Britain, long revered for its choral music and partsongs, had largely neglected art songs since the Elizabethan era. The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed efforts to revive the genre, particularly in the works of Sir C. Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. The following generation, including the Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn (1868–1916), built on the foundations laid by Parry and Stanford and served as the bridge to the vocal music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Edward Elgar, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland, and ultimately Benjamin Britten. Though best known for his Scottish-influenced compositions, MacCunn composed over 100 songs that, free from national constraints, are some of the most refined and sophisticated examples of his music. Almost no modern editions of MacCunn’s song exist, though many were published during the composer’s lifetime. The current two-part edition presents the composer’s 102 extant songs. Part 1 contains 53 individual songs; Part 2 presents the songs that were first published as small collections.

Digital prints and paper offprints are also available for this title.

Contents

Cycle of Six Love-Lyrics by Joseph Bennett (1889)

1. A message came from the East in May

2. Where palms make pleasant shade

3. He passionately bewails her absence

4. He hears of her death

5. The news turns out to be false, and he hears she is coming back

6. They are reunited

Three Songs by William Black (1890)

1. O white’s the moon upon the loch

2. O wilt thou be my dear love?

3. Roses white, roses red

Album of Ten Songs (1892)

1. Tell Her, Oh, Tell Her

2. The Huntsman’s Dirge

3. Welcome, Sweet Bird

4. The Young Rose I Give Thee

5. When the first summer bee

6. Autumn Song

7. Love in Her Sunny Eyes

8. Her Suffering Ended

9. There be none of Beauty’s daughters

10. When Twilight Dews

Six Songs by Lady Lindsay (1892)

1. Wishes

2. A Flower Message

3. Doubting

4. Dreamland

5. Golden Days

6. Hesper

Six Settings of Poems by Robert Bridges (1893)

1. My bed and pillow are cold

2. Fire of heaven, whose starry arrow

3. The Idle Life

4. Angel spirits of sleep

5. Crown Winter with green

6. Pedlar’s Song

Album of Seven Songs by George MacDonald (1894)

I. Picture songs

1. A pale green sky is gleaming

2. Over a shining land

3. The autumn winds are sighing

4. The waters are rising and flowing

II. Songs from Within and Without

1. Oh, my love is like a wind of death

2. The Father’s Hymn for the Mother to Sing

3. The Organ Boy’s Song

Set of Seven Songs by Harold Boulton (1895)

1. Spring and Autumn

2. Noontide

3. A Children’s Rhyme

4. The Waterfall

5. Sleeping and Waking

6. Two Lovers

7. A Dream

Album of Six Songs (1897)

1. The Ash Tree

2. I’ll tend thy bow’r, my bonnie May

3. To Julia Weeping

4. At the Mid Hour of Night

5. A Heart in Armour

6. I will think of thee my love

Bio

Jennifer Oates is Associate Professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center–CUNY. She specializes in research of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British music, particularly dealing with issues of identity. Her biography of Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn appeared in 2013 in Ashgate's Nineteenth-Century British Music series, and her critical edition of MacCunn's overtures is volume 53 in Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.