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Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC was an English composer who was best known for the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and his song settings of A. E. Housman's poems from A Shropshire Lad.
"John Barleycorn" is an English and Scottish folk song listed as number 164 in the Roud Folk Song Index. John Barleycorn, the eponymous protagonist, is a personification of barley and of the alcoholic beverages made from it: beer and whisky. In the song, he suffers indignities, attacks and death that correspond to the various stages of barley cultivation, such as reaping and malting.
A vagabond is a person who wanders from place to place without a permanent home or regular work.
"This Be The Verse" is a lyric poem in three verses of long measure with an alternating rhyme scheme, by the English poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985). It was written around April 1971, first published in the August 1971 issue of New Humanist, and appeared in the 1974 collection High Windows.
Fredegond Cecily Shove was an English poet. Two collections of her poetry were published in her lifetime, and a small selection also appeared after her death.
Martha Wainwright is the self-titled debut album of Montreal singer Martha Wainwright, released on April 12, 2005. The album received generally favourable reviews.
"O Little Town of Bethlehem" is a Christmas carol. Based on an 1868 text written by Phillips Brooks, the carol is popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but to different tunes: in North America to "St. Louis" by Brooks' collaborator, Lewis Redner; and in the United Kingdom and Ireland to "Forest Green", a tune collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams and first published in the 1906 English Hymnal.
Songs of Travel is a song cycle of nine songs originally written for baritone voice composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with poems drawn from the Robert Louis Stevenson collection Songs of Travel and Other Verses. A complete performance of the entire cycle lasts between 20 and 24 minutes.
Flos Campi: suite for solo viola, small chorus and small orchestra is a composition by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, completed in 1925. Its title is Latin for "flower of the field". It is neither a concerto nor a choral piece, although it prominently features the viola and a wordless choir. The piece is divided into six movements, played without pause, each headed by a verse from the Song of Solomon:
- Sicut Lilium inter spinas (Lento)
- Jam enim hiems transiit
- Quaesivi quem diligit anima mea
- En lectulum Salomonis
- Revertere, revertere Sulamitis!
- Pone me ut signaculum
"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" is a Christian hymn written by the pastor and hymnodist Robert Robinson, who penned the words in the year 1758 at the age of 22.
The Five Mystical Songs are a musical composition by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), written between 1906 and 1911. The work sets four poems by seventeenth-century Welsh-born English poet and Anglican priest George Herbert (1593–1633), from his 1633 collection The Temple: Sacred Poems. While Herbert was a priest, Vaughan Williams himself was an atheist at the time, though this did not prevent his setting of verse of an overtly religious inspiration. The work received its first performance on 14 September 1911, at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester, with Vaughan Williams conducting.
James Campbell McInnes was a well-known English baritone singer and teacher at the turn of the 20th century, ex-husband of author Angela Thirkell and father of writer Colin MacInnes.
The song "All Around my Hat" is of nineteenth-century English origin. In an early version, dating from the 1820s, a Cockney costermonger vowed to be true to his fiancée, who had been sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia for theft and to mourn his loss of her by wearing green willow sprigs in his hatband for "a twelve-month and a day", the willow being a traditional symbol of mourning. The song was made famous by Steeleye Span in 1975, whose rendition may have been based on a more traditional version sung by John Langstaff.
Three Shakespeare Songs is a piece of classical choral music written for an a cappella SATB choir. It was written in 1951 by the British classical composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. The work comprises three short pieces which are settings of text from two plays by the English playwright William Shakespeare. It is published by Oxford University Press.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the "songs" in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology describes the poem as "one of the most Virgilian of Tennyson's poems and perhaps his most famous lyric". Readers often overlook the poem's blank verse—the poem does not rhyme.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses is an 1896 book of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson. Originally published by Chatto & Windus, it explores the author's perennial themes of travel and adventure. The work gained a new public and popularity when it was set to music in Songs of Travel by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Ralph Vaughan Williams' Four Last Songs cycle is made up of four songs: "Procris", "Tired", "Hands, Eyes, and Heart", and "Menelaus". All of the songs were composed between 1954 and 1958. The cycle is best suited for mezzo-soprano, although, the original program note from the cycle's 1959 premiere acknowledges that all of the songs may be sung by a baritone, except for "Hands, Eyes, and Heart", "which is a woman's song." It is suggested that the four songs were originally intended to be two separate song cycles with "Menelaus" and "Procris" belonging to one cycle and "Tired" and "Hands, Eyes, and Heart" belonging to another. However, there is debate in the scholarly community about this proposed song cycle grouping. Renée Chérie Clark in her essay, "A Critical Appraisal of Four Last Songs" suggests, citing a letter from the composer to a friend at Cornell University, that Vaughan Williams actually intended for "Menelaus" and "Hands, Eyes, and Heart" to be grouped together. The composer's death in 1958 left both cycles unfinished, and in 1960, they were assembled by the composer's widow, Ursula Vaughan Williams, and published as set by Oxford University Press. The texts of all four songs are poems written by Vaughan Williams' wife Ursula who penned several books of poetry throughout her lifetime as well as a biography of her late husband. "Procris" and "Menelaus" deal with figures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology and epic poetry while "Tired" and "Hands, Eyes, and Heart" depict images of love between a husband and wife.
