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User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
giles earle Recordings of Shallow Brown? (59* d) RE: Recordings of Shallow Brown? 08 Oct 09


As I recall it, the Grainger arrangement has quite different words:

Shaller Brown, you're goin' ter leave me,
Shaller, Shaller Brown;
Shaller Brown, you're goin' ter leave me,
Shaller, Shaller Brown.

Shaller Brown, don't ne'er deceive me,
        etc

You're goin' away accrost the ocean,
        etc

You'll ever be my heart's devotion,
        etc

For your return my heart is burning,
        etc

Shaller Brown, you're goin' ter leave me,
        etc

I have Robin Doveton's old recording from the 1970s. I know purists will carp mightily at the notion of a trained ex-choral scholar tenor singing folksongs to piano accompaniment (with rhapsodic violin as well, in some of RVW's more OTT efforts), but I must say I think he makes a good job of it all, not least because it sticks out a mile that he really does love what he's singing.

Grainger did not, of course, collect his songs as a dry archive. His scores make some attempt to reflect the actual performance he recorded: even more so than, say, Jack Moeran's work, as another early-ish collector who reckoned the actual details to matter. The following paragraph is pinched from http://www.percygrainger.org/biograf4.htm --

Many of the vocal versions of folk songs include a piano part which reinforces rather than dilutes authenticity, since the piano invokes the composer's intrepid presence. Just as the chromaticism of the slow settings is renewal as well as nostalgia, so the energy of the piano part in the quick songs, working in conjunction with or in opposition to the voices, reanimates the spontaneity of the originals in terms appropriate to us. In this way the version of Six dukes went afishing, for instance, becomes modern music: not to mention the magnificent, scarily thrilling version of Shaller Brown, with the notorious tremolo accompaniment, in playing which Grainger used almost to swoon in self-intoxication. The melodrama inherent in the old tale is re-enacted as we listen, for this is no longer concert music but, strictly speaking, a Making New valid for us now, as it had been for them then. This bears on Grainger's attitude to folk-song collection, which for him was not an archaeological pursu it, as it was (he believed) for genteel Cecil Sharp. The genuine folk-song collector should attempt to record the music as it sounded, since its distonations of pitch and irregularities of rhythm were intrinsic. Nowadays, most people accept this and, with the advent of magnetic tape, there is no longer a technical problem. Even so, the significance of Grainger's stand at the time can hardly be over-estimated; the finest tribute one can pay to his arrangements is to recognise that they provide substitutes for, if not equivalents to, the 'careless rapture' of folk performance.

So there you have it


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