Jeffreys, John - Book of Songs

John Jeffreys (1927-2010), Extract from Obituary from the Guardian:

John Jeffreys....was a multi-talented song composer whose sensitive, gentle settings of English poetry have recently found favour with distinguished singers including Ian Partridge, James Gilchrist and Jonathan Veira. The musical climate in the 1970s was not sympathetic to a composer of such traditional bent, and, disheartened, Jeffreys destroyed much of his work. However, in 1983 he chanced upon four reels of tape recordings made in 1966, and reconstructed most of the songs on them.

The publisher Kenneth Roberton championed his cause and published three substantial volumes, with piano accompaniment, in facsimiles of the composer's beautifully and precisely calligraphed manuscripts, with cover illustrations by the composer. In the songs, there is a perfect fusion between the text and the refined, subtle accompaniment. Virtuosity is eschewed in favour of expression and diction. Although many of the early songs were originally composed with string quartet, they were mainly recomposed with piano. There are others with bassoon and recorder as the accompanying instrument.

Contents (Poet in Brackets):

• Ambulance train (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson)
• And would you see my mistress' face (Philip Rosseter)
• The appeal (Thomas Wyatt)
• Curlew calling (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson)
• From Omiecourt (Ivor Gurney)
• Full fathom five (William Shakespeare)
• The hag (Robert Herrick)
• The high hills (Ivor Gurney)
• Horror follows horror (Ivor Gurney)
• I was young and foolish (W. B. Yeats)
• If it chance your eye offend you (A. E. Housman)
• In youth is pleasure (Robert Wever)
• It is winter (Walter de la Mare)
• It was a lover and his lass (William Shakespeare)
• Jillian of Berry (Anon)
• A lyke-wake dirge (Anon)
• The milkmaid (Thomas Nabbes)
• My little pretty one (Anon)
• O mistress mine (William Shakespeare)
• Omens (James H. Cousins)
• Otterburn (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson)
• Passing by (Anon)
• Requiem (Ivor Gurney)
• Romance (Robert Louis Stevenson)
• Severn meadows (Ivor Gurney)
• Sigh no more, ladies (William Shakespeare)
• Sleep (John Fletcher)
• Snow (Edward Thomas)
• The songs I had (Ivor Gurney)
• Stow-on-the-Wold (Wilfrid Wilson Gibson)
• Take, O take those lips away (William Shakespeare)
• There is a lady sweet and kind (Anon)
• Thirteen pence a day (A. E. Housman)
• This night (Padraic Pearse)
• 'Tis time, I think (A. E. Housman)
• Under the blossom (William Shakespeare);
• What evil coil of fate (Ivor Gurney)
• When daisies pied (William Shakespeare)
• When that I was and a little tiny boy (William Shakespeare)
• Who is at my window? (Anon)