Skip to main content

Dorking

Vaughan Williams appears frequently in my book and has cropped up not a few times in this blog too, probably more than any other composer. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, he's one of my favourite composers. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, his influence on hymn music in England is enormous, thanks to his work as Music Editor of important books such as The English Hymnal and Songs of Praise. Some of the best-known hymn-tunes owe their success to RVW, and indeed many of them would not have become hymn-tunes at all if it had not been for him. Most of the folk-songs that he adapted for use as hymns were given names referring to the place where the tune was collected, so this means that his work is a rich source for someone who is interested in the link between the place and the music.

While I was researching the book I contacted the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society for some information about the origins of FOREST GREEN. The Chairman of the Society, Simon Coombs, not only kindly provided me with some interesting leads for my research, but also offered to review the book in the Society's Journal, and invited me to address the AGM as their guest speaker, on 2nd October this year.

The meeting was held at the Surrey Performing Arts Library, in the grounds of Denbies Wine Estate near Dorking. The Library has a room dedicated to Vaughan Williams, and it was here that the members of the RVW Society gathered for their AGM. After the main business of the meeting I gave a talk on O Little Town: hymn-tunes and the places that inspired them, with musical illustrations provided by members of the English Arts Chorale conducted by their founder and Artistic Director, Leslie Olive. The talk was well-received and I even managed to sell a few copies of the book!

Denbies Wine Estate near Dorking
Vaughan Williams' childhood home, Leith Hill Place, is not far from Dorking, and as an adult the composer lived in Dorking during the 1930s. The Dorking Halls, which was originally built as a performance venue for the Leith Hill Festival, has a statue of him just outside the entrance, honouring the great composer who did so much for the area.
Statue of Vaughan Williams by William Fawkes
The hymn-tune DORKING is not very well known. It appears in the enlarged edition of Songs of Praise, the hymn-book which Percy Dearmer compiled for use as a 'national' hymnal suitable for public singing and for use in schools; the music editors were Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw (the latter being the composer of LITTLE CORNARD, about which I have written in an earlier post). In Songs of Praise the tune DORKING is used for a hymn beginning 'Hail, glorious spirits, heirs of light'. The tune is described as being 'Adapted from an English Traditional Melody'.

The traditional melody in question is 'Queen Eleanor's Confession'. The words of this song appear in English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a scholarly collection first published in the 1880s and 1890s by Francis James Childs. A recording of the ballad by Tim Hart and Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span can be heard on YouTube here.

I haven't found a recording of the hymn tune so here is an artificial one played on organ, with no singers. The picture is of a Dorking chicken, an ancient breed introduced by the Romans; the town of Dorking was an important centre of poultry production during the nineteenth century.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sussex hymn-tunes - Part II: KINGSFOLD

A while back I started to write about hymn-tunes that are named after Sussex place-names. Having been briefly diverted by an expedition to Suffolk and Essex, I am now back home and ready to think again about the tunes that grew near where I live. The first instalment of my post on Sussex hymn-tunes  focused mainly on tunes that Ralph Vaughan Williams collected from Harriet and Peter Verrall in Monks Gate, just outside Horsham. Vaughan Williams lived not far away, in Surrey, and many of the folk-songs that he adapted for use as hymn-tunes were collected in Sussex. So if you will indulge me, I will stay with RVW in this entry too. I live in Warnham, a village just outside Horsham, diametrically opposite from Monks Gate. There is a hymn-tune called WARNHAM, but only because I wrote it myself. It was my entry for a competition run by the Royal School of Church Music to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Hymns Ancient & Modern . The competition challenged composers to

Forest Green

FOREST GREEN is the name of the tune sung (in the UK, at least) to O little town of Bethlehem . Since this is the carol from which I have taken the title for my book (and this blog) I thought I should look into it. The tune is a folk-song called The Ploughboy's Dream , which Ralph Vaughan Williams 'collected' in 1903. Vaughan Williams noted that the singer from whom he learnt this song, Mr Garman of Forest Green, was a native of Sussex but living in Surrey. Thanks to Mr Simon Coombs of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society , I have learnt that RVW collected this song at a place called Broadmoor in Surrey, and that he also heard songs sung by one Isaac Longhurst on the same occasion. Here's a map showing Broadmoor: View Larger Map I have tried to find out some more about Mr Garman of Forest Green. Vaughan Williams estimated his age to be about 60. By consulting the census records I have discovered the following: There is only one adult Mr Garman reco

Bunessan

On the southern edge of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides there is an arm of land, the Ross of Mull, that reaches out westwards towards the holy island of Iona. On the map, the end of this peninsula looks a little like a hand wearing mittens, or perhaps a cat’s paw reaching towards a mouse. The inlet between the hand and the thumb is Loch na Làthaich, and on the shores of the loch sits the village of Bunessan. This is a landscape defined by the brown-green of the hills and the grey-blue of the sky and sea. It is a beautiful landscape but also a harsh one, where crofters scraped out a precarious living. Bunessan village viewed from Lower Ardtun © JaneMcArtney [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Just outside Bunessan is a stone monument commemorating a woman named Mary MacDonald. In some ways Mary’s life was unremarkable: in outline it was the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women who li