It's a bit odd that America loves Christmas so much but there's next to nothing in the way of serious recompositions of old carols for voice and piano in the American art song rep, save for John Jacob Niles' lovely setting of "I Wonder as I Wander", which isn't Christmassy in the least but still gets played around this time of year. My research has found that the two best sources of classical music rejuvenating old carols are France and England, with both countries making a big effort in the first part of the 20th century to collect folk songs, bringing many fine melodies and poetry to light. Folk music revivalism was central to England's Pastoralist movement, with guys like Holst, Grainger and even later Neo-Classical composers like Britten rewriting ancestral tunes to fit their unique languages. England also takes Christmas pretty seriously, and at the intersection of these cultural forces we find some excellent Pastoralist Christmas music, such as Holst's In the Bleak Midwinter, Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony and Arnold Bax's A Christmas Carol, a song that I adore and really really wanted to write about but couldn't find a good recording of to use. In searching for suitable replacements I remembered about Ivor Gurney, an important figure in the British art song canon whose career was stifled by chronic mental health issues and an early death from tuberculosis after composing almost nothing for nearly a decade. He wrote hundreds of songs using a wide variety of sources and his musical language is as nuanced and sensitive as anything from his contemporaries, making me wonder why most of his instrumental music (which is just as good as his songs from what I was able to find) is so hard to get a hold of.. For our purposes one of his songs in particular is proper to mention, his Carol of the Skiddaw Yowes.
You might be wondering what a yowe is, much less how a yowe could be skiddaw. "Yowe" is an archaic spelling of ewe, and Skiddaw is a mountain in the Lake District in North West England, a popular vacation spot and home to a number of poets in the 19th century such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. While the "Lake Poets" were mostly active in the early 19th century the author of this song's poem, Edmund Casson (not Ernest as it says at the top) published in the 1900's and '10's and is so obscure that the only detailed information I was able to find on him came from a listing for one of his books on AbeBooks, which you might recognize as not being an encyclopedia. In its original published form it was called "Carol of the Skiddaw Shepherds" and Gurney's title change is interesting not only for putting an archaic word in the title but also shifting the perspective slightly from the shepherds (the obvious subject of the poem) to the sheep, perhaps to strengthen the connection of Christmas with the agnus dei. Gurney's language is pure Pastoralism, rife with added-note chords, sophisticated counterpoint and passages seemingly written in the hirajoshi mode commonly heard in Japanese shamisen music. Unlike many shepherd-based carols I've seen Gurney keeps the tempo up, not wasting any of our time and setting the harmonic flow at a fast enough speed to massage the inner ear without stewing in dissonances. It's a lovely addition to the Christmas song rep, gently flowing and imbued with a kind of motherly concern in dark days. I hope that if anyone sees sheep wandering around alone this holiday season they'll try to keep them safe and warm.
~PNK
The availability of genealogical information has enabled "about whom little is known", as a description of this poet, to progress to "about whom something is known". Sources, below, are given in square brackets.
ReplyDelete(Thomas) Edmund CASSON (11 Jan 1883 Pennington ~ 19 Feb 1960 Ulverston)
Edmund Casson was the author of the lyrics to “Carol of the Skiddaw Yowes” by Ivor Gurney.
His birth was registered in early 1883, in Ulverston registration district, in the Lake District. He was the son of Thomas Casson, a grocer and the local subpostmaster in Pennington, and his wife, Eleanor Elizabeth née Ashburner, who had married a year earlier. A younger brother, Robert, was born a couple of years later.
He went to school at Trent College in January 1898 and played for the school team in 1899 and in the three following seasons – described as a ‘steady bat, with a good off drive. Useful bowler and good field’. He also represented his dorm at fives. He did well academically, gaining Distinctions for Latin, Scripture and History, as well as passing in Greek, in 1902. In the academic year 1902/03 he was a school prefect. He left Trent College in December 1902 and was elected to an exhibition in modern History at Merton College [Trent College email 200205; & Times Digital Archive Thu, Jan. 23, 1902, Issue No. 36672 p5]
By the spring of 1911, Thomas Casson was an Assistant Master at the High School in Keswick, Cumberland and he received his Oxford degree, formally, that summer. [The National Archive 1911 census and & Times Digital Archive Fri Jun 30, 1911 Issue No. 39625 p4]
A copy of “Carol of the Skiddaw Yowes”, with music by Ivor Gurney, is annotated “Christmas 1918” and the words are "Carol of the Skiddaw Shepherds" by Edmund Casson. [No poetry book/copy has been seen to verify that.]
A number of 1930s newspaper articles refer to Edmund Casson and his poetry. [British Newspaper Archive]
In June 1939 the King sanctioned the appointment of T E Casson as a Serving Brother in the Order of St John of Jerusalem. [Times Digital Archive Sat Jun 24, 1939 No. 48340 p14]
The 1939 Register, taken in late September of that year, records Thomas (E) Casson as a retired schoolmaster, in Ulverston, living in a household of Margaret Isabella Ashburner, who was, almost certainly, his mother’s younger sister.
In 1945, his poem won the Greenwood Competition, adjudicated by “that excellent critic of verse, Herbert Palmer” who said of the author that, “I know very little except that in 1938 he published a volume of Collected Poems over the name of Edmund Casson, and that he lives in the Lake District, and is a Wordsworthian”. [The Scotsman Oct 19, 1945]
Early in 1948, he published a new book, which was described as “a long poem dealing with the life of George Fox”. [Penrith Observer Mar 23, 1948]
Thomas E CASSON died on 19 Feb 1960, in Stanley Hospital, Ulverston, aged 77, at which point his address was given as “Vale View, Pennington, Ulverston, Lancashire”. He left a moderately large estate under the care of Edward Walker HARGREAVES, solicitor. He was buried on 23 Feb 1960 at St Michael & Holy Angels, Pennington. [Furness Family History Society; government’s FindAWill website]