Robin Hood and Maid Marian, as printed in Life and Ballads of Robin Hood and Robin Hood’s Garland (Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1859)
Songs of Robin Hood and Marian
VOICES
Tutor: Sara Stowe
Location: St Wilfrid’s Church, Grappenhall
Reviewer: Jill Mitchell
Since Robin Hood and Marian
It is always a pleasant prospect to have as a venue Grappenhall, nestling in its sleepy, cobbled time-warp yet within hailing distance of the A50. Sara Stowe, coming from Oxford to tutor us there on October 17th, found her connection at Birmingham cancelled and was delayed an hour. When Bob Foster rang round with the news, I for one was relieved, being under-organised and in danger of being possibly late and certainly breathless.
When she arrived, Sara made a strong start: she has a most engaging personality and a speaking voice full of warmth and vitality. Our well-balanced group of 7 women and 7 men (one of whom, appropriately, had travelled up from the environs of Sherwood) were in for a delightful day. Our ensemble was a rather modest number, as I’d expected, some perhaps fearing the fare might be a little fey; in fact it was most rewarding, the 13 pieces ranging from the bawdy and boisterous through the lightheartedly gay to the achingly beautiful, across a gamut of mood and effect.
The adventures of Robin Hood and Maid Marian feel quintessentially English, ingrained in our folkloric psyche, yet the whole tradition seems to have been imported from mainland Europe; though we have thoroughly domesticated the original and fleshed it out with home-grown types like the Sheriff of Nottingham, Little John and Friar Tuck, its source is almost certainly continental. Perhaps the best-known 13th century drama is the Jeu de Robin et Marion, an attractive blend of rustic comedy and simple songs by Adam de La Halle, written while he was serving at the French Court in Naples. We essayed 9 sections of this sung dialogue after we’d finally mastered their sequence and numbering, men versus women. The lively triple time was to prove typical of much of the genre. Coyness, ardour and roguery in the shape of the lustful chevalier’s designs on Marion characterised and coloured the action.
But we had begun with the simple Sans Orgueil for Duplum and Tenor, a vivacious melody in the Dorian mode with an occasional flattened sixth, the tension between B and B-flat giving it added piquancy. Sara pointed out the necessity of our trying to sing with more sense of line rather than producing a regimented repetition of identical 3/4. One saw this point exactly but it was the difficulty of articulating the medieval French with aplomb without being confident of pronunciation. So often textual unfamiliarity is responsible for tentative and uncommitted phrasing. N’oubliez mie, again for 2 voices, this time in a spirited 6/8, is in the same Re mode as the previous chanson, with its toying with B and B-flat. Here the Tenor line, as we were often to find, is based on a fragment of slowed-down chant. Once more Sara urged us to note the length and progress of the phrase and shape it accordingly.
Sancta Mater Gracie was particularly interesting to me, the words of the Duplum line being an uncompromisingly sacred text imploring the Virgin’s intercession, recalling her obedience at the Annunciation, her desolation at the foot of the Cross, and insisting on the power of her advocacy. The Tenor consists of a repeated 6-bar Ground to an English text calling upon Robin that a child is weeping. It is a strange coupling of material, an intriguing juxtaposition. Again this is Dorian, with the occasionally flattened sixth, and finishes on the seventh note of the scale. It is a very effective piece, particularly in the upper reaches of the melody when rising to the octave, but the ladies certainly had most of the adventure here!
What a joy it was to sing the brilliant William Cornish’s Ah! Robin: it is an exquisite confection, a limpid, arching melody on a 2-part Canon Ground. It has an art that conceals art with its guise of simplicity; there is about it a gentle, focused longing. What a huge delight it was!
Among so many others, Josquin contributed to this tradition and was represented here by a 3-part chanson, En l’Ombre, and a 6-part chanson, La petite camusette, the most musically complex of our samples. Jean Mouton’s En venant de Lyon told a coy, 4-voiced tale of Robin the elated seducer, the composer punning on his own name in the process. In the anonymous Les l’Ormel there were 3 different related texts unfolding simultaneously and 4 different ones in Trois Sereus: we have met this multiplicity in early Renaissance polyphony.
We particularly enjoyed Thomas Weelkes’s Since Robin Hood, Maid Marian and Little John are gone-A with its rollicking change from quadruple to triple (in the depiction of the dancer-clown Will Kempe’s jigging from London to Norwich) and back again. Our two latest pieces, from the eighteenth century, were a glee by William Shield, In Sherwood’s Grove, and an anonymous, hearty ballad, Robin Hood & the Bishop of Nottingham. In the former the ladies after one reading confessed themselves defeated by the relentlessly hammering “altitude” but we despatched the second piece with wholesome gusto.
We finished at 4 o’clock rather than the scheduled ending at 3 o’clock, making up for our initially lost hour, after a most successful day which had given great pleasure by its spirited and varied material and by the enthusiastic and capable way our tutor had handled it. Moreover, on a personal note, it definitively established one of my 8 musical companions on hypothetical shipwreck!
Jill Mitchell
First published in November 2015 Newsletter
