Austin Symphonic Band Performing Folk Song Suite for Military Band by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Austin Symphonic Band. February 1, 2020 concert at the Luis “Chico” Portillo Performing Arts Center in Austin TX. ASB performing Folk Song Suite for Military Band by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Music Director Richard Floyd conducting. Concert title: "Classics Old & New". Audio recording by On Site Digital, Randy Bryant owner.
I. March-Seventeen Come Sunday
II. Intermezzo-My Bonny Boy
III. March-Folk Songs from Somerset
From the program notes written by David Cross:
Folk Song Suite for Military Band (1923)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
I. March-Seventeen Come Sunday
II. Intermezzo-My Bonny Boy
III. March-Folk Songs from Somerset
At the turn of the twentieth century, with the invention of the portable recording machine, there was an increased interest in the utilization and preservation of folk music led by a number of European composers and musicologists such as Béla Bartók, Edvard Grieg, Zoltán Kodály, Percy Grainger, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Folk songs from the British Isles became particularly fruitful foundations for new compositions. The wind band has been a primary beneficiary of this English folk revival, with many masterworks composed in the first half of the twentieth century relying on these collected folk melodies.
The first movement, “March-Seventeen Come Sunday,” features the eponymous folk song (also set by Grainger and Holst) in British march style. The melody to “Seventeen Come Sunday” tells the story of a soldier enticing a pretty maid and serves as the first theme. It is followed by the contrasting, lyrical “Pretty Caroline,” where a sailor returns from war to his beloved. The third strain of the march is a full, marcato arrangement of “Dives and Lazarus,” a retelling of the Biblical story of a rich man and a beggar-a favorite subject of Vaughan Williams, who also wrote a set of orchestral variations on the melody. The march then returns to “Pretty Caroline” before restating “Seventeen Come Sunday” with a final fanfare.
Next follows a slow, haunting arrangement of “My Bonny Boy,” a painful song of unrequited love first sung by a solo oboe, and subsequently joined by other instrumental colors. Later, a beautiful, swirling arrangement of “Green Bushes,” another song of unanswered passion, enters in the woodwinds, before giving way again to the original theme.
The final movement of the suite, “March-Folk Songs from Somerset,” includes four songs, each presented as successive, contrasting themes in march style, all taken from the titular county on the southwestern peninsula of England. It begins with a light, jaunty melody entitled “Blow Away the Morning Dew,” also known traditionally as “The Baffled Knight,” which tells the story of a soldier enticed by a fair maiden, only
to be teasingly tricked at the last minute. The second folk song, perhaps providing an answer to the first, is a rousing war ballad dating from the War of the Spanish Succession entitled “High Germany,” where a soldier attempts to entice another fair maiden to accompany him to war on the Continent. The trio of the march, “The Tree So High,” tells the story of an arranged marriage between two children, in a conversation between the unhappy daughter and her father. This is answered by the famous tune, “John Barleycorn,” a tale of a knight battling, in some versions, a miller or a group of drunkards, all of whom want to “chop him down,” which can be interpreted as an allegorical telling of the events in the cultivation and harvesting of barley. Finally, the march repeats da capo, reprising the first two melodies before closing with a flourish.