In an article published in 1940 Benjamin Britten identified his attraction to English folk songs: "the sweetness of the melodies, the close connection between the words and music, and the quiet uneventful charm of the atmosphere." These same characteristics proved problematic for Britten as well, however, and many tunes lacked "any striking rhythms or memorable melodic features. Like much of the English countryside they creep into the affections rather than take them by storm." The Eight Folk Song Arrangements from 1976, completed just prior to the composer's death in the same year, demonstrate the wit and skill with which Britten, by the end of his career, had learned to address the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the folk music sources from which he had frequently drawn.

The eight songs stand as the last of several folk song collections composed by Britten between the mid-1940s and the end of his life; they demonstrate both Britten's admiration of Percy Grainger and his quirky sense of national identity. During a stay in the United States in the 1940s, Britten described nationalism as "an anachronistic irrelevance"; accordingly, his arrangements do not seek to evoke ethnic identity by concertizing old material so much as to conceive, using new musical methods, the energy and spirit that the original words and melodies would have once held. His choice of performance forces in this collection serve just such an end: the songs are scored for solo voice and harp, the latter providing highly gestural and sometimes stylized accompanimental material that alternately supports and subverts, elucidates and obfuscates, the text and melody of the former. In "The False Knight Upon the Road," for example, the harp switches between accompanimental flourish and simple melodic doubling in order to articulate the grammatical delivery of the narrative, while during the second verse of "She's Like a Swallow," a haunting countermelody emerges from the otherwise static chordal patterns.

The Eight Songs hail from various locales on both sides of the Atlantic. The collection begins with "Lord! I Married Me a wife," a comically concise ballad of a henpecked husband which Britten found, along with the aforementioned "False Knight," in a book of songs gathered from the southern Appalachia. (Many English folk song traditions that disappeared in Britain were preserved by descendants of English settlers in rural Appalachia). Two of the songs—the plaintive "I Was Lonely and Forlorn," and the mournful "David of the White Rock"—hail from Welsh sources. An English source provides what is perhaps the most distinctive tune in the collection: in the "Bird Scarer's Song," the singer frantically tries to shoo a flock of bothersome fowl into the neighbor's yard so he can take a nap. The harp assumes the role of the bird with pictorially dissonant glissandi and ostinati, which pester the singer until the final frantic yelp and the loud clap that end the song cycle.

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