Sharp and his helpers collected morris, sword and country dances, and published influential instructional books. The result was that Sharp emerged as the leader of the folk dance movement and he launched the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS) in 1911. The collaboration worked very well at first but then Sharp and Neal fell out – ostensibly Cecil Sharp felt that the dances were not being taught properly by trained teachers. Sharp’s interest in folk dance was reawakened in 1904, when he was approached by Mary Neal and Herbert MacIlwaine of the Espérance Club, looking for folk dances for their girls to perform, This sparked renewed contact with William Kimber, the collection of dances and the development of dance notation (the music was the easy bit). His other big aim was to get folk song into the education system, an aim which was not shared by all of the collectors. In 1907 his seminal ‘English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions’ was published, the only major theoretical work on English folk song published in the folk revival (other collectors packed their wisdom into book introductions or articles). All the while, he was having to fit his collecting into the school holidays. He was a staunch promoter of folk song in the columns and letters page of the Morning Post, and with lectures and demonstrations across the country. He played a leading role in the effective relaunch of the Folk-Song Society in 1904 (it had become moribund following the illness and subsequent death of Kate Lee), and he became heavily involved in folk song publishing. Sharp’s involvement in the folk movement grew rapidly after this. ![]() Was dying out and needed to be recorded before it disappeared, with a particular emphasis on collecting the music. Sharp was not the first of the English folk song collectors, but like his predecessors (notably Lucy Broadwood, Sabine Baring Gould and Frank Kidson), he believed that traditional song Charles Marson, singing ‘Seeds of Love’ in Hambridge, Somerset. ![]() The move into collecting folk songs was a natural development, given his interests, although again it started with an apparently accidental event in 1903, hearing John England, gardener to his friend the Rev. In 1901 he joined the Folk-Song Society (formed in 1898) and a year later had published A Book of British Song, which included traditional and national songs. He was fascinated and called back their musician, concertina player William Kimber, to notate the tunes. On Boxing Day 1899, Sharp was staying with his mother-in-law in Oxford and happened to see the Headington Quarry Morris Men performing a set of five dances. During his 17 years in the post, he took on a number of other musical jobs, most notably as Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music (1896-1905). In the same year he was engaged as a music teacher by Ludgrove School in North London. Sharp returned to England in 1892 and in 1893 he married Constance Birch. Incidentally, his comic opera ‘Sylvia, or, the Marquis and the Maid’ dating from this period features a morris dancing sequence, almost a decade before he came across the real thing. There he taught singing and music theory, in his spare time writing compositions of his own and conducting with the Adelaide Philharmonia Society. In October 1882, he left for Australia where he lived for nearly ten years, working as Associate to the Chief Justice of South Australia and then as a partner in the Adelaide College of Music. Although mathematics was his primary subject, he did some courses in music and participated in musical activities throughout his time in education. ![]() He was born in Denmark Hill, South London, and attended Uppingham School before studying mathematics at Clare College, Cambridge (now the home of his fair copy manuscripts). His energetic schedule of lectures, demonstrations and newspaper articles, together with his leadership of the English Folk Dance Society from 1911, made him the figurehead of the folk movement. Between his “discovery” of folk dance in 1899 and his death in 1924 he collected almost 5,000 folk songs and tunes, far more than any other English collector. Cecil James Sharp is the best-known collector of English folk music.
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