Originally billed locally as ‘Orphean Spring’, Orphean Sprig, the featured artists at the Song Loft’s March Performers’ Night impressed a packed York House back room with their fluency, energy and musicianship. An instrumental ensemble emerging from the Cambridge session scene – three fiddles, guitar rhythm section (surely RSI beckons) – and looking suitably like a University Challenge quiz team (thank you, Jane L!), they dazzled with a rich and varied mix of traditional, modern, and original tunes of (it says here) Scottish (with a touch of Swedish) inspiration, both moving and moving. (Audience could have done without that explanation of what ‘a session’ is, though).
The band name, though! As stated, they were erroneously billed as Orphean Spring, but what a difference a single ‘n’ can make. Orphean, sure: melodious, entrancing; spring a bit general in application. But Orphean Sprig; so much sharper, pro-active, and specific, like, a joy-bringing sprig of mistletoe or holly, or new plant growth. I’m pretty sure the band name is a borrowing from a poem. ! didn’t get the idea from them, and it’s only a theory and I had no idea at the time, only came to it when failing to find them in a search engine without adding the qualifier ‘band’, but the name comes from a glorious line in a brilliant poem, first published 1968, by Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, called simply Trio. And the band – one of whom is Scottish – do the quote justice.
That line is “Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!” and it really isn’t as surreal as it sounds. Given the study guides the search engine threw up, the poem is pretty obviously widely studied at schools in Scotland. Lucky them! It’s a great piece of work that I’m surprised I hadn’t come across before. Because of copyright I’ll not quote the whole thing, but it starts with the poet coming across three young people one cold winter’s pre-Christmas night in Glasgow city centre, enjoying one another’s company:
Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening
a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights –
The young man carries a new guitar in his arms,
the girl on the inside carries a very young baby,
and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua.
Consider the poet’s heart truly cockled. And when the three have vanished into the crowd he says (in brackets): “(yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind / the life of men and beasts and music / laughter ringing round them like a guard)“. You can find the whole magnificent life affirming text here:
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/trio/
And later that same month, the March Song Loft gig featured The Wilderness Yet. Hey – more young people playing folk music.
With a repertoire drawn from the English, Scottish and Irish traditions plus originals, they delivered an engaging couple of sets. We got various songs and tunes with the instrumentation as per the pics (and occasional banjo), that sat alongside some accomplished a capella three-part harmony songs. [Photo (c) Andy Powell]
Much to the audience’s surprise, singer Rosie Hodgson – owner of one of those rich British folk voices – announced at the start of the second set that it was guitarist Ben’s first public gig with them; we would never have guessed. As well as delighting the ears, it was an informative – and as you can see from my photo above – fun evening. Nice tale of the old Italian lullaby making it back into the folk repertoire via a Tchaikovsky steal. And Rosie made a claim for 5/4 being the proper time signature for English – Copper Family derived – folk song, leaving me none the wiser; I’ve often wondered if there was any rhythm in the originals I’ve heard, and love it though I do, I’ve never been able to convincingly count along to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five – but what do I know?
‘Poetry fans’ it say at the head of this piece. Well, they did give us a setting of Robert Burns’s Ae fonde kiss, and another poem that I really should have made a note of. Nature – specifically bees, trees, birds (the thrush, the nightingale) – was their more than occasional inspiration, so it only seemed possible that the band’s name could have been borrowed – as spotted by Vicki S, for which thanks – from one of the great nature poets, which was confirmed by the Rosie. Gerard Manley Hopkins‘ poems have stayed with me since first studied at age 18 – “as kingfishers catch fire” has never left me (and so wonderful to discover how true) – and it is from his poem Inversnaid that The Wilderness Yet get their name, from the celebration of its very last line:, “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet“.
Long out of copyright, I’m only too happy to give you Inversnaid in its entirety:
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home,
A windpuff bonnet of the fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern’
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet of wildness? Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/inversnaid/
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