Sleep (1922)

Ha’nacker Mill (1927)

My own country (1927)

Yarmouth Fair (1924)

In June 1910 Roger Quilter took part in a concert at Eton College, his old school, acccompanying a performance of his Three Shakespeare Songs Op.6. In the audience was the 15-year-old Philip Heseltime, who was so moved by what he heard that the event had a profound influence on the composing career that was eventually to flourish, and tragically wither, under the pseudonym of Peter Warlock. “To R.Q.” he later wrote in a dedication to Quilter, “without whom there could have been no P.W.” There were other influences on his development, of course, not least his friendship with Delius, whom he met at about the same time as he got to know Quilter, and his enthusiasm for Elizabethan and Jacobean song. Those two interests coincide in a fascinatingly incongruous and entirely unique kind of way in “Sleep,“ in the second stanza of which chromatic harmonies slide and clash under an initially archaic but always elegantly poised vocal line.

“Ha’nacker Mill” and “My own Country,” two of Three Belloc Songs that were meant to form a group but were published separately, are more conventional in their harmonies. Dissonances do not fail to make their point, however, in reflecting the desolation of Ha’nacker Hill since Sally abandoned it and, though discreetly, they colour the descending phrase so hauntingly looking for resolution in the beauty of “My own country.” They are there too, though only for comic effect and to heighten the exuberance of the last stanza, in “Yarmouth Fair” - a song to a tune originated in 1896 by a Norfolk road-mender, John Drinkwater, collected as folk material by E.J. Moeran, harmonised by Warlock and, for copyright reasons, supplied with new words by the composer’s friend Hal Collins.