The Banks of Green Willow
Or
St Cecilia or The Power of Music
George Butterworth noted down the folk tune ‘The banks of Green Willow’ as sung by Mr and Mrs Cranstone of Billingshurst, Sussex, in June 1907. He also made a wax cylinder recording of David Clements singing ‘The Banks of Green Willow’ in Basingstoke Workhouse in 1909. When he made the recording he was probably in the company of Ralph Vaughan Williams as there is also a cylinder recording by him of Clements singing the same song that picks up where Butterworth’s leaves off.
Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were a part of the folk song revival of the early twentieth century, they would tour the English countryside writing down and recording folk songs as sung by ordinary people. Thanks to this extraordinary movement songs and voices that would have been lost in time have been preserved.
Both Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were composers who used folk songs in their compositions, Butterworth wrote a short orchestral piece entitled ‘The Banks of Green Willow’ that makes use of the tune along with one from the folk song ‘Green Bushes’. The piece has become associated with World War One remembrance as Butterworth was killed on 5 August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, but also because the music seems to conjure up a picture of a lost English Edwardian idyll tragically destroyed by war.
Listening to ‘The Banks of Green Willow’ the other day I could picture the two of them, Butterworth and Vaughan Williams, in a turn of the century English village like a couple of Butterfly catchers netting songs. A whole world comes to mind in intangible feelings and thoughts, the social history of the village, the singers of the folk songs, the character of Butterworth and his friendship with Vaughan Williams, all these things lost but still present somehow in the music.
It could be the nearest thing we have to a time machine is music. Folk song carries and develops story and sentiment through time, written music catches a moment in time and keeps it on paper in dots and dashes. Astonishingly by playing the dots and dashes on a musical score a moment long gone in time comes to life again. What kind of sorcery is this?
In ‘St Cecilia or The Power of Music’ Heinrich Von Kleist tells the tale of four brothers in sixteenth century Germany who are apparently driven insane by a piece of music. Kleist leaves the tale delightfully balanced so that you cannot tell if it is the power of music or supernatural intervention that has unhinged the wits of these four young men. The story ends with a visit by the mother of the men to the town where the uncanny events occurred in order that she may discover what has become of her sons. There she sees open on a music stand the very piece of music which it seems had so affected them, and by psychology or spirits feels that same influence, Kleist writes,
“She looked at the magical unknown signs, with which, as it seemed, some fearful spirit had mysteriously marked out its circle, and was ready to sink into the ground… It seemed to her as if the whole terrors of music, which had proved the destruction of her sons, were whirling over her head; at the mere sight of the score her senses seemed to be leaving her, and with an infinitely strong feeling of humility and submission to the divine power, she heartily pressed the leaf to her lips, and then again seated herself in her chair.”
That is the power of music, by coded marks on a page to summon up feelings, imaginings and spirits.
Kleist is right though, we must not lean either too much towards a superstitious explanation of the effect nor too far towards a mechanical explanation because neither of themselves is quite true enough. Instead let us sit by the banks of green willow and be enchanted by both the beauty and the sadness which flow by.
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