The Singing Landscape Project

The Singing Landscape Project uses research by Yvette Staelens and Dr. C.J. Bearman to raise awareness of English folk music, create a sense of common ownership over 'the music of the people', and encourage enquiry into the rich but largely unknown store of music discovered and collected by George Gardiner, Percy Grainger, Cecil Sharp, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, amongst others. It proposes a three-way interactive knowledge transfer between academia, museums, and the general public on an exciting personal journey to a largely ignored heritage.

The project deals with more than 600 traditional musicians and dancers collected from in the three counties of Gloucestershire, Hampshire, and Somerset. It had been assumed that personal detail about their lives was not recoverable - a few lines in a census entry, no more - but diligent research in national and local archives, plus oral history material, has revealed a wealth of detail about the milieu within which traditional music operated. For example, so little was known about the great Somerset singer Emma Overd (1838-1928) that not even her first name was certain. Sufficient was recovered to give her a deserved place in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and to show that her fellow musicians were among the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers of the street where she lived.

The project engages Bournemouth University with the museum and archive services of Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset to produce a series of presentations and exhibitions revealing hidden collections and new knowledge. It also proposes to produce Folk Maps for Gloucestershire and Hampshire to join the existing Map (the first of its kind) compiled by C.J. Bearman and Yvette Staelens and published by Somerset County Council in 2006. 20,000 copies were printed for free distribution as a cultural, educational and tourism resource. Somerset County Council regards the Map as a valuable addition to its cultural output, and reported wide press interest in its release.

Initial research outputs have included 'Somerset Sisters', a musical performance of songs collected from Cecil Sharp's women source singers which was commissioned by the Chard Foundation for Women in Music in 2001. This performance was subsequently promoted by the rural touring scheme 'Take Art' and toured to seven venues in the county. In 2003, a commercial CD of collected Somerset Folk Songs was developed and issued to celebrate the centenary of Cecil Sharp's first collecting journey around Hambridge. Some of this material was broadcast by the BBC 1 in a 'Songs of Praise' programme in the UK and Australia and by Radio 4 as a feature on 'Women's Hour'.The research has also attracted American interest with the research team being invited to share their work via a presentation to the International Folk Alliance Conference in Nashville in 2003.

Back in the UK there is at present an unprecedented interest in family history. Among the project's aims in taking this material back to the public is that of inviting further oral history contributions to be placed in county archives to provide a resource for researchers and family historians. Some of the biographical material on Emma Overd came from her former employer's daughter who remembered Emma taking her out in her pram. This project investigates an undiscovered country, now present only in the mind and soon to be gone for ever.

The Singing Landscape Project is an exciting collaboration between museums and academia with a distinct focus on public engagement. We want to excite people to discover more about their singing ancestors and to join us in a celebration of the rich folk music heritage of the people of England.