Songs I to English Texts/Chansons I sur des textes anglais

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

Frederick A. Hall, Chairman and professor of music history in the Department of Music at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, has selected 66 Canadian or Canada-related patriotic songs, popular songs, and art songs for facsimile reproduction in Volume 3 of the Canadian Musical Heritage Society’s anthology of Canadian music. Thanks to this collection, broadsides and sheet music from 13 public and private collections are now readily accessible to scholars, performers, teachers, and historical interpreters, or to anyone who enjoys old typefaces, decorative title pages, and long-forgotten words, melodies, sentiments, and events.

The collection spans nearly 150 years, beginning with “A new song wrote on the taken of Louisbourg & Co.” (a broadside published in London about 1758), and ending with songs from the 1890s. Most in the collection are for solo voice, with piano accompaniment of varying difficulty; a few are in three or four voices; one calls for flute or guitar accompaniment. All are worthy of inclusion for their historical and/or musical interest, as is explained in an informative four-page introduction, and in biographical notes on composers and lyricists, and critical notes on the songs themselves.