21 October 2020 [‘The Turtle Dove’]
Duncan Honeybourne, St Mary’s Church, Weymouth, UK
10 February 2022 [full set]
Duncan Honeybourne, King’s College Chapel, Aberdeen, UK
Score
Programme note
Folksongs are simple ‘re-imaginings’ of well-known English folksongs that have long since left their natural surroundings to become cultural artefacts in their own right. Another word for the compositional process exhibited here might be ‘deconstruction’ as each folksong is reduced to a handful of key features, such as a melodic fragment, a cadence or a rhythmic gesture and pieced together in a different fashion. In doing so, the essence of the song remains the same, but the mode of expression has changed, hopefully causing the listener to reassess these well-worn, but timeless tunes.
Another way of looking at Folksongs is as an aspect of ‘transfiguration’, which in its broadest sense is a complete change of form into a more beautiful or spiritual state – each of these short pieces seeks to do something similar (even the jauntier ones), taking the existing material and transfiguring it into something more ethereal and mystical. This act of composition has been present in my pieces for a long time, but it is only recently that I am realising that it is a concept with deep resonances and significance in my work. With that in mind, I have called the Folksongs ‘studies in transfiguration’ as they not only suggest the beginning of a process, but also that the very nature of the change of form is often slight or ephemeral – the opening of a door to another mode of being or thinking.
The twelve folksongs are all English in origin (though origin is a difficult word to assign to music that by its very nature is of dubious heritage) and many are amongst the most well-known pieces in the genre. Some were chosen as I had encountered them growing up (we sang Green Grow the Rushes, Oh! at primary school and D’Ye Ken John Peel was often sung before foxhunts in my home town), others purely for their links to pre-existing arrangements by more established composers and trailblazers. The one that is a red herring in the set is ‘The Man of the River’, which is a transfiguration of my own folksong pastiche that began life as a simple piano piece for my young daughter – I thought it both amusing and fitting that this piece should rub shoulders alongside its more illustrious forebears – perhaps emphasising the uncertain legacies of all music purporting to be ‘of the people’.
Although Folksongs can be performed as a 24-minute set, it can also be performed as individual pieces or selections from the whole – all are equally valid. These are simple pieces, easy to play and perhaps even more easy to understand. Though a concert performance of the set is possible, it is equally conceivable to consider these songs as some form of ‘background’ music (or if not background, then perhaps not foreground), something where the listener’s mind wanders in and out of focus on the music as the material softly changes and undulates. That is not to denigrate the concept or the process behind the composition (nor the original songs themselves) but to recognise the intrinsic qualities of these twelve pieces and the transfiguration at their heart.
PAC
