TATAR #13 Is My Team Ploughing?

 

by AE Houseman and George Butterworth (1909)

I've put these two names together as if they were some kind of songwriting duo. Although "Houseman and Butterworth" has a nice ring to it, they were, in fact, a poet and a composer. The poem is taken from Houseman's best known work, A Shropshire Lad, written in 1896. It was later set to music by Butterworth around 1909. 

So this isn't quite a song in the way in which we think about songs today. It's poetry set to music and from what you might call the "posher" end of the culture. Nevertheless, it has an immediacy that gives the songs a very different feel to most classical songs and, to my ears, much closer to a theatre song.

Why so?

Well, for a start, it's a very simple structure. The poem consists of alternate verses in alternate voices. The first voice is that of the ghost of a recently-deceased young man asking a series of questions:

Is my team ploughing

That I was used to drive?

And does the harness jingle

When I was man alive?

The responding verses are told in the voice of his still-very-much-alive friend:

Aye, the horses trample

The harness jingles now

No change, though you lie under

The land you used to plough

So, like a theatre song, there's a lot repetition, more than you would normally find in a classical number. Not only does the tune repeat four times, the answer-response nature of the poems means that the ideas repeat themselves too (like the harness jingling in the first and second verses). This makes the words more immediate and understandable, more like a lyric.

Then there's the simplicity of the chordal accompaniment which allows the singer flexibility with the words. In classical songs or operatic arias, the meaning of the words may be important but the sound of the words - their natural emphases and cadences - usually ain't. The music tends to dominate. In this case, however, the music is much more in service to the words. Like a good song. 

Finally, the innate drama of the song calls on the singer to do a bit more than only pay attention to the music. They have to act a bit which makes it more like a theatre song. There's a distinct change in singing voice required from the thinner, weaker voice of the ghost to the more robust tones of the living friend. And I like the way the performer here nervously fiddles with tips of his fingers when he's singing the ghostly verses. Then, for the final verse, he uses the same gesture, only this time it's the friend who's anxious about the final question:

"Is my friend hearty

Now I am thin and pine?

And has he found to sleep in

A better bed than mine?

To which comes the nervous reply:

"Aye, he lies down lightly

He lies as lads would choose

He cheers a dead man's sweetheart

Never ask me whose"

Awks!

That lovely, sudden and empty note on "whose" with no chords in the accompaniment, only a solitary note, tells you all you need to know about the character's guilt about what he's done.

So we have character, situation, immediacy and a balance of music and words.

Goes to show, even the "posh" fellas, the poets and classical composers, can write a good theatre song from time to time.