On the southern edge of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides there is an arm of land, the Ross of Mull, that reaches out westwards towards the holy island of Iona. On the map, the end of this peninsula looks a little like a hand wearing mittens, or perhaps a cat’s paw reaching towards a mouse. The inlet between the hand and the thumb is Loch na Làthaich, and on the shores of the loch sits the village of Bunessan. This is a landscape defined by the brown-green of the hills and the grey-blue of the sky and sea. It is a beautiful landscape but also a harsh one, where crofters scraped out a precarious living. Bunessan village viewed from Lower Ardtun © JaneMcArtney [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Just outside Bunessan is a stone monument commemorating a woman named Mary MacDonald. In some ways Mary’s life was unremarkable: in outline it was the same as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other women who li...
Vaughan Williams appears frequently in my book and has cropped up not a few times in this blog too, probably more than any other composer. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, he's one of my favourite composers. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, his influence on hymn music in England is enormous, thanks to his work as Music Editor of important books such as The English Hymnal and Songs of Praise . Some of the best-known hymn-tunes owe their success to RVW, and indeed many of them would not have become hymn-tunes at all if it had not been for him. Most of the folk-songs that he adapted for use as hymns were given names referring to the place where the tune was collected, so this means that his work is a rich source for someone who is interested in the link between the place and the music. While I was researching the book I contacted the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society for some information about the origins of FOREST GREEN . The Chairman of the Society, Simon Coo...