Lake Charles community Band - English Folk Song Suite Movement 3 by Ralph Vaughan Williams

English Folk Song Suite Ralph Vaughan Williams
English Folk Song Suite is one of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams' most famous works. It was first published for the military band as Folk Song Suite and its premiere was given at Kneller Hall on 4 July 1923, The first movement is set as an English march, and is made up of three folk songs, I’m Seventeen Come Sunday, Pretty Caroline, and Dives and Lazarus. The first two folk songs deal with similar subject matter of military men falling in love with, and marrying, beautiful women. The styles of the two songs offset each other, the first is bouncy and jovial, the second legato and cantabile. The third folk song included in movement one is Dives and Lazarus. Lazarus repeatedly begs Dives, a rich man, for food but is denied. To portray the antagonism of the event, Vaughan Williams has set a firm duple meter melody in the low brass against a rigorous triple meter accompaniment in upper winds.
Both folk songs used in the Intermezzo deal with love betrayed, and Vaughan Williams’s keen sense of orchestration is on full display throughout this movement. My Bonny Boy begins the movement in a lonely F dorian with sparse accompaniment. The mood shifts slightly to the folk song Green Bushes set as a somewhat playful scherzando. The pace of this folk song belies the fact that the tonal center has remained F dorian, and thus never really feels happy or jovial.
The third movement, Folk Songs From Somerset, uses four different folk songs dealing loosely with unattainable love. Blow Away the Morning Dew, describes a country boy attempting to seduce a girl who quickly outwits him. The second folk song, High Germany, is about a young English woman’s lover and her three brothers being called off to war in Germany. Thirdly, Vaughan Williams modified a version of “The Trees They Do Grow High” which deals with a young woman who has been wed by her father to a much younger boy. The final folk song is John Barleycorn which is an allegory representing the harvesting of
barley, and the imbibing of its final form (beer and whisky). accompaniment in upper winds.