#AFolkSongAFortnight No.2: The Birds in the Spring
A Sussex/Copper Family classic provides a launchpad to discuss the influence of birds on folk and classical music, as well as human myth, spirituality and even language; to consider the parallels between collectors of folk song and wildlife sounds; and to explore heightened public engagement with both creativity and nature during lockdown.
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| British Birds: Cock Skylark; Hen Beam Bird; Hen White Wagtail; Hen Blackcap; Cock Nightingale; Hen Nightingale; Cock and Hen House Martin; Cock Marsh Titmouse; Hen Titlark; and a Hen Grass Hopper 1736; Charles Collins (c.1680–1744); National Trust, Anglesey Abbey |
(NB – this blog was scheduled for last weekend, but I lost my voice and so couldn’t record the singing part! To get back in sequence, the next one may be in one week’s time)
In another, less virus-stricken timeline, we would have been in Bristol for May Day, dancing the sun up on Castle Green with Brighton Morris. Instead, in this uneasy reality, I set the alarm at home in Hebden Bridge, and awoke for a novel cyber-ritual; to participate in the daybreak portion of the Hastings Jack-in-the-Green (1), with a webcam mounted high above the town.
The experience was contrasted and augmented by an un-anticipated but profound analogue experience - a rich and riotous dawn chorus. It was a glorious, sublime moment, and crystallised into an obligation this week's choice of song: One May Morning Early / The Birds in the Spring (Roud 365) (2):
One May morning early I chanced for to roam
And stopped by the field at the side of the grove.
It was there I did hear the harmless birds sing,
And you never heard so sweet (you never heard so sweet),
you never heard so sweet as the birds in the spring.
At the end of the grove I sat myself down
And the song of the nightingale echoed all round,
Their song was so charming their notes were so clear
No music no songster (no music no songster),
No music no songster can with them compare.
All you that come here the small birds to hear,
I'll have you pay attention so pray all draw near.
And when you're growing old you will have this to say,
That you never heard so sweet (you never heard so sweet),
You never heard so sweet as the birds on the spray!
For the recording, I've also tried to echo my May Day epiphany by recording yesterday's dawn chorus, and overlaying with my singing; though nightingales are these days sadly absent from West Yorkshire.
I first heard ‘The Birds in the Spring' at the Bob Copper 'centenary' concert at Cecil Sharp House in 2015. It's a joy of a song; a recognisably Sussex lilting melody, with clear, satisfying and inviting chorus lines. The song is indelibly associated with the Copper Family of Rottingdean, who account for 12 of the 31 versions held by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (the preeminent online repository of the traditional music of the British Isles). There are also early versions collected in Surrey and even Somerset between 1891 and 1908 (including by Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan-Williams), whilst Peter Kennedy actually gathered the first audio recording in 1956 in Copthorne, from George 'Pop' Maynard (4).
In its straightforwardly joyous appreciation of birdsong at daybreak, especially that of nightingales, the song also echoes the poetry of John Keats and John Clare (both of whom, in their different styles and amidst broader complexities, express sentiments readily compressed to 'you never heard so sweet')(5). 'Down By the Green Groves' also carries a greater implication than simply the enchanting musicality of these birds; for the teller of the tale, the nightingale's song heralds both daybreak and summer – a double-triumph of light over darkness.
In its straightforwardly joyous appreciation of birdsong at daybreak, especially that of nightingales, the song also echoes the poetry of John Keats and John Clare (both of whom, in their different styles and amidst broader complexities, express sentiments readily compressed to 'you never heard so sweet')(5). 'Down By the Green Groves' also carries a greater implication than simply the enchanting musicality of these birds; for the teller of the tale, the nightingale's song heralds both daybreak and summer – a double-triumph of light over darkness.
From our present vantage point in the early 21st century, the song carries particular poignance - both songbird species decline, and urbanisation of man's own habitat and work patterns, mean that this sort of chance encounter - yielding a near-transcendent experience - is available to fewer and fewer of us. The lyrics even seem to anticipate this; do they warn that ‘when you’re growing old’ moments such as these might only be grasped as memories?
Bird Song / Art Song / Folk Song
Birds carry powerful metaphorical potential in the realms of art and religion. The generative symbolism of the laying and hatching of eggs is clear. The beauty of their songs, and our sense of kinship with them as ‘music-making animals’ both bring great inspiration, as does the colour-riot of their plumage. In their feeding and courtship behaviours and migratory patterns, they can embody the turning of the seasons (especially, but not solely, the arrival of spring and summer). Their flight represents a sense of freedom – physical and spiritual – that humans long for, as well as a totalising/unifying perspective from above (of course, these generalisations merely scratch the surface of the subject).
The inspiration provided by birds and bird-song to human art and culture extends back through millennia, across all continents. They feature in the creation mythology of Finland, Estonia, parts of Indonesia, and some Polynesian, Native American and Inuit tribes (6), and birds - even the mimicry of Birds - feature in the songlines of Australian First Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders (7). Birds are mentioned many times in the Bible, and the sacred texts of the other Abrahamic faiths (8).
The presence of birds stretches even further into pre-history; they are present in cave art of the Paleolithic period in Europe (9) and in the rock art of Australia (10). The earliest discovered cache of man-made musical instruments - found in the Geissenkloesterle Cave in Southern Germany, and thought to be over 40,000 years old - include flutes fashioned from bird bone (11); it seems a small leap of imagination to contemplate our ancestors choosing this material not only for its physical properties, but out of a desire to capture and channel the essence of birdsong itself.
In 1871 Darwin mused that "The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language," (12). A substantial-and-growing body of research explores the parallels between human communication and birdsong. One recent, landmark study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posits that birdsong may even have influenced the roots of human language itself (13).
The influence in the western art of the last two centuries is equally strong – particularly in poetry and classical music. Mozart, Ligetti, Handel and Mahler all felt this inspiration (14). Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife Sounds at the British Library, cites Beethoven, noting that, “in the 2nd movement of the Pastoral, he uses instruments to mimic the sound of a quail, cuckoo and nightingale.”(15).
Tipp also especially highlights Messiaen, who made ever-more-ornate and ambitious efforts to harness the power of birdsong – weaving the sounds of nightingale and blackbird into the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ which he devised as a prisoner of war in 1940. Over four decades, Messiaen filled thousands of pages of manuscript paper with fragments of birdsong, and produced further complex compositions 'Reveil d’Oiseaux' ('Dawn Chorus' - 1953) and 'Oiseaux Exotiques' ('Exotic Birds' - 1954), culminating in 1958’s 'Catalogue d’Oiseaux' ('Catalogue of Birds'), which displayed the calls of 77 species across 13 movements, and 2-and-a-half hours (16).
Birds also hover above and swoop through British compositional history. ‘Sumer is icumen in’ celebrates the return of spring as embodied in the call of the cuckoo, and stands as both one of the oldest known poems and most venerable vocal compositions in English (17). The aptly named Renaissance composer William Byrd wrote several pieces focused on hawks particularly (18).
Birdsong is strongly present in the works of composers closely associated with the first and second phases of the English Folk revival. Two of Frederick Delius’s best-loved compositions are ‘On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring’, and his orchestral arrangements of ‘Brigg Fair’ (19). ‘Winter and the Birds’, ‘There Sits a Bird on Yonder Tree’ and ‘Ye Little Birds’ were amongst Gustav Holst’s earliest vocal/choral settings (20), whilst – amongst his many works engaging with the English folk tradition - his ‘Somerset Rhapsody’ and ‘Songs of the West’ derive from song collections gathered by Cecil Sharp and the folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould respectively (21). In the mid-20th Century, Benjamin Britten – a keen birdwatcher – aimed to replicate the sounds and character of both wagtail and cuckoo in his work (22). Throughout his career, Britten also returned repeatedly, with great success, to arrangements of English Folk Songs (23).
Without wishing to simplify the intentions of these giants, a common motivation across the engagement of such composers with both birdsong and folk-song is the evocation of a pastoral idyll approaching a unifying spirit of the landscape, and even of the nation. It also represents a bulwark against, or refuge from, the worst impacts of modernity – industrialisation, depopulation of the countryside, and then the catastrophe of the First World War for Holst and Delius; and in Britten’s case, the national rebuilding after World War II.
Ralph Vaughan Williams is perhaps the apotheosis of these tendencies. ‘The Lark Ascending’, written on the eve of war in 1914 but not performed until 1920, is both a lament for a prelapsarian ideal, and a paean to nature’s, and the nation’s, resilience and recovery (24). Vaughan Williams was also the most avid collector and re-interpreter of English traditional music, gathering over 800 songs from source singers ‘in the field’ across 21 counties between 1903 and the mid-20s. He tackled folk song in orchestral, choral, vocal and instrumental settings throughout his career, perhaps most famously through 1906’s The English Hymnal, and 1934’s 'Fantasia On Greensleeves'. He was the President of the English Folk Dance and Song Society for the final decade of his life; and The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs, co-edited with A.L. Lloyd, was published in 1959 - the year after Vaughan William’s death (25).
Birds and bird-song deeply permeate Britain's folklore, folk customs and folk song, to an extent which calls for a thesis rather than a blog to fully unpack. Searching the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library database again (26), there are 1258 song results returned just for the word 'birds' in titles and lyrics; this expands exponentially when running further searches for particular species including blackbirds, thrushes, wrens, larks, and many others.
Indeed, some of the most famous and well-loved folksongs feature birds prominently (upon starting this blog, I also crowdsourced a list on the Mudcat forum) (27). Lancashire folk-singer and birder Derek Gifford even made an album celebrating this harmonious union, and his website indicates plans for a future book (28).
An interesting sub-strain that is very apparent throughout is the juxtaposition of birdsong with challenged, or even doomed affection. ‘The Seeds of Love’(29), the very first song collected by Cecil Sharp, recounts the dilemma of an uncertain young man agonising over a choice of bouquet offering, whilst ‘small birds sweetly sing.’
‘Pleasant and Delightful’(30), a song collected widely across England (from Suffolk and Gloucestershire to Yorkshire), tells of a sailor and his love on the eve of parting; but precedes and juxtaposes this with blackbirds and thrushes calling ‘on every green spray’, and larks which sing ‘melodious, at the dawning of the day’. More curious still, ‘The Week Before Easter’ (31), also known as ‘The False Bride’, foreshadows a lover’s betrayal with ‘the small birds… singing and changing their notes/down amongst the wild beasts of the forest’.
Across such songs the birds represent beauty, innocence, yearning, and an emotional ideal to be sought or regained; and the passing of hardship with the turning of the seasons. However, they can also denote the cruel indifference of nature to the affairs of men, and to the ardent desires of the human heart. A modern encapsulation of this is Shirley Collins’s use of delicate birdsong to underpin the murderous tale of ‘Cruel Lincoln’, on her 2017 comeback LP Lodestar (32).
Collecting and conservation
Reflecting upon Vaughan Williams in particular, it’s interesting to consider the parallels between the field recordists of both folksong and birdsong. The poet John Clare is a fascinating case-study in both regards - a meticulous collector of folk songs and fiddle pieces (33), he also made transcriptions of birdsong – including of a nightingale, in May 1832:
chew - cheer cheer cheer
chew chew chew chee
up cheer up cheer up
tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug
According to David Rothenberg, this was to prove the most accurate phonetic rendering of birdsong for over a century (34).
Both disciplines have their roots in the mid-eighteenth century, with the work of antiquaries like Thomas Percy (Reliques of English Poetry, 1765)(35) on the one hand, and naturalist and watercolourist Eleazar Albin (A Natural History of English Song-birds, 1759) on the other. (36)
Folk song collecting began to coalesce as a formal discipline in the early 19th century, and truly solidified around the 1880s onwards, with published volumes from the likes of FJ Child and the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould. The English folk revival entered full flight at the turn of the century, with the work of Mary Neal, Sharp, Vaughan Williams and many others. Though the phonograph had existed since the 1880s, and was used to record folk music in Europe and America from its first appearance, English folk songs were primarily collected by written notation. Neal and Sharp experimented with a phonograph acquired by the English Folk Dance and Song Society in around 1905, but the first collector to fully embrace the audio capture of English source singers was the Australian composer Percy Grainger, who travelled and recorded relentlessly from 1906 to 1908 (37).
In comparison with this somewhat slack utilisation of available technology by scholars of English folk, the first known recording of birdsong was rather precociously made in Frankfurt by Ludwig Koch, who – aged 8! - captured birdsong on an Edison cylinder machine brought home by his father. He would go on to be one of the key nature sound recordists of the 20th century (38).
It is obviously important not to overstate the analogy; but also, to consider where certain similarities may sometimes emerge through what we might now understand as a lapse in ethics on the part of folk-song collectors in particular. The history of the discipline globally is littered with those who either approach the subject in an excessively anthropological way (denying the source singers sufficient presence or agency; misapprehending as somehow inert what are actually continuously living, evolving traditions; and ‘othering’ source communities, often on the basis of regionality, class or race); or, shoehorning and even altering the work gathered to fit preconceived conceptions of 'correctness' of form and taste, or to align with a preferred narrative or ideology.
I asked Cheryl Tipp for her reflections on the similarities between the two disciplines; she concurred that there are “definite parallels”, noting that “the collector’s mentality is the same here - it’s the desire to record and preserve a certain vocabulary. This could be the different vocalisations of a particular species or the various songs from a particular region. Recordists are driven to collect in order to preserve, understand and ensure that the subject is properly documented.”
The folk singer, song collector and environmentalist Sam Lee also shared his thoughts with me, drawing connections between historic folk-song scholarship and “forensic environmental research like dendrology, pollen samples and ice cores”. On balance, Lee feels that “there are so many similarities, and so many areas where the analogies can fall short… [A key question is,] what’s the research for? If it’s to provide evidence of need of protection, then yes, it’s happening and that’s a lot of what science and studies of analysis and eco-systems are doing; it’s looking at loss, and trying to find quantifiable figures of decline where you can then start to say – this is disappearing, we need to work on it. I guess that’s where the exploration of all music cultures, contemporary and folk, need to be documented – to show that they are suffering (or thriving).”
Decline... and resurgence?
Lee’s point here is an intriguing one on which to pivot. Both English traditional music and birdlife have undergone a century of unprecedented decline; in different ways, industrialisation and changes to agricultural practices have been central issues in the plight of each. Folk song as a locally practiced phenomenon intimately interwoven with family, community and work has been eroded by urbanisation. The advent of radio and TV removed part of the drive for people to entertain themselves and each other, and displaced local specificity of taste and repertoire with a rapidly moving cycle of ever-new national and international favourites. Urban living and modern media have moved us away from collective music-making towards a professionalised, transactional experience of performer and audience.
Likewise, many bird species in Britain have been in freefall, especially over the last 60 years - with many drivers including pesticides and pollution (both chemical and sensory), and the loss of habitat with the shift towards mega-mono-cultures of farming. British birdlife is part of an intimately connected global ecology, and varied factors such as drought in sub-Saharan Africa, and even an expansion of mass hunting at key migratory points like Malta, have drastically impacted the numbers of treasured species including cuckoos, swallows, house martins and – especially – nightingales (39).
Despite these difficulties and dangers, precious enclaves still persist. It’s fascinating to consider the what it is that makes a county like Sussex both one of the few remaining bastions of the nightingale, as well as the home of families like the Coppers (now largely resident in Peacehaven), maintaining a vibrant living tradition of collective signing which radiates out across that corner of the county.
The coronavirus pandemic has wrought enormous loss of life, and wider profound and perhaps long-lasting social, cultural and economic challenges. The peculiar nature of this catastrophe, with its imposition of stasis and isolation for hundreds of millions of people globally, has also enforced upon us all time that can be used to reflect upon society as it was, and how we might wish it to be in the future.
Alongside a massive upsurge in community solidarity and collective support (40), it’s fascinating to see that two of the behaviours that have most changed during the crisis – and which, with collective will, it might be possible to maintain in the aftermath – are engagement in with creativity and culture; and attentiveness to and appreciation of nature.
Observing flora and fauna gives us the opportunity to slow down, quell our own turbulent thoughts, and derive perspective in the present and hope for the future in nature’s ability to endure present difficulties. It has become far more widely accepted that access to green space is a fundamental cornerstone of our wellbeing, and the double-plight of those isolated without gardens or parks has been much discussed (41). The TV naturalist Chris Packham has observed that “people are talking about birdsong more than I've ever heard them talk about birdsong, because they've had the time to stop and listen to it.” (42). Although, contrary to perception, birds are actually singing less loudly than before, freed of the need to battle against the roar of traffic and aviation, we have become hyper-aware of their presence, and enraptured by it (43). BBC’s Springwatch 2020, despite a change of format, appears set to smash its previous record viewing figures, reaching millions of people (44).
Likewise, under lockdown people have used creativity not just for entertainment but for connection to others; to express and process difficult emotions; and to collectively re-imagine the future that we might build for ourselves. Singing has been a big part of this – from Italian families serenading each other across empty streets to dissipate the shock and anxiety of Europe’s first lockdown; neighbours performing to each other from their front yards with Sheffield’s Garden Gigs; and over 100,000 registering for Gareth Malone’s Great British Home Chorus in the first week of lockdown alone. As a newcomer to traditional-singing, I could still have my choice of multiple separate Zoom singarounds and streamed folk gigs, every night of the week (45).
Sam Lee’s Singing With Nightingales 2020 has been a magnificent convergence of both tendencies. Had everything continued as normal, virus free, his series of intimate events at Sussex’s Knepp estate would have welcomed hundreds of guests to participate over the course of 10 nights. In contrast, under self-isolation, nearly 86,000 tuned in to watch a host of musicians duet with these majestic feathered songsters (46).
I asked Sam whether it’s reasonable to hope for us to not only consolidate, but to build upon these new habits as we all exit lockdown; he expressed a number of reservations and anxieties about what forms of activity Government might prioritise in order to nudge the economy, but held an optimistic note overall: “I hope so…!! There’s been an enormous awareness of what’s been a really spectacular spring; one of the best I can remember; also, it might be that this is a time when we can start focusing on green alternatives in the rebuild of society… We’re all living in this time when everyone feels more connected with nature – EVERYONE; it’s unbelievable that there’s almost no-one on the street not talking about birdsong… right now we live in hope of seeing what the moment might hold, what comes out!”
I share this hope. It’s not only possible – I believe we have an obligation to build upon this potential. Alongside the investment in green energy that Sam proposes, major cities across Europe are already talking about permanently excluding traffic from miles of streetscape where cars have been temporarily absent due to lockdown (47). Is it possible to repay what nature has given to us through these difficult months, by securing mass collective demands for greater protection and nurturing of wildlife - encompassing habitat restoration, rewilding and a shift towards less ecologically damaging farming practices?
How might we continue the ‘rewilding’ of our cultural landscape, not just protecting the infrastructure of organisations that have been imperilled by lockdown, but by reaffirming creativity as something that belongs to all of us, collectively – protecting wellbeing, and helping to bind and strengthen our communities over the months, and years, to come?
And, what possibilities might this create for a re-embedding of communal singing at a local level - reactivating dormant repertoire; and initiating new, inclusive traditions of shared and cherished songs, which retain multi-stranded connections to our collective past, whilst also speaking to, and of, the present?
And, what possibilities might this create for a re-embedding of communal singing at a local level - reactivating dormant repertoire; and initiating new, inclusive traditions of shared and cherished songs, which retain multi-stranded connections to our collective past, whilst also speaking to, and of, the present?
References:
1 https://www.facebook.com/HastingsTraditonalJackintheGreen
2 https://mainlynorfolk.info/copperfamily/songs/thebirdsinthespring.html
3 https://www.efdss.org/about-us/what-we-do/news/2898-day-long-celebration-to-mark-bob-copper-centenary-csh
4 https://www.vwml.org
5 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale + https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/nightingale-21
6 http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Be-Ca/Birds-in-Mythology.html + https://www.horniman.ac.uk/story/birds-myth-lore-legend + https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2016/11/08/delving-into-cultural-myths-tales-and-beliefs-about-wild-birds
7 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/29/many-birds-feature-in-our-art-and-songlines-but-im-teamwedgetail
8 https://www.openbible.info/topics/birds + http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3316-birds + https://www.mosquefoundation.org/birds-of-the-quran
9 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190311125215.htm
10 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/extinct-bird-key-to-dating-australias-oldest-cave-art-29394729
11 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18196349
12 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
13 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130221141608.htm
14 http://www.colander.org/gallimaufry/Birdsong.html
15 https://youtu.be/I0QfstT-2TE
16 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3gJFSH6W6wXVgybrqqNtFGq/the-composer-who-took-a-cue-from-birdsong
17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer_is_icumen_in
18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Byrd
19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Delius
20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Holst
21 https://www.efdss.org/2-general/7623-folk-music-journal-volume-10-number-1
22 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jan/30/benjamin-britten-composing-walks
23 https://goodmorningbritten.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/an-introduction-to-britten-and-the-folksong-a-new-take-on-old-music
24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lark_Ascending_(Vaughan_Williams)
25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Williams_and_English_folk_music
26 VWML ibid
27 https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=167892
28 http://www.derekgifford.co.uk/Birds01.htm
29 https://mainlynorfolk.info/joseph.taylor/songs/sprigofthyme.html
30 https://mainlynorfolk.info/louis.killen/songs/pleasantanddelightful.html
31 https://mainlynorfolk.info/copperfamily/songs/thefalsebride.html
32 https://youtu.be/4_QMW4mv6As
33 George Deacon, John Clare and the Folk Tradition, Francis Boutle, 2002 revised ed.
34 David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, Allen Lane, 2005; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview5
35 Steve Roud, Folk Song in England, Faber & Faber, 2017
36 https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2013/10/the-pleasures-of-birdsong
37 Roud, ibid; https://www.jstor.org/stable/4522107?seq=1
38 https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-complete-history-of-collecting-and-imitating-birdsong + https://www.wildlife-sound.org/resources/articles/44-resources/articles/181-ludwig-koch-master-of-nature-s-music
39 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48064500
40 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/uk-volunteering-coronavirus-crisis-community-lockdown
41 https://www.sustrans.org.uk/our-blog/opinion/2020/may/why-urban-green-spaces-are-essential-for-mental-health
42 Channel 4 News, 18 May 2020; https://www.channel4.com/news/we-are-part-of-nature-and-if-we-dont-respect-nature-and-look-after-it-wont-look-after-us-in-the-future-naturalist-chris-packham
43 https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/06/843271787/do-those-birds-sound-louder-to-you-an-ornithologist-says-youre-just-hearing-thin?t=1590950032611
44 https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/springwatch-bbc-chris-packham-autumnwatch-winterwatch-a9537336.html
45 (please indulge me, for citing my own work blog!) https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/blog/getting-creative-health-and-wellbeing
46 https://www.youtube.com/user/thenestcollective
47 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/15/large-areas-of-london-to-be-made-car-free-as-lockdown-eased
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