Benjamin Britten's England was a land of great and longstanding choral traditions, a tradition that still remains a bastion of Britain's musical life. One exemplar of this tradition are myriad boys' choirs, such as those at Winchester Cathedral and other churches, as well as those at academic institutions throughout the country. Britten from early in his career—even before he can be said to have a career—was fond of the pure, innocent timbre of the children's choirs and of the voices of boy trebles in particular. He wrote many works involving children's choruses, including Spring Symphony (1949) and War Requiem (1962), and in his operas, particularly A Midsummer Night's Dream, children's voices figure prominently.

One of Britten's earliest works for treble voices is the set of twelve songs for choir and piano grouped under the title Friday Afternoons, Op. 7 (1933-35). The title comes from the circumstance of their composition. Britten wrote the pieces over the course of a couple of years for his brother Robert and the boys of Clive House School, Prestatyn. The choir practices took place on Friday afternoons. The poetry is of widely mixed authorship, ranging from anonymous old folk poems, to Izaak Walton (seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler), to William Thackeray and the children's author Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965).

All of the songs, excepting the last, "Old Abram Brown," are less than two-and-a-half minutes long. Most are less than two minutes, and a few are less than a minute long. The settings are marvelously illustrative and attentive to the mood of the texts. The piano accompaniment is ripe for orchestration, with a variety of textures and figures supporting the poetic imagery. The opening song, "Begone, dull care!" contrasts with the minor mode, mock-tense Thackeray setting, "A tragic story," that follows it, an accelerating four-part sequence pedal harmony about a sage's battle with his own pigtail. The melancholy pastoral "Cuckoo!" (Jane Taylor) sets twice the five-line, April-to-August life of the cuckoo. It is followed by a another pastoral, a folk-tale about a marauding fox. The quiet "A New Year Carol" pairs with the rustic "I mun be married on Sunday" by the sixteenth-century playwright Nicholas Udall. The very brief "There was a man of Newington" (anonymous) is a slightly gruesome nonsense rhyme about a man that loses, but regains, his eyes. Britten sets Izaak Walton's "Fishing song" in 5/4 time; it tells of the pleasures of the pastime. "The useful plough" trudges with the rhythm of the ploughman behind his horse. A more recent poem is Eleanor Farjeon's "Jazz-Man," an upbeat song about a one-man band. "There was a monkey" is in a similar mood, a song observing the activities of several characters in the town. "Old Abram Brown" is the most extended and darkest of the settings. The intensity of the setting builds throughout by setting the two-line verse in voices offset in a round (unison canon). At the climax, two groups of voices sing the same tune, with one group singing at half the tempo of the other.

The germ of Britten's boundless melodic and dramatic invention is present throughout the cycle. These brief but marvelously varied settings are an early example of one of the most fecund imaginations and prodigiously skilful compositional voices of the twentieth century.

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