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Coda : I Sowed the Seeds of Love

from Dark Summer Glimpses by Hermione Harvestman

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On August 22nd 1903 Cecil Sharp has his epiphanic encounter with English Folk Song when he heard his friend's gardener (the very aptly named Mr John England) singing The Seeds of Love whilst busy in his potting shed. Mr Sharp promptly 'collected' the song, making a parlour arrangement to perform at the piano-forte for his upper-class chums that very evening, thus beginning the 100 year old tradition of the upper-middle-class making gentrified parlour arrangements of working-class feral folk song by way of Revival.

Being of a relatively upper-middle-class cast of mind, I've taking Mr England's melody, as recorded by Mr Sharp, and placed it into a different parlour context entirely. Revival doesn't interest me in the slightest and I feel extinction is certainly more dignified than taxidermy - it is certainly more natural. What remains here is the echo of the melody as I once heard sung in all earnestness by a young revivalist at Cecil Sharp House at some point in 1962 whereupon it became part of my inner archive of Musical Experience until some 22 years later when, on August 22nd 1984 in remembrance of that most auspicious occasion long ago, it emerged as part of the improvisation you have here.

This is not, of course, folk music (no matter how vague the proscriptions of the 1954 Definition) rather freely improvised electronica touched by a melody from 81 years earlier that wasn't sung as folk music either. Dedicated to Mr John England, who in all probability couldn't have cared less.

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from Dark Summer Glimpses, released August 22, 2014

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Hermione Harvestman UK

'I feel like Wainwright - we are both hermetic ramblers. He made his books for when he was no longer capable of rambling his beloved fells, and I made my music for when I'm no longer able to ramble the by-ways of Albion - but only to listen, and think "Was that really me? That solitary figure who stood in a landscape dreaming of ages past in dread fear of the future."

Hermione Harvestman ... more

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