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18 January 2017

Insight: The Child Ballads Redux

Resurrecting the lost songs


Andrew Robson Image: Andrew Robson  
© Natalie Boog

Andrew Robson writes about the genesis, over a couple of decades, of his major work The Child Ballads, inspired by a late 19th-century collection of English and Scottish ballads. Robson's The Child Ballads has just been released on CD and available via Birdland. A number of scores from The Child Ballads are now also available for purchase on the AMC website.

> More 'Insight' feature articles by the AMC's Represented and Associate artists (scoop.it).

Understanding the inner workings of my 'creative process' has always proved somewhat elusive. Indeed, the phrase itself has seemed slightly ironic; the word 'process' suggesting some kind of orderly procedure, which, if followed, will unfailingly reveal a fully formed work of art; in theory perhaps, but not in practice. When I compose, each new piece always seems to demand its own new 'process'. Some compositions reveal themselves in fits and starts while others tumble forth more or less fully formed (this, I regret to say, is rare!), but as I will describe, my most recent composition began life with a conversation and twenty years would then pass before I was finally able to describe the work as complete.

On 8 December 2016, I celebrated the launch of my most recent recording The Child Ballads with a performance of my new work at the Sound Lounge in Sydney. For this concert, as on the recording, I was joined on stage by vocalist Mara Kiek, guitarist Llew Kiek and double bassist Steve Elphick; I played alto and baritone saxophones.

For readers familiar with my music, the presence of a vocalist in the above line-up will have already alerted you to the fact that The Child Ballads is somewhat of a departure from almost all of my previous projects. Further distinguishing this work from previous projects is the twenty-year time span separating the initial idea from the finished product.

As an improviser and composer working primarily in the jazz idiom, I most often find myself composing for instrumental ensembles of which I am usually a member. I tend to write quickly, for musicians I know well, and my compositions are developed and honed onstage in real time before being subjected to and captured by the recording process. In contrast, The Child Ballads was an idea first sparked by conversation with Mara Kiek sometime around 1996.

Despite a lifelong interest in folk music, this was the first time I had been alerted to the existence of Francis James Child's iconic folksong collection The English and Scottish Popular ballads. At the time, Child's colossal five-volume collection was out of print, but my interest had been roused and the subsequent difficulty of locating a copy only added to the work's mystique. I remember frequently trawling the secondhand bookshops of Glebe and Newtown in Sydney in search of a copy. During this early stage, the creative process was driven by nothing more than a hunch or, rather, a series of them: I had an interest in folk music that stretched back to my childhood, and, at the time, I was working with the celebrated and enigmatic band leader, bassist and singer Jackie Orszaczky for whom the folk music of his native Hungary provided a foundational and orienting influence. Many of my musical heroes from Coltrane and Bartók to Kodály, Grainger and Britten had all successfully drawn on folksong in their music. I was convinced there was something to be found in Child's collection, but precisely what that was, and how it could be distilled into a new work, was to remain a mystery to me for almost two decades.

By 1998 I had located three of the five Child volumes during one of my many second-hand bookshop searches (possibly Gould's on King St in Newtown) and I was finally able to make a meaningful start on the project. With no real sense of how to proceed, or indeed where the project was headed, I began by reading each of the ballad texts that Child had so meticulously cataloged, and wrote a short synopsis of each in an effort to select the 'best' stories, an initial idea being to create a story arc for a longer composition or perhaps a suite.

With some notable exceptions1, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads brought together all of the English and Scottish folk ballads known at the time of publication2. In some ways Child's work is a kind of 'collection of collections' as Child relied in part on earlier folksong folios and collections, but his work was unquestionably the most comprehensive collection of folk ballad texts, and the final (5th) volume offers an almost unfathomably detailed list of source and reference materials.

Born in Boston in 1825, Francis James Child was an academic, teacher and folklorist. In 1876 he was appointed Professor of English at Harvard University, a post he held until his death in 1896. As a scholar of English language, Child's primary focus, when writing The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, was the ballad texts. The musical component - a not insubstantial ingredient in a folksong I would argue - makes only the most fleeting of appearances. In Child's defence, this attitude was very much in keeping with the ideas of the 19th century, and he was certainly not the only scholar or folksong collector to believe that the value of folksong was to be found almost exclusively in the words themselves. Indeed, the realisation that folksong comprises the inseparable combination of words and music is a relatively modern one. It was an attitude that first rose to prominence in England during the opening decade of the 20th century, and it was an approach championed by Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, George Butterworth and Percy Grainger, among others.

The invention of the phonograph3 and other progressively sophisticated devices helped to make this new approach possible as it allowed collectors to rely less on their own transcribing skills, which often left much to be desired. In addition to capturing folksongs in their entirety, sound recording also allowed for repeated listening of a single performance, facilitating detailed study and the making of highly accurate transcriptions.

Fast-forward a hundred years and I, too, was faced with the dilemma of what to do about this seeming dichotomy between the words and music in Child's collection. As a saxophonist, my compositional work to date had been predominantly instrumental, with two brief exceptions. The first was when vocalist and poet Michelle Morgan wrote words to two of my pieces for a collaborative concert a number of years ago, and the second an attempt to set a short Italian poem to music for a project with Llew and Mara Kiek. Writing lyrics myself has never been something I have been drawn to but, looking back, I think this was one of the underlying attractions and challenges offered by F J Child's work as it provided such a deep reservoir of inspiration.

I eventually located a complete copy of the Child collection at the State Library of NSW, allowing me, for the first time, to get a true sense of the size and scope of Child's magnum opus. Across the five volumes, the author sets out 305 distinct folk ballads. Within each of these, there are numerous other versions and variations that Child has linked to the main ballad. For example, the ballad Tam Lin (Child 39) offers 15 different versions of the ballad: version A contains 42 stanzas; version B contains 41 and so on. For each main ballad category (ballads 1-305) Child also provides a detailed history, including multiple connections to other folk traditions and additional source information.

Still unsure of how I could fashion a self-contained musical work from this vast quantity of material, progress again stagnated until two breakthroughs came in quick succession. The first was courtesy of a small publishing house in the United States who republished Child's complete work in 2001. This new corrected edition incorporated all of Child's own corrections and additions that had appeared in earlier facsimile editions as an appendix at the end of each volume. I was now able to complete my ballad outlines and hopefully find a way to push my new work forward.

The second breakthrough came with my discovery of the work of Bertrand Harris Bronson. Like Child, Bronson was an American academic who had also published an enormous multi-volume work of research on English and Scottish traditional ballads. However Bronson's work differed markedly from Child's in that its focus was entirely musical. Bronson sought to re-introduce the musical component to Child's earlier work as the book's title, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads makes clear. Published in four volumes between 1959 and 1972, Bronson attempted to reinstate the traditional melodies for all of the ballads in Child's collection, arguing that

'Ballads, as we have recognized, are songs, and the music that carries the words, and keeps them alive in tradition is an integral and ultimately inescapable half of the subject. Text and tune are interdependent and interactive.' (Bronson 1959, xviii - xix)

Of course, Bronson's undertaking was an impossible one and in the end he managed to supply musical material to slightly more than two thirds of Child's collection. Eventually it was to be these 'missing melodies' that would provide the way forward for my new work, but initially it seemed that I had simply unearthed a second mountain of source material and now I needed to somehow make sense of Bronson's work, too.

By 2008 several other creative projects had caused me to put the The Child Ballads to one side, however by this time I had managed to complete a synopsis for all 305 of the main ballads in Child's collection hoping that this process would miraculously reveal a way forward. It did not. And I was still faced with several dilemmas: would (or should) my work include words? If it didn't, in what sense would I be drawing on Child's work? Was this going to be a series of folksong arrangements? If this was to be my approach, how did it satisfy my desire to compose and play new music?

It was now more than twelve years since my conversation with Mara. I was more confident than ever that there was a significant project here, but I was still coming to terms with both Child and now Bronson's massive tomes4 and I was weighed down by the sheer volume of information. Moreover, I felt that I just didn't know anywhere enough about English and Scottish folksong to find a way through this material. In an oblique twist (if such a thing exists) my interest in the Child ballads was the catalyst that led me to embark on a PhD at the University of Sydney in 2012, and it was while writing my thesis that the thick fog that had always surrounded my attempts on Child's work finally began to lift. I won't offer up vast tracts of my dissertation in order to explain precisely how this happened (my thesis is available online for those of you who are interested), but suffice to say that I was finally able to settle on an approach.

Perhaps the safest and most obvious path would have been to bring both Child (words) and Bronson (tunes) together in a series of arrangements, but I had (thanks to my PhD), recently explored this very approach with another project and I was now looking for something else. Remembering that Bronson had been unable to locate traditional melodies for nearly one third of Child's original collection, I now saw an opportunity to embark on a kind of rescue mission. My take on The Child Ballads would focus entirely on the ballads for which Bronson was unable to locate a traditional tune. Without a melody, these ballads could no longer be sung and their stories no longer heard. So by setting these texts to new melodies, melodies that I would write, I would be providing the means by which these ballads could again be sung.

In The Traditional Tunes of The Child Ballads, Bronson begins his introduction with the slightly provocative opening:

Question: When is a ballad not a ballad?

Answer: When it has no tune?

Clearly, Bronson's faux-riddle could just as easily be answered with:

When it has no words.

And so I felt that my new work must contain both.

Often, the initial stages of a composition can simply be a process of limiting your options, creating a more manageable series of musical problems to solve. This tactic proved very much to be the case here. Because I was now focusing entirely on the ballads with the missing melodies I was able to cull more than two hundred ballads from Child's collection. Further, having decided that I would be setting the texts for a vocalist to sing, my new work was now more or less clearly defined, and while other practical issues did arise, progress from this point was relatively swift.

Having decided to compose all of the music for my Child Ballads project, I was now selecting ballads based entirely on the surviving texts as preserved by FJ Child. The length of the selected ballads would be an important consideration as some texts included many dozens of stanzas. Would, for example, a ballad 59 stanzas long be practical in performance - how could musical interest be sustained? The subject matter of each narrative was also important, as was the completeness of each text, as Child's volumes included space for the not infrequent missing lines of text.

By mid-2013, I had narrowed down the possible texts to a mere handful and, crucially, I had also decided on the musicians that I would ask to perform the work with me. With the clarity of hindsight, it seems rather strange to me now that so many aspects of this work remained unclear for so long. In the early days of this work, I made numerous lists of ideas for potential ensembles and instruments, although none suggested a way forward. But once I had decided to include the texts and write a vocal work, there was only ever one person I considered asking. I will readily confess to having goosebumps on hearing Mara sing these pieces for the first time.

Mara, Llew and Steve are three of my closest friends and colleagues and it is difficult to put into words the influence that all three of these wonderful musicians have had on me and my music. The Child Ballads draws on our combined experiences and it is very much a celebration of our shared musical worlds. Along with Steve, I had been a member of Mara and Llew's group The Mara Ensemble! for more than ten years, but I had left the group in the mid-2000s to pursue other projects. The Child Ballads became a musical reunion of sorts and, in addition, Mara's involvement provided a wonderful sense of resolution, as it was Mara with whom I had the initial conversation that provided the spark for the entire project - And yes, I have remembered to thank her!

The premiere performance of my completed song-cycle The Child Ballads took place on Saturday 30 August 2014 in Springwood in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. The performance was part of a concert series presented by 'Live at the Village'. The completed work contains eight ballads that tell stories of abduction, murder and an execution (a particularly nasty one), topics that have both terrified and enthralled us across the ages. As to the success of the project, well, you will have to judge that for yourself, but the process, long though it was, has certainly taught me the value of perseverance and of always keeping creative ideas - musical or otherwise - you never know where they might lead.

Notes

1 Child has been criticised for omitting some ballads, notably texts that he considered ribald or rude.

2 The publication dates of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads range between 1882 and 1898, as each volume was made available upon its completion.

3 The phonograph was an early device for recording sound onto wax cylinders. Operating more or less in the same way as a record player, the phonograph was able to record sound by scratching a groove into the soft wax of the interchangeable cylinders. The device was portable and therefore ideal for making field recordings of folk singers.

4 In 2009 Loomis House Press re-published Bronson's The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. This was the same publishing house who had previously published Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

References

Bronson, Bertrand Harris (1959) The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 volumes. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Child, Francis James (2001-2011) The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, corrected second edition, 5 vols. USA: Loomis House Press. Original edition 1882-1898.

Robson, Andrew (2015) Austral Jazz: A Practitioner's Perspective on the Local Remaking of a Global Musical Form, PhD thesis, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Accessible online.

Further links

Andrew Robson - AMC profile

Andrew Robson: The Child Ballads - album details on AMC Online - for purchases, go to Birdland Records.

For scores of individual songs, see the Child Ballads work page on AMC online.


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Fascinating

great to read about the long and winding road to this project Andrew!