Secular part-songs and unison songs by Edward Elgar Unison Choir - Sheet Music

This volume is edited by Donald Hunt, who has drawn on a wealth of practical experience gained over many years of conducting the songs it contains. It is a treasure trove of unfamiliar arrangements, some unpublished and one entirely unknown, but all Elgar’s own. In their original versions, most of Elgar’s part-songs have gained a sound foothold in the choral society repertoire and several – part-songs such as My love dwelt in a Northern Land, There is Sweet Music, Go, Song of Mine and As Torrents in Summer – are considered masterpieces of the genre. Although in his later years Elgar voiced the opinion that nobody wanted his music any more, his reputation among choral societies remained secure and several wrote to Novello suggesting that some of his more popular part-songs should be arranged for other forces, significantly for the female choirs then in the ascendency. Elgar responded readily to such requests, supplementing his income from recording projects and elsewhere with the worthwhile fees Novello were prepared to pay him for these arrangements. And Novello obviously found this a profitable business as they commissioned additional arrangements from him of their own volition.\n\nAlthough these arrangements were all published, they never supplanted the originals from which they were derived, so that such rarities as the Five Part-songs from the Greek Anthology in the arrangement for SATB and As Torrents in Summer as a two-part song for schools are now all but forgotten to all except Donald. But all are to be found in this volume which contains no less than 56 part-songs in Elgar’s various arrangements, as listed overleaf.\n\nNot all choirs were content with an arrangement, however. In 1922 the enterprising trainer of a boys choir in Todmorden, Yorkshire wrote to the four leading British composers of the day, asking each to provide a ‘rally cry’ for the house within the choir named in their honour. Elgar was the last of the four to respond and his original manuscript, sent to the Yorkshire choirmaster, has never been seen. But the choirmaster was grateful enough to collate all four rally cries on a single sheet of paper, sending a copy to each contributor. Elgar’s copy has long since been lost; but in researching for the Collected Correspondence edition, Martin Bird came across an image of the lost sheet in a microfilm of Birthplace originals deposited with the Worcestershire Record Office around 50 years ago, thus allowing the inclusion of Elgar’s offering, his Solemn Fanfare, in this volume. At a mere 3 bars long, we are confident it will have little influence on his reputation as a composer, but it is a fascinating relic nevertheless.