Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was an influential British composer and folk-song collector. His powerful and expressive orchestral music is notable for its very “English” sound. His early adventures collecting folk songs in the English countryside profoundly influenced his later compositions. Along with Gustav Holst and Percy Grainger, his works for wind band form a foundation for the serious literature in that medium.
The English Folk Song Suite is one of those foundational works. It was written in 1923 and premiered at Kneller Hall, home of Britain’s finest military music academy. It uses as its source material several English folks songs. It is cast in 3 movements: a “March” subtitled “Seventeen Come Sunday”; an “Intermezzo” on “My Bonny Boy”; and another “March” subtitled “Folk Songs from Somerset”, which incorporates several different tunes. A good summary of the movements and the folk songs involved in each is available at Wikipedia. The original composition also included a fourth movement, Sea Songs, which Vaughan Williams later decided to publish separately. While the English Folk Song Suite is a cornerstone of the wind band repertoire, it is not fully demonstrative of Vaughan Williams’s compositional powers. Only the “Intermezzo” approaches the harmonic daring and lyricism that mark the rest of his work. The remainder of the piece is a fairly straightforward, faithful setting of the folk songs.
See more about the Suite at the Wind Repertory Project, Classic FM, and IMSLP.
A chapter on British wind band music from an online History of the Wind Band by Dr. Stephen L. Rhodes. Vaughan Williams and the English Folk Song Suite feature prominently.
The Eastman Wind Orchestra plays each movement:
Now some of the original material! Here is “Seventeen Come Sunday,” which opens the first movement:
The lyrical clarinet melody comes from “Pretty Caroline,” presented here in a 1908 phonograph recording:
The low brass take over for “Dives and Lazarus,” shown here in a modern folk performance:
The second movement begins with “My Bonny Boy,” given here (slightly different than Vaughan Williams’s version) for unaccompanied voice:
The middle section of the second movement features “Green Bushes“:
The third movement begins with “Blow Away the Morning Dew“:
Followed by “High Germany”:
Then, in the 6/8 section, “Whistle, Daughter, Whistle“:
Finally, before the da capo that ends the movement, “John Barleycorn” gets a turn:
The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society – the source for anything you might ever possibly want to know about the composer.