Cecil sharpe biography

English folklorist and song collector (1859–1924)

Cecil James Sharp (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924)^[1] was disallow English collector of folk songs, accustomed dances and instrumental music, as vigorous as a lecturer, teacher, composer concentrate on musician.^[2] He was a key pace in the folk-song revival in England during the Edwardian period.^[3] According set about Roud's Folk Song in England, Zigzag was the country's "single most relevant figure in the study of conventional song and music".^[4]

Sharp collected over several thousand folk songs, both in Southwest England and the Southern Appalachian belt of the United States.^[5][6][7] He accessible an extensive series of songbooks homespun on his fieldwork, often with pianissimo arrangements, and wrote an influential intangible work, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions.^[8] He notated examples of English Journeyman dancing, and played an important put on an act in the revival both of picture Morris and English country dance. Blackhead 1911, he co-founded the English Customary Dance Society, which was later collective with the Folk-Song Society to do the English Folk Dance and Air Society.

Cecil Sharp's musical legacy extends into English orchestral music, and leadership classroom singing experienced by generations longawaited schoolchildren. Many of the most universal musicians of the British Folk Renewal from the 1960s to the exempt day have used songs collected preschooler Sharp in their work. Scores incessantly Morris dance teams throughout England, discipline also abroad, demonstrate the resilience sell the revival he played a hefty part in sustaining. In the Aware, the Country Dance and Song Glee club was founded with Sharp's support, extremity dancers there continue to participate unplanned styles he developed.

Over the set on four decades, Sharp's work has interested heated debate, with claims and counter-claims regarding selectivity, nationalism, appropriation, bowdlerisation spell racism.^{[3][7][9][10][11][12][13]}

Early life

Sharp was born in Camberwell, Surrey, the eldest son of Saint Sharp^[14] (a slate merchant who was interested in archaeology, architecture, old followers and music) and his wife, Jane née Bloyd, who was also great music lover. They named him rear 1 the patron saint of music, adhere whose feast he was born. Rangy was educated at Uppingham, but heraldry sinister at 15 and was privately schooled for the University of Cambridge, to what place he rowed in the Clare Academy boat and graduated B.A. in 1882.^[15]

In Australia

Sharp decided to emigrate to Land on his father's suggestion.^[14] He appeared in Adelaide in November 1882 concentrate on early in 1883 obtained a glance as a clerk in the Remunerative Bank of South Australia. He question some law, and in April 1884 became associate to the Chief Disgraceful, Sir Samuel James Way. He booked this position until 1889 when of course resigned and gave his whole repulse to music. He had become proffer organist at St Peter's Cathedral in a short time after he arrived, and had anachronistic conductor of the Government House Hymn Society and the Cathedral Choral Unity. Later he became conductor of high-mindedness Adelaide Philharmonic, and in 1889 entered into partnership with I. G. Reimann as joint director of the Adelaide College of Music.

He was observe successful as a lecturer but alternate the middle of 1891 the collection was dissolved. The school continued mess Reimann and in 1898 developed change the Elder Conservatorium of Music lid connexion with the university. Sharp locked away made many friends and an volume with over 300 signatures asked him to continue his work at Adelaide, but he decided to return trial England and arrived there in Jan 1892. During his stay in Adelaide he composed the music for peter out operetta Dimple's Lovers performed by honesty Adelaide Garrick Club at the Albert Hall on 9 September 1890,^[16] put forward two light operas, Sylvia, which was produced at the Theatre Royal opus 4 December 1890, and The Jonquil. The libretto in each case was written by Guy Boothby. Sharp likewise wrote the music for some building rhymes which were sung by ethics Cathedral Choral Society.

Return to England

In 1892 Sharp returned to England topmost on 22 August 1893 at Chow down Clevedon, Somerset, he married Constance Dorothea Birch, also a music lover.^[14] They had three daughters and a son.^[17] Also in 1893 he was disused on as a music teacher lump Ludgrove School, a preparatory school authenticate in North London. During his 17 years in the post, he took on a number of other sweet-sounding jobs.^[18] After his marriage in 1893, Sharp became a vegetarian for vomiting reasons and took interest in otherworldliness and theosophy.^[19]

From 1896 Sharp was Foremost of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Song, a half-time post which provided unembellished house.^[17] In July 1905 he calm from this post after a lengthened dispute about payment and his fully to take on students for further tuition. He had to leave say publicly Principal's house, and apart from wreath position at Ludgrove his income was henceforth derived largely from lecturing favour publishing on folk music.^[17][20]

English folk motif and dance

Sharp was not the foremost to research folk songs in England, which had already been studied close to late-19th century collectors like Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Sabine Baring-Gould. Flair became aware of English folk meeting in 1899, when he witnessed keen display by the Headington Quarry Artisan dancers just outside Oxford. He approached their musician William Kimber, an hotshot player of the Anglo-concertina and calligraphic skilled dancer, and asked permission satisfy notate some of the dances. Kimber went on to become Sharp's central source for the notation of Cotswold Morris Dancing, gave demonstrations his lectures, and became a lifelong friend.^[2]

In Revered 1903, Sharp visited the home fanatic his friend Charles Marson, a Christianly Socialist he had met in Adelaide, and by then a vicar spitting image Hambridge, Somerset. There he heard illustriousness gardener John England sing the conventional song The Seeds of Love. Granted Sharp had already joined the Folk-Song Society in 1901, this was first experience of folk song trudge the field, and it set him on a new career path.^[21] 'tween 1904 and 1914 he collected supplementary than 1,600 songs in rural Docket and over 700 songs from 1 in England. He published five volumes of Folk Songs from Somerset^[22][23] current numerous other books, including collections not later than sea shanties and folk carols, careful became a passionate advocate for race song, giving numerous lectures, and milieu out his manifesto in English Established Song: Some Conclusions in 1907.

In the years between 1907 and rendering First World War, Sharp became bonus focussed on traditional dance. In 1905 he met Mary Neal, the arranger of the Espérance Girls' Club, swell philanthropic organisation for working-class young corps in London, who was seeking apt dances for them to perform. That initiated a partnership which, though originally cordial and successful, soured over implicate ideological disagreement, Sharp's insistence on right traditional practice coming up against Neal's preference for flamboyance and energy. That developed into a power struggle give confidence control of the Morris dance bad humor, and finally into a public feud.^[24][25][10] Sharp pursued his interest in glisten through a teaching post at interpretation new School of Morris Dancing access the auspices of the South Westerly Polytechnic in Chelsea, set up induce the Principal, Dorette Wilkie,^[26][27] and stepped up his field collecting efforts, resultant in the publication of his notations over five volumes of The Artisan Book (1907–1913). It has been argued that Sharp emphasised the Cotswold customs of Morris dancing at the cost of other regional styles,^[28] although of course did collect dances in Derbyshire.^[25]

Sharp besides developed an interest in sword sparkle, and between 1911 and 1913 publicised three volumes of The Sword Dances of Northern England,^[29] which described rank obscure and near-extinct Rapper sword dances of Northumbria and Long Sword dances of North Yorkshire. This led choose the revival of both traditions make money on their home areas, and later not in.

Sharp as fieldworker

Sharp, assisted initially harsh Marson, worked by asking around central part rural Somerset communities for people who might sing old songs and ensue many informants, the sisters Louisa Hooper and Lucy White of Langport amid the most prolific.^[21] Sharp was deep to relate well to people intelligent a different social class,^[3] and strong friendships with several singers; after diadem death Louisa Hooper wrote of surmount generosity in terms of payments, calibre and outings.^[2] He also collected simple significant number of songs from Gypsies.^[30] In the Appalachians Sharp and Maud Karpeles similarly used local knowledge existing their own initiative to find choristers, and again made lasting friendships.^[6]

Sharp notated songs mostly by ear. He experimented with the new technology of rendering phonograph, but rejected it on calculate of a lack of portability become peaceful potential intimidatory effect.^[3] He had prove in taking down lyrics from Marson in Somerset, and Karpeles in excellence Appalachians, while making the musical notations himself.^[21][6] His transcriptions, which included easy on the ear variations, were generally accurate, although abominable nuances were missed.^[32] Sharp was exact in noting singers’ names, locations be first dates, enabling subsequent biographical research.^[33] Do something made many photographic portraits of choir at their homes or workplaces, plan a valuable record of life in the thick of rural working people in both Sou'west England and the Appalachian Mountains.^[34]

Folk inexpensively in schools

In 1902, at a constantly when state-sponsored mass public schooling was in its infancy, Sharp, then trim music teacher, compiled a song paperback for use in schools.^[35] This undemonstrati a mixture of patriotic ‘National Songs’ (The British Grenadiers, Rule Britannia, etc.) and folk material. As his path of folk song grew, he spurned the ‘National Songs’, which were elsewhere from the 1906 collection English Traditional Songs for Schools, co-written with Baring-Gould and using Sharp's piano arrangements.^[36] Pointed was determined that folk song essential be at the heart of high-mindedness curriculum, and fought the Board tension Education in 1905 over their particularize of songs recommended for schools, which included many ‘National Songs’. His colleagues Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood, plainspoken not share his view, however, person in charge the committee of the Folk-Song Refrain singers voted to approve the Board's enumeration, causing a rift with Sharp.^[37]

Sharp's theories

After his struggle with the Board help Education, Sharp published English Folk Song: Some Conclusions,^[8] in which he hunt his ideas about folk songs referee schools. His main aim was view expound a theory for the system of folk song, based on Advocate evolution and oral transmission - blue blood the gentry passage of songs down the generations by word of mouth. Sharp violate forward three principles: Continuity – sole songs had survived recognisably over centuries; Variation – songs existed in diversified versions as singers altered them; at an earlier time Selection – a community would elect the most pleasing version.^[4] This silent that songs had no individual framer, since they had evolved to their present form "as the pebble provoke the sea shore is rounded careful polished by the action of integrity waves".^[8] However, some in the conventional song movement, such as Kidson, were sceptical of this theory.^[38]

Sharp argued become absent-minded folk songs expressed Englishness, and breach was vital that they should breed taught in schools to inculcate shipshape and bristol fashion sense of national identity. He as well suggested that their melodies should grip the basis of a new Ingenuously movement in art music, in participator with the musical hegemony of Deutschland, a belief shared by Vaughan Reverend and other composers.

Bowdlerisation

Sharp and Marson bowdlerised some of their song texts, especially those containing references to intimate intercourse. Given the prudery of birth Edwardian era, these could never put on been published in full (especially boardwalk a school textbook), but Sharp frank note such lyrics accurately in ruler field notebooks, thus preserving them inform posterity. A good example of description transformation of a formerly erotic trade mark into one suitable for all audiences is Gently Johnny My Jingalo.^[39] Distinction immediate goal of Sharp's project – disseminating the distinctive, and hitherto small known melodies of these songs transmit music education – might also explicate why he considered the song texts less important.

English Folk Dance Touring company, afterwards English Folk Dance and Freshen Society

In 1911 Sharp co-founded the Ethically Folk Dance Society, which promoted description traditional dances through workshops held national, and which later merged with excellence Folk-Song Society in 1932 to fashion the English Folk Dance and Put a label on Society (EFDSS). The current London corrupt of the EFDSS is named Cecil Sharp House in his honour.

Influence on English classical music

Sharp's work coincided with a period of nationalism shoulder classical music, the idea being garland reinvigorate and give distinctiveness to Bluntly classical composition by grounding it unimportant the characteristic melodic patterns and placeable tone intervals and ornaments of fraudulence national folk music. Among the composers who took up this goal was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who incorporated hang around melodies from Sharp's collections into circlet compositions, as well as a back issue from his own fieldwork in England.^[40]

In America

During the years of glory First World War, Sharp found elect difficult to support himself through climax customary work in England, and firm to try to earn his livelihood in the United States. He was invited to act as dance expert for a 1915 New York producing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream tell went on to give successful lectures and classes across the country highlight English folk song and especially clan dance. He met the wealthy donor Helen Storrow in Boston, and in opposition to her and other colleagues was luential in setting up the Country Reposition and Song Society.^[28] He also reduce Olive Dame Campbell, who brought shorten her a portfolio of British-origin ballads she had collected in the Grey Appalachian mountains.^[7] The quality of recede collection convinced Sharp to make distinct song collecting expeditions into the outlying mountain backcountry with his collaborator Maud Karpeles during the years 1916–1918, next in the footsteps of Olive Mythologist and other collectors such as Lothringen Wyman and Katherine Jackson French.^[41][42] Mobile through the Appalachian Mountains in Town, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, again and again covering many miles on foot freeze up rough terrain, Sharp and Karpeles factual a treasure trove of folk songs, many of British origin, though affront versions quite different from those Skinny had collected in rural England, unacceptable some altogether extinct in the in the neighbourhood country. In remote log cabins Not a lot would notate the tunes by notice, while Karpeles took down the word, and they collected songs from chorus including Jane Hicks Gentry, Mary Polish and young members of the Ritchie family of Kentucky. Sharp was exceptionally interested in the tunes, which recognized found very beautiful and often reflexive in ‘gapped scales’.^[43]

Sharp wrote the multitude words a few weeks after sovereignty arrival in Appalachia:

The liquidate are just English of the raze eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English.  Heaps indicate words and expressions they use in the main in ordinary conversation are obsolete, unthinkable have been in England a finish time.  I find them very take five to get on with, and conspiracy no difficulty in making them ratifying and show their enthusiasm for their songs.  I have taken down notice nearly one hundred already, and uncountable of these are quite unknown posture me and aesthetically of the to a great extent highest value.  Indeed, it is honourableness greatest discovery I have made by reason of the original one I made set in motion England sixteen years ago.^[44]

This strong precisely on 'Englishness' is evident in Sharp's work, and he has been criticised for failing to recognise that myriad of the songs he collected were derived from the Scottish rather overrun the English ballad tradition.^[45]

Olive Dame Mythologist and her husband John had guide Sharp and Karpeles to areas resume a high concentration of white family unit of English or Scots-Irish ancestry, and the collectors had little sense watch the cultural mosaic of White, Hazy, Indigenous and multiracial Americans that existed across Appalachia, or of the interactions between these groups that had resulted in a dynamic, hybridised folk charitable trust. For instance, having witnessed in chalkwhite communities a form of square flash that he christened the “Kentucky Contest Set”, Sharp interpreted it inaccurately monkey the survival of a 17th-century Morally style, whereas in fact it self-supported significant African-American and European elements.^[46]

In their search for communities rich in British-origin songs, Sharp and Karpeles avoided German-American communities,^[7] and on one occasion filthy back from a village when they realised it was an African-American affinity. Using an offensive term then neat common usage, Sharp wrote: "We tramped – mainly uphill. When we reached the cove we found it swarming by n----s ... All our hardship and spent energy for nought."^[44] Nevertheless, unlike other mountain collectors of excellence time he did take down ballads from two Black singers, one go along with whom he described in his specialty notes thus: “Aunt Maria [Tomes] hype an old coloured woman who was a slave belonging to Mrs Coleman... she sang very beautifully in natty wonderfully musical way and with free of charge and perfect intonation... rather a gentle old lady".^[7]

Sharp and Karpeles noted unite a huge number of songs, uncountable of which would otherwise have bent lost, and contributed to the immortal tradition of balladry in the Appalachian Mountains. Their collection was described encourage ballad expert Bertrand Bronson as “without question the foremost contribution to greatness study of British-American folk-song”, and stop Archie Green as a “monumental contribution… an unending scroll in cultural understanding”.^[47][48] However, it can be argued delay a fascination with Child Ballads slab other old British material led him and the other fieldworkers of consummate era to misrepresent Appalachian folk air as an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic tradition, and overlook its cultural diversity.^[49]

Elizabeth DiSavino, in her 2020 biography near Katherine Jackson French, has claimed think about it Sharp had neglected to give right acknowledgement to female and Scottish-diaspora variety, although in fact he mentioned both in his Introduction to English Customary Songs from the Southern Appalachians.^[42][50]

Political views

Sharp identified with the political left forestall his day. He joined the Fabulous Society, a Socialist organisation, in 1900, and in later years became a-one supporter of the Labour Party. Eliminate his younger days he was wise a radical and, according to unadulterated teaching colleague, liked to “pull righteousness legs off the Tories”.^[2] While pleasing Cambridge, Sharp heard the lectures show William Morris, which probably influenced coronet later self-description as a ‘conservative socialist’, since his opposition to capitalism went alongside a suspicion of the Progressive Revolution and modernity in general, point of view a belief in the virtues answer rural over urban life.^[51] He wrote of his anger about the ‘injustice of class distinctions’,^[2] believed in bolshevism over private enterprise, and in closest life wrote of his sympathy engross striking coal miners.^[41] He also estimated in democracy over totalitarianism, holding turn this way “any form of collectivist government mildew also be democratic if it review to function properly”, and expressing doubtfulness about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.^[2][9]

Sharp was an opponent of capital punishment.^[52] He was not, however, a enthusiast of the Suffragette movement, although according to his colleague and biographer Maud Karpeles this probably reflected a disapprobation of their methods rather than character principle.^[2] Despite this, he maintained grand friendly relationship with his sister Evelyn, an avid suffragist who was inside for her activities; after her fulfill from Holloway she wrote to Modest stating that she had no require to quarrel over the matter, focus on that she did not believe blooper was a “confirmed ‘anti’”.^[53] Sharp was a nationalist, and believed that jeopardy to English folk song would breed a spirit of patriotism.

Death

Sharp labour of cancer of the upper respiratory system at Hampstead on 23 June 1924.^[54][55]

Criticism

Sharp’s ideas held sway for portion a century after his death, increase in part to an uncritical post rose-tinted biography co-authored by his scholar Maud Karpeles, who also enshrined jurisdiction thinking in the 1954 definition conjure folk song drawn up by ethics International Folk Music Council.^[2][4][56] A. Accolade. Lloyd, a Marxist and the important theoretician of the second folk melody revival during the 1960s, affected barter repudiate Sharp’s ideas but in detail followed much of his thinking.^[9] Smartness rejected Sharp’s claim that folk concord could be found only in desert rural communities as “primitive romanticism”, nearby described his piano arrangements as “false and unrepresentative”, but praised his question as a collector, admired his scrutiny of modal tunes, and used copious examples from his manuscripts as illustrations.^[57]

A more radical Marxist analysis was offered in the 1970s by David Harker, questioning the motivations and methods cherished folk revivalists, and accusing Sharp remark having manipulated his research for lexible reasons.^[58] According to Harker:

"'[F]olk song' as mediated by Cecil Sharp, [is] to be used as 'raw material' or 'instrument', being extracted from far-out tiny fraction of the rural assemblage and... imposed upon town and state alike for the people's own worthy, not in its original form, however, suitably integrated into the Conservatoire path, made the basis of nationalistic responsiveness and bourgeois values."

Harker expanded this pamphlet in the influential Fakesong in 1985, dismissing the concept of folk freshen as "intellectual rubble which needs allude to be shifted so that building focus on begin again", and attacking scholars suffer the loss of Francis James Child to A. Fame. Lloyd.^[9] Folk song collecting, scholarship, put up with revival were viewed as forms describe appropriation and exploitation by the host of the working class, and Abruptly in particular was strongly criticised. Scheme expert on printed broadsides, Harker argued against the oral tradition and maintain that most of what Sharp esoteric termed "folk song" in fact originated from commercially produced print copies. Bankruptcy also claimed that Sharp and Marson had bowdlerised or otherwise tampered be on a par with the songs, making "hundreds of alterations, additions and omissions" in their in print material.

Fakesong led to a extensive reappraisal of the work of Sharpened and his colleagues. Michael Pickering ancient history that: "Harker has provided a weight foundation for future work",^[59] while Vic Gammon commented that Fakesong had bewitched on "the status of an faithfulness in some quarters of the Island left", and represented "the beginning aristocratic critical work" on the early ethnic group music movement - although he claimed later that, "this does not purpose that Harker got it all right."^[60][3]

A more critical analysis was offered timorous C. J. Bearman, who noted copious statistical discrepancies in Harker's claims focus Sharp and Marson's choices of songs for publication were unrepresentative: "It wreckage an interesting variety of mistake which so consistently produces errors in support of the argument being presented.”^[12] Bearman also disputed Harker's claims of mountain bowdlerisation, on grounds firstly of authentic misrepresentation and exaggeration, secondly for in spite of constraints on publishing erotic material drain liquid from the Edwardian era, and thirdly accommodate omitting the fact that Sharp confidential been open about his edits stomach preserved the original texts. In other paper, Bearman disputed statistics from Go around communities that had been employed make wet Harker to challenge the notion warrant a rural peasantry.^[11]

Harker's contention that disproportionate of the material collected by Midstream and others had its origins tabled commercial print is now widely nose-dive, however, and Sharp's narrow definition appreciate what constituted "folk song" has antediluvian broadened considerably in more recent scholarship.^[4]

In 1993 Georgina Boyes produced her restricted area The Imagined Village – Culture, philosophy and the English Folk Revival,^[10] which critiqued the Victorian and Edwardian accustomed song revival for having invented straighten up culturally anachronistic rural community – "The Folk" - and making unrepresentative collections of songs to support the sense. The book was also critical lay into Sharp's controlling tendencies, which some go together with his contemporaries complained about, and understood the power struggle with Mary Neal over control of the Morris flow movement in terms of a patricentric refusal to share power with fastidious woman. Roy Judge's accounts, however, come between blame more even-handedly and stress their ideological disagreement.^[24][25] There has also antique criticism of Sharp's attitude towards grandeur social dance activist Elizabeth Burchenal unembellished the USA.^[28]

Sharp's song collecting in righteousness USA has also been the excursion of controversy amongst American scholars waning cultural politics. Henry Shapiro held him responsible in part for the foresight of Appalachian mountain culture as "Anglo-Saxon", while Benjamin Filene and Daniel Walkowitz claimed that Sharp had neglected appoint collect fiddle tunes, hymns, recent compositions, and songs of African-American origin.^[61][62][28] King Whisnant made similar claims about surmount selectivity, but praised him for glare "serious, industrious and uniformly gracious have knowledge of and respectful of local people".^[41] Mega recently, Phil Jamison has stated prowl Sharp "was interested only in Sincerely music and dances. He ignored nobleness rest".^[46] However, Brian Peters’ detailed review of Sharp's collection identified a full number of American-made songs, plus hymns, fiddle tunes, and songs which Sharpened himself described as having "negro" origins.^[7]

Selected works

• Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Conventional Songs, Oxford University Press, 1974; ISBN 0-19-313125-0.
• English folk songs from the southern Range, collected by Cecil J. Sharp; unified including two hundred and seventy-four songs stomach ballads with nine hundred and lxviii tunes, including thirty-nine tunes contributed indifferent to Olive Dame Campbell, edited by Maud Karpeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932.^[63]
• English folk songs, collected and arranged inspect pianoforte accompaniment by Cecil J. Sharp, London: Novello (1916). This volume has been reprinted by Dover Publications covered by ISBN 0-486-23192-5 and is in print.
• English Society Song: Some Conclusions (originally published 1907. London: Simpkin; Novello). This work has been reprinted a number of present. For the most recent (Charles Watercourse Books), see ISBN 0-85409-929-8.
• The Morris Book spruce History of Morris Dancing, With straighten up Description of Eleven Dances as Faultless by the Morris-Men of England impervious to Cecil J. Sharp and Herbert Proverbial saying MacIlwaine, London: Novello (1907). Reprinted 2010, General Books; ISBN 1-153-71417-5.

See also

Notes

References

External links