trad.: Barbara Allen

At a time when we are going farther and farther afield in the quest for new musical experiences, it is good to know that a source of popular music existed in England that sufficed to beguile every phase of life, to enrich the experience of serious composers through whom it influenced all of Europe, and that even today many of the tunes at the top of the Hit Parade are heavily indebted to it.

This newly recorded CD, made in the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge in 2010, is only the second to be made by an independent label featuring this world-famous Choir. Sir David Willcocks, who celebrated his 90th birthday in December 2009, was Director of Music at King's from 1957 to 1974, during which time he made a number of - now legendary - recordings. This Priory CD, featuring a number of Sir David's own choral works, is the first commercial recording he has made with the Choir for 36 years: it also includes artists and forces from musical organisations with which he has been associated. We are therefore very privileged to be able to include this issue in our catalogue.

Prima Voce has assembled some truly remarkable examples of Clara Butt’s art and even at first hearing the listener will be struck by the vocal presence and personality behind each recording. The deliberate but completely unforced exploitation of those extraordinary and smoothly blended cello-like bottom notes in her lower and middle registers was beautifully managed throughout her career, but they do evoke different reactions from some modern commentators on vocal-art.

Although folksong is a relatively simple and direct form of music, it is no easy matter to give a definition of a true folksong or to determine how it originated. Goethe, himself a collector, admitted the difficulty when he confessed: We are always invoking the name of Volkslied without knowing quite clearly what we mean by it.' There are countless old songs of a popular nature dating from centuries ago, but they do not all belong to folklore; there were the songs written for Shakespeare's plays, the lute songs played at the Tudor courts, ballads that were written by individual composers and, later, the popular music-hall songs of the Victorian age. True folk music, as officially defined by the International Folk Music Council in 1954, is 'the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are continuity, which links the present with the past-variation, which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and selection by the community, which determines the form, or forms, in which the music survives.