‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ at full strength once more

The feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated last Thursday in Poland (where indeed it is a national holiday), and in the south-eastern city of Rzeszów there was the welcome return in its full form of one tradition: ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’, the great annual outdoor hymn concert.  (I have written more about these concerts here, and this year’s edition, which I’ve been catching up with, can be watched in full here).  

These past two years the concert has of course been constrained by various pandemic restrictions — though the organisers heroically put together an online concert in time for Corpus Christi in 2020, and then organised two live concerts with reduced audiences in September 2020 and Corpus Christi 2021.  This is the first time that it has been possible to relax a little more about the virus, and to enter more freely into its old mood of joyful, prayerful togetherness — a mood which persisted in spite of a terrific rain-storm whose arrival coincided squarely with the beginning of the concert!  Amid the wind and the rain it was nice to see some by now familiar faces once again: Hubert Kowalski conducting the orchestra, Joachim Mencel playing the hurdy-gurdy, Jan Budziaszek the percussionist and one of the main founders, and the various Pospieszalskis and Posieszalskas: Marcin, Lidia, Barbara…

This has also, of course, been the first edition of the concert since the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine.  Rzeszów is only fifty or so miles from the western Ukrainian border, and it is this part of Poland which has been at the forefront of the country’s heroic response to the refugee crisis.  And of course, although Russia’s wrath is now mostly concentrated in eastern Ukraine, her forces have proved themselves capable of firing missiles well into the west, with seemingly gratuitous strikes on the city of Lviv and military positions only ten miles from Poland’s border.  So to the musicians and the concert-goers the war will be and remain an immediate and pressing concern.  And it only reinforces a paradox at which I have wondered before: that this hymn-concert, one of the most hopeful, joyful sights in Europe, has grown up in a part of our continent which has seen some of its worst and longest suffering.

It was as right and just as it was to be expected that some Ukrainian musicians were invited to contribute to the music. The band ‘Kana’ are already regulars at the concerts, but there were also some bandura players from Lviv, bringing to the stage a haunting sound that was new to me.  As well as these there were the old favourite of course: a big orchestral number at the beginning followed by Paweł Bębenek’s ‘Dzięki Ci, Panie’ (‘Thank you, Lord’); the exuberant ‘Jezus zwyciężył’, ‘Jesus has triumphed’, which is the cue for the multitude to go wild; and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

The flavour of the concert seems in recent years to have been moving in more of an American-style ‘praise-and-worship’ direction, but what I have always preferred and looked forward to most are the home-grown orchestral arrangements and jazzings-up of favourite Polish hymns.  Several of these seem to appear every year — I’m never sure who is responsible for them but I think usually either Marcin Pospieszalski or Hubert Kowalski are the culprits — and at least one of them always strikes me as a real gem.  This year I was rather taken with a setting of lines from a much-loved poem by the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584):

Czego chcesz od nas, Panie, za Twe hojne dary?
Czego za dobrodziejstwa, którym nie masz miary?
Kościół Cię nie ogarnie, wszędy pełno Ciebie:
I w otchłaniach, i w morzu, na ziemi, na niebie.

Tyś Pan wszytkiego świata.  Tyś niebo zbudował
I złotymi gwiazdami ślicznieś uhaftował.
Tyś fundament założył nieobeszłej ziemi
I przykryłeś jej nagość zioły rozlicznemi.

Tobie k woli rozliczne kwiatki Wiosna rodzi,
Tobie k woli w kłosianym wieńcu Lato chodzi,
Wino Jesień i jabłka rozmaite dawa,
Potym do gotowego gnuśna Zima wstawa.

Here is a translation (from StaroPolska.pl,
http://www.staropolska.pl/renesans/jan_kochanowski/czego_chcesz_Panie.html):

What do You want from us, Lord, for Your lavish gifts?
What for the benefactions, which have no limits?
The Church will not contain You; You are everywhere:
On the earth, in the depths, the sea, the open air.

You are the Lord of the whole world, You built the sky,
And embroidered it splendidly with gold stars high.
Of the earth untraversed You lay the foundation
And covered its bareness with rich vegetation.

By Your will Spring brings flowers, in abundance born,
By Your will Summer wears wreaths made from ears of corn.
Autumn gives out wine and apples of various kinds,
Idle Winter rises, when ready meal she finds.

The melody of the song in the concert was composed by Jacek Sykulski (1969–), a beautiful setting which has become a popular hymn —

— but Mateusz Pospieszalski — brother of Marcin, the bass-guitarist and Jednego Serca stalwart — has given it a lavish arrangement, jazzing it up with a syncopated five-time rhythm, a clever lyrical part for strings, a refrain which proves delightfully contrapuntal, and some irresistible ripplings from the harp.  I don’t think they needed to change key halfway through, but otherwise I thought it a very affecting rendition, and loved especially the low, clear, pure tone of the upper voices in the second verse.  By the way, the soloist on the left, Barbara Pospieszalska, is Mateusz’s niece.

So, as I have had occasion to say before, there are plenty of good things going on in Poland.  New music with old roots, spontaneous youngsters dancing the conga, ladies with flowers in their hair, thousands of voices singing hymns in the rain…  Niech żyje Polska!  Long live Poland, and happy Corpus Christi!

Lincolnshire Towers

St. Wulfram’s church, Grantham, 3rd November, 2018.

Of all our counties I suspect few more strongly than Lincolnshire of keeping hidden, somewhere, the last remaining corner of Deep England.  For a start, there is so much of it in which to hide: after North Yorkshire it is the second-largest of the ceremonial counties, while the density of its population is the seventh lowest overall (ranking forty-second of forty-eight).  All that undisturbed, unmotorwayed acreage, almost as wide as mid-Wales, largely spared by industry and development, and unblemished by any major conurbation, in which Deep England might yet linger.  The river Trent, the Humber estuary, the Fens and the Wash, once its arteries of commerce, have come to serve as buffers against the cutting edges of modernity; and even its western, inlandmost parts are only incidentally served by the Great North Road and the East Coast Main Line (which latter never comes within thirty miles of that coast while Lincolnshire has anything to do with it).  It is true that the county has a grittier side — Scunthorpe steelworks, the port of Grimsby with its face set like flint against the North Sea, or the austerely dead-flat southern Fens — but its heart, the landscape of the Wolds or south Kesteven, has an otherworldly softness, even a tameness, about it.  That homeliness is matched by the place-names, among which even those of Danish derivation retain only a slight angularity: Willoughby… Hagworthingham… Scamblesby… Then there are all the old railway stations whose names appear in Flanders and Swann’s song ‘The Slow Train’, hinting at the heavy blow struck here by the Beeching Axe: Mumby Road, Dogdyke, Tumby Woodhouse.  Even the name of the county, with its buttery consonants, has a welcoming warmth to it.  And consider Bag Enderby in the light of Bag End, the name of Bilbo Baggins’ home in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  If in these parts the mythical Shire can shimmer just beneath the surface, then why not very Deep England itself?

It is worth noting, too, that many Yellow-Bellies themselves — as Lincolnshire people are called — can fairly be said to be in sympathy with the ideals of Deep England. One of the most famous, indeed the son of a rector of Bag Enderby, and born nearby at Somersby, was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose verses tell of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and vanished Lyonesse, and of many things loved and lost.  Or there is the late Roger Scruton, arguably the most articulate defender of Deep England in the past forty years, who began life in the tiny hamlet of Buslingthorpe near Market Rasen.  I concede, however, that Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe) and Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) are harder to square with this list…

In any case, Lincolnshire has form where the preservation of Deep England is concerned.  The March of Progress always seems to be missing Lincs: is it too much to hope to find something that it has left alone altogether?  Not necessarily, is Lincolnshire’s murmured answer.  I think of Ruddock’s, the old-fashioned stationers and bookshop in Lincoln’s High Street, to which I paid tribute here at the time of its sad demise in 2017.  Or the quirky Bubble Car Museum near Boston.  And Lincolnshire sausages of course, the glorious centrepiece of any Full Deep English Breakfast.  Then there is another, less tangible but momentous example: whereas, in more urbanised parts of the country, who knows how many traditional folk-songs had been forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, in Lincolnshire some were still remembered.  Here the last folk-singers lived just late enough to coincide with the earliest recording equipment and the Edwardian folk-song revival which saved so many tunes from extinction.  It was in the north of the county that the composer Percy Grainger discovered, and duly recorded and transcribed, such beautiful melodies as ‘Brigg Fair’ or ‘Rufford Park Poachers’.  That we can hear the voice of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, a man born in 1832, singing the songs of his youth, is cause to be thankful not only for Grainger and the singers who sang for him, but for the county which had preserved that folk-memory for so long.  Those songs are not only artefacts of the past, but to many ears some of its profoundest and most vivid evocations: this is borne out by the misty and chromatic arrangements that many composers made of them, Grainger’s own ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ being an example.*  Things linger in Lincolnshire: the old is slow to fade, and the new takes time to set in.  As I was once told by the guide on a rooftop tour of Lincoln Cathedral: "When the cranes go up in Lincoln, you know there’s a recession on the way."

This is not simply happenstance, either.  The county has a definite streak of rebelliousness, and its people stick by their principles.  I count very much in their favour the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in turn sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious popular opposition to confront Henry VIII; also the Lincolnshire Martyrs, who include two canonised saints.  The knowledge that Henry VIII hated Lincolnshire, declaring it ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, only makes me fonder of it still.  Less clear-cut morally is the tradition (if that’s the word) of poaching, which does, it must be said, have in its defence the injustice of the eighteenth-century enclosures of common land by wealthy land-owners.  The song ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, as sung by Joseph Taylor, with its pleasingly defiant declaration —

A buck or doe, believe it so,
A pheasant or an hare,
Were put on earth for everyone
Quite equal for to share […]

— captures the spirit, as does the more famous ditty ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (apparently a favourite of George IV; presumably it was not his hares that were being filched!).  Those landowners had come to see the land merely as an asset or a useful resource, whereas for the poachers and ordinary folk it was simply home, and home for their minds and spirits as much as for their empty stomachs.  To this day, it is not Lincolnshire’s way to follow the herd or pay heed to fashion overmuch, and this tendency to dig in heels, combined with the fondness for old things, creates conditions highly favourable, I would say, to the secret abiding of Deep England.

For it is not altogether unthinkingly that Deep England drowses green and gold in the haze of the afternoon.  I like to believe that those who dwell in that lost land are awake and alive to truth and beauty, pondering great thoughts and bold deeds over another hearty round of ale.  The proof that such folk did once live in Lincolnshire —  if they do not live there still — is plain to see in the heirlooms they left us, which stand amid the low rises and shallow hollows of this gentle county, startling us with their beauty: I mean the towers, the great audacious medieval church towers, with their youthful exuberance, their sheer verticality, which everywhere point heavenwards.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral, 20 March 2014.  With its original spire, it once stood at 520 feet; without, it is now 271 feet high.

There is of course Lincoln Cathedral — in John Ruskin’s estimation ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’ — which, when it still had its spires, was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548.  The highest spire, 520 feet tall, crowned a county that never naturally rises higher than 551 feet above sea level.  But these are not Lincolnshire’s only towers.  The relative prosperity of this region in the Middle Ages, as well as its ready access to the raw material of the Great Limestone Belt (which stretches south-west from Lincolnshire’s Kesteven through Rutland, Northamptonshire and the Cotswolds, all the way to Somerset), provided conditions favourable to the building of great towers by any self-respecting town.  So it is that Lincolnshire came to possess some of England’s greatest treasures.  At Louth it boasts the tallest medieval parish church tower in England, St James’s, whose spire stands at 287 feet.  St. Botolph’s at Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) has the tallest church tower to its roof: instead of tapering to a spire, the masonry shoots straight upwards to a height of 266 feet.  The spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram, 274 feet high, sweeps into sight at 105mph when beheld, sudden, serene, from express trains on the East Coast Main line.  And hundreds of other towers, less lofty but all distinctive, all dignified, lay claim to their segment of the wide Lincolnshire sky, each raised up in intercession for its parish and all souls there dwelling.**  That is because the folk of these parts in the Middle Ages committed their wool-wealth to the dressing of their homeland for Heaven, ornamenting this lowest-lying of counties with ardent upliftings of passionate stone.

As Julian Flannery says so movingly in ‘Fifty English Steeples’, an epic volume of detailed architectural surveys of medieval church towers, and one of the most treasured books on my shelves, 

England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth [church tower in September 1515] and the arrival of the English Reformation.  The pre-industrial landscape was dominated by the steeples of 17 cathedrals, 900 monasteries and 9,000 churches.  The spire of Lincoln Cathedral was the highest man-made structure the world had ever seen, and the construction of the great chapels at Westminster, Windsor and Cambridge had reached its magnificent conclusion.  Within a generation the monasteries had been dissolved, church-building had ceased, Lincoln spire had fallen, and medieval England had passed into history.  [p. 9]

Yet, for all the reasons above described, I have my suspicions that it is in Lincolnshire that the lost beauty he describes has lingered longest, and in particular in Lincolnshire’s towers that it survives most fiercely.  In a series of articles to come, I hope to describe what I found when I went to see some of them for myself.

St. Botolph’s church, Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’), under scaffolding on the 2nd February, 2019.  The tower is 266 feet high.

* Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy was used as the incidental music for John Betjeman’s 1964 BBC film Branch Line.
** One other Lincolnshire tower, that of the parish church of Deeping St Nicholas, photographed from the Peterborough-Spalding line on the 20th March 2014, illustrates the title banner of this blog.

Betjeman the prophet

Highbridge Wharf, your hopes have died:

They flow like driftwood down the tide,

Out, out into the open sea —

O sad forgotten S. & D.

Any readers who feel like a laid-back half-hour might enjoy this film, ‘A Branch Line Railway’ with John Betjeman, broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1963 and now available indefinitely on the I-Player.  (Since this is the B.B.C.’s website I have a feeling it can be watched only in the U.K.).  It is a journey from Evercreech Junction to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, along part of the former Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway.  The ‘S. & D.’ was a line from the west Somerset coast to Bournemouth, with a long arm from Bath joining at Evercreech.  It was built in anticipation of a surge of goods traffic from South Wales and the Midlands to the English Channel and the Continent.  As Betjeman explains, this traffic never emerged; the line was a backwater all its life.  (The music accompanying the film is Percy Grainger’s ‘Lincolnshire Posy’, arrangements of folk-songs that he had collected in that county in the early 1900s).

Most of the Somerset & Dorset is no more: of course, 1963 was also the year of Dr. Beeching’s infamous report on ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, in which he recommended the pruning of about a third of this country’s route mileage in the name of efficiency (see p. 109 for the renowned list of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ and its unexpected pathos).  This was so vehemently the age of the motor-car and the motorway that Betjeman’s appeal to save the Doric arch at Euston station in London was a lonely and eventually unsuccessful one, and an era so eager to jettison the past that he, almost alone, deserves the credit for having preserved the splendour of St Pancras station from a modernisation scheme.  Against such a backdrop Betjeman’s nostalgic film gains a rather polemic quality.  His journey is an argument as much as a portrait, and every so often (for example at eight minutes in) there are flashes of rhetoric and rawer protests at the spirit of the age:

You know, I’m not just being nostalgic and sentimental and unpractical about railways.  Railways are bound to be used again.  They’re not a thing of the past. And it’s heart-breaking to see them left to rot and to see the fine men who’ve served them all their lives made uncertain about their own futures and about their jobs.  What’s more, it’s wrong in every way when we all of us know that road traffic is becoming increasingly hellish on this overcrowded island. […] I think it’s more than likely that we’ll deeply regret the branch lines we’ve torn up and the lines that we’ve let to go to rot.

It is easy to think of Betjeman more or less as a nostalgist par excellence, and it is true that the burden of much of his writing and many of his broadcasts was to cherish, to defend and, indeed, to mourn the past.  He was also a prophet, though, and I think rather a better prophet than his modernist, forward-thinking contemporaries.  He saw through the illusory freedom of the internal-combustion engine and the motorway to their fundamental soullessness, and likewise saw through the rust and soot of the post-war railways to their fundamental usefulness, wholesomeness and even moral superiority (about which I have tried to set down my own thoughts here).  So it is that we are slowly and expensively re-opening some of those lines too hastily closed and sold off by British Rail in the 1960s, and so it is that we struggle now to believe that such an idea as the demolition of George Gilbert Scott’s astonishing St. Pancras station, under whose seemingly weightless roof travellers by rail to and from Europe arrive and depart, ever even entered anybody’s mind.

The statue of John Betjeman at St. Pancras station, the building he defended against demolition and now a magnificent welcome for passengers from the Continent.

‘His Music Lives. It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains’

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (picture from Wikipedia.org)

Today is the 140th anniversary of the birth, in Holborn in London, of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the late nineteenth-century composer (as distinct from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge!).  Coleridge-Taylor never knew his father, a doctor from Sierra Leone, who for his part had returned there without knowing he had a son.  His mother Alice moved to Croydon; there Samuel was brought up and lived for the rest of his life.

He learnt the violin and sang in two church choirs, and polished his talent diligently enough that, in 1890, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.  Here he was taught by Stanford, knew Holst and Vaughan Williams, and had his first publications.  A few years later he received a commission for the Three Choirs Festival on the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar, who called him ‘the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men’.  

Not long afterwards came his greatest success.  This was ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’, the first of a trilogy of cantatas, which catapulted him to his greatest fame, but, alas, not to riches.  He had sold the rights outright for a trifling fee, and all his life had to work hard for a living, and to provide for his wife Jessie Walmisley, his son Hiawatha and daughter Gwendolyn.  

Here is the first movement of his violin concerto in G minor (the second movement and the third movement are also available to listen to):

His African background led him to take a deep interest in African and African-American culture and history; he collaborated with the American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and travelled to the U.S.A. on conducting tours.  He also made haunting arrangements of spiritual melodies, and saw himself as doing much the same work as Dvořák and Grieg had for the folk-music of their own cultures:

Coleridge-Taylor died, having collapsed at West Croydon railway station and succumbed a few days later to pneumonia, at the catastrophically early age of thirty-seven, and so never wore, as he might deservedly have done, the laurels of a great twentieth-century British composer.  He is buried within a few miles of his home in the cemetery at Bandon Hill in Wallington.  His life seems under-remembered today in his own south London, but all the same ‘his music lives’, as the epitaph on his grave, by his friend Alfred Noyes, proclaims: ‘It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains.  It pulsed with his own life, but now it is his immortality.  He lives while music lives.’

Further reading and listening:

• A biography on the British Library’s website: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/coleridgebackground.html
• A facsimile of ‘Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: His Life and Letters’ (1916): https://archive.org/stream/samuelcoleridget002424mbp#page/n7/mode/2up
• A photograph of Coleridge-Taylor at work in his room in 1901: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/sctpiano1lge.html
• Article about Coleridge-Taylor on the website of the London Borough of Sutton: https://www.sutton.gov.uk/info/200554/heritage_and_culture/1359/local_people/2
• ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on B.B.C. Radio 3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0219x03

Music from South Sudan

Being an ecumenical sort of chap, I am becoming rather a fan of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I think that he explains himself clearly and intelligently, and speaks in complete paragraphs of measured English, which is rare in the media these days.  His sincerity and sense of humour give him an approachable, slickness-free media presence, which no doubt matches the impression he must give in person.  Above all, his faith spills out of him, qualmless and unabashed, in an invigorating and heartening way.

I mention him because the other day I listened to his appearance on ‘Desert Island Discs’ (which should be audible here).  Kirsty Young’s questions were not always easy, so he was perhaps less relaxed than I have heard him elsewhere (here, for example), but it was certainly enjoyable.  In any case, my main reason for listening was my curiosity about his taste in music (I have admitted to being nosey about this sort of thing!).  There was a broad spectrum: Tavener, Beethoven, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, an evangelical worship-song by Matt and Beth Redman, and even ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.

His fourth choice, however, stood right out from the others:

It is a South Sudanese folk-song called ‘Yesu Odechi’ (the translation is given as ‘Jesus Number One’, so perhaps it is more of a folk-hymn).  I was stunned by its freshness, even rawness of sound and by the soloist’s incredible voice.   Looking it up, I found that it is in fact very new, having been composed by its very singers (they are members of the Kachipo tribe).  In fact, there was apparently some trouble in transcribing the words, Kachipo culture being entirely oral.  Although the accompaniment was added later in a studio, the mood and sound seem unfakeably unchoreographed and authentic.  

This music speaks (or sings?) for itself, but I cannot resist noting the light it sheds on one of the paradoxes of our age, which is itself made up of two contradictions.  The first paradox, as Justin Welby observes, is the brightness of this music against South Sudan’s already bloodstained short history (some of which he has witnessed at first hand).  The second, on the other hand, is that we who enjoy relative peace do not write peaceful music, but instead content ourselves with sordid lyrics set to mindless beats or pride ourselves on our supposed edginess.  It is needless to say that the victims of war are little to be envied, but I think they (as opposed to the wagers of war) seem to have a firmer grasp of truth, in faith as well as in art, than we do in our indulgent age.   Perhaps this is one of the things Pope Francis meant when he said, "Certain realities in life can only be seen through eyes cleansed by tears".

The Sound of Old England

Often I wish that everyone could be invited onto Desert Island Discs.  I could listen all day to people’s lists of favourite music (not to mention the reasons for their choices and the records themselves), regardless of the guest’s prominence – regardless even of whether I have ever heard of them.

Assuming that any readers feel similarly, this scratchy recording, barely thirty seconds long, of an old man rattling out an even older song, is a strong candidate for my island:

This is the voice of a man who was born around 1832, and the song he is singing was very old even when he had been taught it as a boy.  He sings only two verses because that is all he can recall, but there is no doubt about the tune.  He has borne it in his heart for threescore years and fifteen (the recording was taken in 1906), but the August morning of his song has lost none of its freshness.  And this goes for us who hear him more than a lifetime later still.

The singer is Mr. Joseph Taylor of Saxby All Saints in Lincolnshire, a bailiff, aged seventy-five.  In many respects he was an ordinary Englishman, which of course is what is so interesting about him.  His plain north Lincolnshire voice proclaims that ordinary Englishmen of those days really did inherit tradition from the past, and not only in the self-conscious sense of a revival, but within a home-made culture alive and authentic.

Now of course this recording could not have come about without theatrics of one sort of another.  Even in those days before the Great War the traditions were endangered: the Industrial Revolution had of course stirred the kingdom up and people could suddenly move around the country with great ease.  The new and vivid geographical horizons, though a wonderful development, were also distractions from the local consciousness of history, which had to be learnt and understood.  For these and many other reasons, the folk-songs were beginning to fall not only out of use but out of mind.

We owe a great deal, then, to musicians such as Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who at the eleventh hour (the turn of the twentieth century) cycled around the countryside with sheaves of manuscript paper in search of folk-songs and their singers.  (Cecil Sharp alone collected nearly five thousand songs from Britain and North America).  Percy Grainger, though Australian by birth, was another of these.  It was to him that Joseph Taylor sang in Lincolnshire, and he who notated ‘Brigg Fair’ and other songs and recorded them — for our sake — on a cylinder phonograph.

Grainger did not see himself as a curator only, but even entered into the tradition himself.  He wrote his own arrangement of ‘Brigg Fair’, in which a faithful reprisal of the tune is underlain with his rich harmonies.  I think the best recording is sung by the inimitable King’s Singers here, but it can also be heard here and on the cello here.  (Frederick Delius’ rhapsody is also worth hearing!).

To my post-millennial ears, Grainger’s characteristic mistiness  does to his arrangement what the crackle of the phonograph does to the recording.  That is to permit the listener to hear distance (about which more here).  We ‘only just’ have the sound of Joseph Taylor’s voice, which in any case is heard across the gulf of the twentieth century, a gulf whose breadth sometimes seems unfathomable.   Out on that desert island I would not be any further away from Britain in space than we already are in time from Joseph Taylor’s England, so perhaps it is not such an odd choice after all.