Episode 11. The Seeds of Love: Opus Anglicanum

SYNOPSIS

Cecil Sharp overheard Revd Charles Marson’s gardener John England singing I sowed the seeds of love at the Vicarage, Hambridge, Somerset in September 1903, and it became a seminal moment in the folksong collecting movement, 1903-1924. Comfortably distanced by class from the mainly elderly country people they sought out, Varsity-educated gentlemen, some with left-wing or Fabian sympathies, engaged in ‘rescue archaeology’, scouring the countryside to record traditional songs and dances which they feared were dying out.  Some tunes, with names like Kingsfold (‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’) and Monk’s Gate (‘He who would valiant be’) found their way into English hymnals.  Opus Anglicanum’s CD recording, The Seeds of Love, pays tribute to this movement.  The interview covers John Rowlands-Pritchard’s place in that tradition as professional choral singer at Ely Cathedral, dancer with the Cambridge Morris and witness to the Bampton Morris, which proves to be an epiphany.     

GUEST

John Rowlands-Pritchard is an engraver, director of Gregorian Chant workshops and founding/former member of the music group Opus Anglicanum, made up of singers from the cathedral choir tradition, who give performances of their own intriguing, story-telling sequences. These are carefully crafted, using narrated texts and unaccompanied sung music of all kinds. In 1998 they produced the CD recording, The Seeds of Love: Collecting English Folk Music which intersperses readings from the diaries, letters and writings of the Edwardian generation of collectors with choral arrangements of some well-known folk-songs and shanties. 

John’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded in Ditchling, Sussex on 29 November 2019.