Sons and Daughter of the Soil
A sequence of poetry, prose and music on the theme of working on the land, with readings by Emilia Fox and Alex Jennings.
Emilia Fox and Alex Jennings with a selection of readings and music reflecting the lives of those who work the land, including poems by
Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Sasha Dugdale, Dylan Thomas and Virgil. Music of an agricultural nature comes from Benjamin Britten, Debussy, Duke Ellington, Scott Walker and Ivor Gurney among others.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
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Music Played
Timings (where shown) are from the start of the programme in hours and minutes
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00:00Trad.
The Merry, Merry Milkmaids
Performer: The City Waites.- SOUNDALIVE SAMHCCD009.
- Tr20.
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Thomas Hardy
We Field-Women, read by Emilia Fox
John Clare
The Milking Hour, read by Alex Jennings
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00:04Achille-Claude Debussy
The Little Shepherd, No. 5 from 'Children's Corner'
Performer: Karen Geoghegan (bassoon), Philip Fisher (piano).- CHANDOS CHAN10521.
- Tr17.
Sasha Dugdale
Shepherds, read by Emilia Fox
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00:08Duke Ellington
The Shepherd (Who Watches Over The Night Flock)
Performer: Duke Ellington.- PRESTIGE 000252 18544528.
- Tr6.
Robert Frost
The Gum Gatherer, read by Alex Jennings
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00:17Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No 6 in F major , Op.68 聳 Allegro: Peasants聮 Merrymaking
Performer: Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer (conductor).- EMI CDC7471882.
- Tr3.
James K. Baxter
Farmhand, read by Emilia Fox
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00:24Andrew John Partridge
Love On A Farmboy聮s Wages
Performer: XTC.- Virgin ?聳 CDVD 2811.
- CD2, Tr3.
Christopher Marlowe
The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, read by Alex Jennings
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00:29Stephen Jaffe
The Rhythm of the Running Plough
Performer: The Prism Orchestra, Robert Black (conductor).- BRIDGE BCD9047.
- Tr1.
W.B. Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree, read by Emilia Fox
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00:40Benjamin Britten
The Ploughboy
Performer: Peter Pears (tenor), Benjamin Britten (piano).- LONDON 4300632.
- Tr21.
Dylan Thomas
Fern Hill, read by Alex Jennings
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00:45Scott Walker
Farmer In The City
Performer: Scott Walker.- Fontana ?聳 526 859-2.
- Tr1.
W.D. Ehrhart
The Farmer, read by Emilia Fox
Seamus Heaney (成人快手 Radio 3 Archive)
Digging, read by Seamus Heaney
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00:54Ivor Gurney
I will go with my father a-ploughing
Performer: Susan Bickley (mezzo-soprano), Iain Burnside (piano).- NAXOS 8572151.
- Tr14.
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper, read by Alex Jennings
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00:58Harald S忙verud
Hjuringen 聭pi eismodal (Shepherd Boy聮s Lonely Vigil)
Performer: Einar Steen-N酶kleberg.- NAXOS 8554301.
- Tr34.
Virgil (translated by C. Day Lewis)
Georgics, read by Alex Jennings
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01:02Big Bill Broonzy
Plow Hand Blues
Performer: Big Bill Broonzy.- Indigo Recordings ?聳 IGOCD 2076.
- Tr20.
R.S. Thomas
Soil, read by Emilia Fox
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01:06Virgil Thomson
The Plow that Broke the Plains - Suite - Devastation
Performer: The New London Orchestra, Ronald Corp (conductor).- HELIOS CDH55169.
- Tr6.
Producer's Notes: Sons & Daughters of the Soil
Working the land is an increasingly rare occupation in industrialised societies, but two centuries ago most of us would have been sons and daughters of the soil.听 Hardly surprising then that this close working relationship with nature 鈥� its attendant pleasures and hardships 鈥� has for a long time been a source of inspiration to writers and composers.听听听
We begin with The Merry, Merry Milkmaids played by The City Waites.听 This is one of the dance tunes published by John and Henry Playford in the first edition of The English Dancing Master in 1651.听 The title suggests an idealisation of the lot of agricultural workers which we shall encounter again elsewhere.
We meet another group of milkmaids in Thomas Hardy鈥檚 We Field-Women.听 This poem is a pithy distillation of the section in Tess of the D鈥橴rbevilles which sees Tess and her fellow workers enduring a miserable winter in the cheerless fields of Flintcomb Ash, before returning with relief to the Vale of the Dairies when spring comes.听
While the artist who takes farming as their subject can sometimes appear to be an outsider, observing working-class life from a distance, this cannot be said of the poet John Clare.听 His father was a farm labourer and Clare followed the same path as a child.听 In The Milking Hour he sketches an idyllic scene 鈥� the narrator accompanies his milkmaid love across the fields in the early evening.听 Absorbed in conversation as she milks the cows, they reminisce fondly about the times they have spent together, little knowing that this will be their last.听
The Little Shepherd is part of the Children鈥檚 Corner suite that Debussy wrote for his daughter Chouchou.听 Composed originally for solo piano, this transcription for bassoon by Bronislav Prorvich is played by Karen Geoghegan, accompanied by Philip Fisher.听 It captures the wistful solitude of a shepherd playing his flute as he minds his sheep.听
A shepherd is a rare sight in the British landscape these days and more likely to be riding a quad bike than playing a flute. 听In her poem Shepherds, Sasha Dugdale conjures up the shades of those who used to tend their flocks on the South Downs in Sussex but are now long gone.听听听
The Shepherd (Who Watches Over The Night Flock) is taken from Duke Ellington鈥檚 Second Sacred Concert.听 Both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible abound with shepherds, both real and metaphorical, and the idea of the good shepherd resonates through the Judeo-Christian tradition.听 Pastors (derived from the old French for shepherd or herdsman) are still spoken of as looking after their flocks.听
Shepherding, as we have seen it portrayed so far, is a lonely business, as were other traditional ways of living off the land.听 The man who Robert Frost鈥檚 narrator meets in The Gum Gatherer lives on his own on the side of a mountain and makes his living by harvesting gum from spruces.听 A pleasant life, according to the narrator, but then the outsider doesn鈥檛 necessarily see the whole picture.听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听
But it鈥檚 not all solitude in the countryside.听 The third movement of Beethoven鈥檚 Symphony No. 6 (鈥楶astoral鈥�) is titled Peasants鈥� Merrymaking and evokes a welcome release from the hard slog of working in the fields.听 You can almost hear the well-worn boots shaking the ground with exuberant dances.听
It鈥檚 at another rural knees-up that we meet James K. Baxter鈥檚 Farmhand, this time in New Zealand rather than Germany.听 Standing outside the dance-hall, his awkwardness and reticence to join the young women inside is contrasted with his effortless self-assurance when he鈥檚 about his work back on the farm.听
The farmboy in XTC鈥檚 Love on a Farmboy鈥檚 Wages has problems of a different nature.听 He鈥檚 met the woman who he wants to marry, but although they plan for their wedding, he can鈥檛 see how it can ever happen while he earns so little.听
By contrast, Christopher Marlowe鈥檚 Passionate Shepherd goes all out to entice the shepherdess who has caught his eye, listing the many gifts and delights that he can offer her.听 Since these include slippers with gold buckles and a belt with coral clasps and amber studs, one can only conclude that watching over flocks was a surprisingly lucrative line of work in the Elizabethan era.听
While we muse upon 16th century agrarian economics, here鈥檚 Stephen Jaffe鈥檚 pastoral work The Rhythm of the Running Plough.听 Jaffe took the title from these lines by the poet William Everson:听
The fragrance of the earth rises like tule-pond mist
Shrouding me in impalpable folds of sweet, cool smell,
Lulling my senses to the rhythm of the running plough,
The jingle of the harness
And the cries of the gleaming, bent-winged birds.A return to the apparently simple and carefree existence of living off the land can seem very appealing to the jaded urbanite.听 The life that W. B. Yeats proposes in The Lake Isle of Innisfree could hardly sound more inviting, but it smacks of an idealism that could only be conjured up by someone living in the heart of a city.听
At the same time, the hardship and isolation of a traditional rural life could make an aspirational farm worker yearn for the luxuries and excitements of urban living.听 In the traditional song The Ploughboy 鈥� sung here by Peter Pears, in an arrangement by Benjamin Britten 鈥� the young lad has already escaped from the muddy furrow to become a footman and dreams of climbing higher and higher up the social ladder, eagerly embracing every means of advancement, no matter how corrupt.听
For Dylan Thomas, the childhood visits to his aunt鈥檚 farm that he recalls in Fern Hill, have become bittersweet memories of a boyhood idyll, an innocent bucolic past from which he is forever banished.听
Scott Walker鈥檚 Farmer in the City sounds like a man struggling to acclimatise himself to unfamiliar surroundings.听 Although Walker was writing, albeit obliquely, about the death of writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, the song reminds me of another Italian 鈥� Marcovaldo, the fictional creation of writer Italo Calvino.听 Marcovaldo is a man from the country who moves to an industrial city and constantly attempts to pursue the rural habits and pastimes that are familiar to him, but in an urban environment.听 The results are not entirely successful.听
In his poem The Farmer, W.D. Ehrhart plays with the metaphor of the writer as a labourer in the fields, toiling hard on unpromising soil with no certainty of a good harvest.听 Seamus Heaney also draws parallels between writing and working the land in Digging, continuing the determined labour of his father and grandfather, but with a pen, not a spade.听听听
The passing of the skills and traditions of farming from one generation to the next is also celebrated by another Irish poet - Joseph Campbell - in I Will Go with My Father a-Ploughing, set to music by Ivor Gurney and sung by Susan Bickley.听
Wordsworth鈥檚 poem The Solitary Reaper underlines again both the isolation that can go hand in hand with farming and how agricultural workers can seem remote and unknowable to outsiders (who may find themselves guilty of romanticising their lives). 听Especially so in this case, when they are divided by language.听
There鈥檚 another solitary figure in the landscape in Norwegian composer Harald Saeverud鈥檚 short piano piece Hjuringen 鈥榩i eismodal (Shepherd Boy鈥檚 Lonely Vigil), part of his Tunes and Dances from Siljustol, his home in the countryside just outside Bergen.听
As mentioned earlier, until comparatively recently in human history, most people would have been involved in farming in some way (even today agriculture is still the largest global provider of jobs, employing over 1.3 billion people or close to 40% of the world鈥檚 population).听 Hardly surprising then to find references to horticulture and animal husbandry in classical literature.听 Virgil鈥檚 Georgics, published in 29 BC, is a poem specifically about these subjects, providing a 鈥榟ow to鈥� guide in hexameters.听 In this extract, the poet ends by wistfully recalling the days before Jove ushered in the age of agriculture, when the earth gave freely of its bounty without incessant human toil.听
This is clearly a time that blues singer Big Bill Broonzy would have welcomed.听 As a young man he worked as a sharecropper until his crop and stock were wiped out by drought.听 In Plow Hand Blues he imagines how heartily sick of that life a man would be if he鈥檇 spent 40 years behind the plough.听
The Welsh poet R. S. Thomas challenged the cosy view of the traditional pastoral poem with vivid, unsentimental views of rural life, reflecting the harsh, impoverished existences he saw around him.听 In Soil, the worker鈥檚 world is defined and circumscribed by the earth from which he lifts swedes.听 He almost grows out of the soil himself, a dogged, uncomplaining feature of the landscape.听
We end with a cautionary note on the unintended consequences of human cultivation of the land.听 Virgil Thomson wrote the soundtrack for the 1936 documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains.听 This film told the story of the Dust Bowl 鈥� the ecological disaster that hit the North American prairies during the 1930s as a result of drought and deep ploughing.听 This final part of Thomson鈥檚 suite is titled Devastation 鈥� a reminder that our sons and daughters of the soil have the capacity to do harm as well as good.听
听Torquil MacLeod听
(You can hear more about milkmaids from Victorian expert Kathryn Hughes on on Thursday 19th January at 10pm)
听
Broadcasts
- Sun 15 Jan 2017 17:30成人快手 Radio 3
- Sun 9 Dec 2018 17:30成人快手 Radio 3
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