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VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Essex Folk Song ‘Bushes and Briars’ – 4 CELLOS (easier)

Other Identification:
“Bushes and Briars” is an English folk song collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams in Essex in 1903, making it a pivotal song in the English folk revival. He heard the song from Charles Pottipher, a 70-year-old laborer. The song, which is about a singer walking through the woods and overhearing their lover lamenting, was first published by Vaughan Williams in 1908.

This was Vaughan Williams’s first time collecting a folk song directly from a traditional singer in its “native conditions,” which then spurred a period of intense folk song collecting for him.

The song has been covered by a number of artists over the years. The folk singer Sam Lee released a version on his 2023 album ‘Songdreaming’, which references the original song and its themes of nature and love.

Movements or sections: marked ‘Andante sostenuto’

Instrumentation: QUARTET OF FOUR CELLOS
set by R. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
prepared as a Cello Quartet by DAVID JOHNSTONE
A wonderful Music Preparation and Edition by cellist FAHMY TAREK

Downloads of 2 PDFs:
[1 – General Score
[2 – All individual parts

Approximate difficulty: EASY TO MEDIUM
It is not difficult in cello registers. However, the musical weaving makes it necessary to include cellists with a certain confidence!

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David Johnstone lives near Pamplona (Navarre, Spain) with his wife Rosa and their two “Spanglish” children, close to the Atlantic Pyrenees. The nearest international airport is Bilbao.

He is interested in world affairs, politics, animal rights, and most sports (including being a lifelong suffering Reading FC fan!). Also passionate about Celtic culture and genealogy, he has traced his ‘English’ family back to 1280, although Scotland and Ireland have also shaped his background. And yes — he is half-ashamed to admit it, he loves silly jokes!

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