19 June 2024 – Dr Sophie Louisa Bennett, PhD Conservation Biology (Lincoln 2016), MA Modern and Medieval Languages – German and Swedish (KC 1987, Cantab 2020)
Many have heard of the Lincolnshire Poacher, but who is familiar with A Lincolnshire Posy?
Who’d have thought it? You can travel from Lisbon to Rufford Park under an English heaven. Courtesy of Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961), who was born Australian but wrote music about the land and the county of his forebears. Like Vaughan Williams he was an avid collector of folk songs. “I regard the study of native music [makes me feel somewhat like he had been studying zoological specimens] and close association with folk-singers as the most fruitful experience in my creative career.” He worked hard to preserve the originality of folk songs by recording and taking notes of individual performances in their natural habitat.
Six of the songs Grainger collected on one of his ‘expeditions’ (I hope the natives were welcoming because they tend to be quite fierce at times.) are presented in A Lincolnshire Posy. The Posy was described by the composer as “a bunch of musical wild flowers.” A description I would more readily associate with Elgar or Vaughan Williams, but there is much to enjoy in this floral offering. Considered by Ray Crick to be Grainger’s masterpiece for bands, it displays “all his originality and colourful invention” (Crick, on the sleeve notes of a Past Times cassette recording of Under an English Heaven: A Treasury of Pastoral Music).
The opening song of the six is Lisbon and the Posy ends, as it should, with a last dance. I could even have saved myself the ‘bother’ of flying out to Portugal it seems by simply listening to a collection of songs from my native county ;-). And clearly either Grainger’s geography was not quite as accurate as he believed or Nottinghamshire has at some point stolen Rufford from us by a change in boundaries! Otherwise Greater Lincolnshire could have been much larger, it seems.
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