Archives for May 27, 2019

Major Michelle A. Rakers and the United States Marine Band perform “Horkstow Grange,” a movement from Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, in concert at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2015: 

Lincolnshire Posy is a six-movement suite for concert band composed by Grainger in 1937. The thematic material is drawn from English folk songs that were collected by Grainger in the field early in the twentieth century. He learned this folk song in July of 1905 from the singing of George Gouldthorpe, a lime-burner who was born sometime around 1840.

To read Grainger’s program note for Lincolnshire Posy, which contains a detailed account of how he collected “Horkstow Grange” from Gouldthorpe, go here.

To hear the actual wax cylinders on which Grainger made his original field recordings of the songs used in Lincolnshire Posy, including Gouldthorpe’s 1905 performance of “Horkstow Grange,” go here.

*  *  *

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“’Tis said that courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare. Animal resistance, the instinct of the male animal when cornered, is no doubt common; but the pure article, courage with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon’s mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of elevated characters.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Courage”