I spent quite a lot of the weekend, when I wasn’t doing birthday or church-related things, listening to The Complete Quilter Songbook Volume 1, performed by Mark Stone and Stephen Barlow (on Spotify again). I discovered it when Mr C and I were looking for versions of Non Nobis Domine. I don’t even remember why we were doing this – maybe because we’ve done an arrangement of it at choir (which turned out to be the Quilter one) or maybe just because Mr C likes the version of it that was in the soundtrack to Kenneth Branagh’s film Henry V (which was by Patrick Doyle, as I also discovered yesterday).
Anyway, the point of this post is not really to show my ignorance, but to sing (or type) the praises of Roger Quilter, who, I’m ashamed to say, I had to look up as I hadn’t heard of him before, despite having sung at least one of his songs. Bad me. His biographer, Valerie Langfield, describes him as “a gentle and gentlemanly composer of elegant songs”. His songs are certainly elegant, gentle and unobtrusive. There is a definite air of Englishness about the songs – even without knowing that many of them are settings for English poems and Shakespeare sonnets – the melodies alone could not be anything but English. Well, I say that, but I really don’t know much about such things, so feel free to disagree.
The songs also seem like they were written to be sung, if that makes sense. Some compositions just don’t – they’re not easy to sing and they feel like the composer was trying to show everyone how clever he (because it usually is a he) was being putting in that unusual interval, or whatever. Such things are not nice to sing and I don’t even think they are particularly nice to listen to. Quilter’s songs, however, flow and are deceptively simple. They sound like they’ve existed forever. Again, this may be because of the lyrics often being traditional or well-known, but the melodies have an organic quality of their own. Listening to the songs makes me want to sing them.
I’m probably not doing a great job of praising Mr Quilter, so perhaps I should just recommend that you go and listen to his work yourself. If you are subscribed to Spotify you can listen to The Quilter Songbook there, or otherwise your local library may have recordings of Quilter’s work. Please click on the links in this post to find out more about Roger Quilter on sites written by people more eloquent and knowledgeable than I.
