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production line by transcribing songs, with the plan to get them more familiar with collecting practices by listening to oth- ers’ recordings before they themselves embark on field recording.”
Archiving the recordings with special- ist institutions is an important facet of the Collective’s work. The Vaughan Williams Mem orial Library in London and the Irish Tradi tion al Music Archive in Dublin will each receive copies, and are at hand to offer guidance.
As this hive of activity buzzes on, it’s clear there is no shortage of future plans and ideas. “In the next five years, I’d like to see us become more international and have many more people involved in different ways,” says James. “It’s crucial that we empower more song collectors to do more field recordings. We have dozens of irons in the fire including films, CDs, books, trips, col- laborations… Time will tell what comes to fruition and when, but we’re certainly only at the beginning of a very exciting journey.”
Full of enthusiasm for his next collecting trip with Sam – this time to Nova Scotia – James and his colleagues continue to put song collecting firmly in the present tense. “We have a good laugh on our long road trips over how we’re going to ask the next singer we meet [in a posh, plummy accent]: ‘Peasant, do you know a song that begins ‘As I rrrrovèd out...?’ but the joke ends there!”
http://songcollectors.org Natasha Solomons
We first meet narrator Harry Fox-Talbot immediately after the Second World War. Harry, or ‘Fox’ as he is affectionately known, is a budding composer inspired by the old songs he collects from his local Dorset com- munity. Music will profoundly affect his relationships with the glamorously elusive singer Edie Rose and with his family home, Hartgrove Hall. Later, as an old man and doyen of the classical world, music gives Fox a unique connection with his challenging grandson Robin, whom he discovers to be a prodigy on the piano. Over half a century, music remains the one constant amidst the turbulence of love and family tensions.
C
elebrated author Natasha Solomon’s latest novel is titled The Song Collector (Sceptre 978-1444736380 £16.99). Judging by the title, I expected
this story to open with an Edwardian gent trundling through bucolic pastures, phono- graph in tow. I was quite grateful to dis- cover my mistake. To be sure, there is a plummy protagonist and a big house, but the narrative flits between the late 1940s and the 2000s, the grand house is crum- bling and Edwardian serenity has been thoroughly obliterated by two world wars.
Books which flit between eras can sometimes irritate, but here the dual time- frames are opportunities for skilfully han- dled dramatic irony and explorations of continuity, grief and love over time. Books rarely make me cry, but I reluctantly admit to more than a few specks of dust making their way into my eyes when reading this. I ascribe this to Solomons’ deep understand- ing of music: her evocations of how inspira- tion can both elude and strike without warning are vividly drawn. The author’s note at the end of the book provides a per- sonal connection, as Solomons recalls dis- covering an 18th Century book of tunes made by Benjamin Rose, a former inhabi- tant of her cottage.
Music’s elusiveness is a recurrent motif: from the songs Fox’s mother sang when he was too young to remember, to the old Yid- dish songs of Edie Rose’s Russian childhood. We’re back to the title again; this book is really about the impossibility of truly ‘col- lecting’ a piece of music.
Courtesy of Sceptre and Natasha Solomons, we are pleased to present an extract from The Song Collector:
Farmhands have started to empty Hart- grove Hall of the few pieces of decent furni- ture and stack them in one of the barns. I wonder where the General will go – I pre- sume to his occasional wartime lair, the bun- galow on the other side of the hill – but I can’t bring myself to ask him. I can’t forgive him. He hasn’t asked us where we’ll go or what we’ll do. In fact he carries on precisely as before, taking his breakfast with The Timesin the morning room, Chivers bring- ing him coffee and rolls and marmalade from Fortnum’s. He clearly intends to spend his last few days in the house as he has spent the previous sixty-eight years, barring the inconvenient interruptions brought by two world wars. For an awful moment I wonder whether he means to go down with the ship, sitting at the breakfast table with his newspaper and his jar of marmalade with its silver spoon as the house falls around him, burying him in the rubble.
I want to be far away and I can’t bear to leave. I walk up to the ridge as dawn breaks behind the hill, setting the gorse and the brambles ablaze for an instant. It’s cool and the ground is thick with dew; thousands of spiders’ webs wobble in the grass, catching the light and looking like the corners of dis- carded lace handkerchiefs. As I hurry up the steep slope, I realise that I’ve spent the last few days tramping my favourite walks, bid- ding them goodbye. The routes I’ve taken to collect songs in pubs and farm cottages have corresponded exactly with an internal map of the places I love the most. I’ve been walking the path of my own memories, and, if I think about it, I could trace the last few
Photo: David Solomons