Malcolm Archer – Four Folksong Settings for Tenor or Soprano

British folk songs may be traced back to the Medieval period, though strictly speaking, folk music has existed since the arrival of Anglo-Saxon folk in about 400 AD. Folk songs have always been sung in rural communities with many regional variations and handed down orally over the centuries. Some were working songs sung by farmers and farmhands, probably in the ale house, while others may have been composed to accompany Morris dancing and for special festive occasions. A reference in William Langland’s Piers Plowman mentions ballads sung from the late fourteenth century about characters such as Robin Hood, and a collection of Robin Hood ballads was published around 1495.

In the sixteenth century, the spread of courtly music in the upper social classes and the increasing use of instruments affected folk music in other social groups, and instruments such as the pipe, tabor, bagpipe, shawm, hurdy-gurdy and crumhorn became popular.

In the twentieth century, there was an active folk song revival because a part of our musical and social heritage was seen to be in potential decline, and Cecil James Sharp (1859-1924) ––a serious collector of these folk melodies––amassed 4,977 tunes from England and North America. English folk melodies strongly influenced the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and he incorporated some of these into his compositions and hymn tunes in his edition of The English Hymnal (1906).

This collection’s four folk song settings are some of the best-known from the British Isles and contains original settings of Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill, The Ash Grove, O Waly Waly and The Foggy Foggy Dew.

Composer Malcolm Archer spent many years at the helm of Cathedral music in England, having been Organist and Director of Music at Bristol, Wells and St. Paul’s Cathedrals and Director of Chapel Music at Winchester College. He is a widely published composer of choral and instrumental works and receives frequent commissions for new material. Archer’s work as an organist, pianist and conductor has taken him to various parts of the world, and he is often invited to conduct his own works. As a piano accompanist, he works frequently with singers, and writing English song is something very close to his heart.