Sarah Maria Sun - Folk Songs (2022) Hi-Res

The decades between the two world wars witnessed vast changes in the way folksongs and other music of proud and disappearing populations and traditions were captured. From the beginning of the century Cecil Sharp (his ideology and motivation much criticized in later decades) had been passionate about the musical and folkloric value of folksong, which he notated on his extended forages through English villages and, during the First World War, Appalachia. Yet the advances in recording technology in the 1920s made Sharp’s pencil and field notebook, his staunchly diatonic framework and proto nationalism, seem old fashioned and undesirable. Others differently motivated signed up to this new discipline – in Truro, Somerset, Mississippi, the Carpathian Basin and beyond – with nascent recording technology their ally. In so doing they etched and forever altered the sound of the twentieth century.
The results were part anthropology, part art. Composer–collectors a generation younger than Sharp used these recordings and transcriptions in their own works. Percy Grainger, Benjamin Britten and Luciano Berio spurned Sharp’s literalism in exchange for something far more harmonically inventive (though each left the transcribed vocal line pretty much alone), while Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók infused their own concert works with the asymmetrical speech rhythms and modal freedom they lifted from the folk music they diligently unearthed and recorded.
Samuel Blaser (b. 1981) and Oscar Strasnoy (b. 1970) are also inspired by the great resource folk music and field recordings represent, but there any similarity with Sharp swiftly ends. Taking the instrumentation of Berio’s Folk Songs (1964) as their starting point (flute/piccolo, clarinet, harp, viola, cello and percussion, two players), each composer has immersed himself in the language and sounds of a particular community. For Strasnoy it is the Swiss canton of Graubünden (Grisons), its Romansh language today spoken by fewer than 40,000 people. For Blaser it is the music of America’s south, though sourced from three very disparate groups. Blaser’s great trick in Work Songs (2019) is to replace Sharp’s studied harmonic simplicity with an accompaniment of glorious complexity, aided by the addition to Berio’s line-up of trombone (Blaser’s own instrument), piano and judiciously employed sound recordings – a gentle nod to the origins of the material he so deftly elevates.
‘I’ve got a horse darlin’ ‘n a buggy too,’ the soprano sings at the cycle’s commencement, and we’re off immediately into a world of early country music. It’s almost literally a four-note country song, yet Blaser’s tonal palette transforms it into something resembling a country-music dystopia. The moto-perpetuo figure, shared evenly between instrumental families, and the sparse soundtrack that appears periodically (‘Death Chant Honor Song’, Blaser names the track) show us that this is not your usual rodeo. Nor indeed is it Blaser’s first; there is nothing in the least bit coltish about the surefooted instrumental texture here.
‘Sur le bord de l’eau’ (On the water’s edge) is a shift in time and place. Using an historical recording by Louisianan vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Blind Uncle Gaspard (1878–1937), Blaser places us at the heart of Cajun balladry, a tradition celebrating the culture and Cajun language of the communities that emerged in Lower Louisiana following French colonisation in the late-seventeenth century. There’s an other-worldly quality to the setting – with haunting sounds like those that emanate from the Dutchman’s ship – which well suits the tale. In a neat inversion of a few thousand years of Greek mythology, the two youngest of thirty sailors living and working on a barge, moored close to the edge of an island, sing an enchanting song. A beautiful maiden walking in her garden nearby is entranced, and approaches the water, curious to learn the source of this beguiling music. Yet even with the chromatic scamperings, the disembodied whistlings and dislocating syncopation, Blind Uncle Gaspard’s spirit remains ever present.
Two of the most enterprising American ethnomusicologists working in these decades were John Lomax and his son Alan. John, a self-described ‘ballad hunter’, was astonishingly open-minded regarding whence these ballads came. (‘Go get this material while it can be found,’ was his admirable philosophy.) At the height of the Depression and with his son unavailable, John employed ex-con Huddie William Leadbetter (1888– 1949) as driver. Together they spent months travelling through the deep south of the country, recording songs at every stop on Lomax’s portable gramophone.
‘Lead Belly’ was himself a gifted folk and blues singer, and a distinctive twelve-string guitar player to boot, his style shaped by the music in the bars, brothels and dance halls