Сесил Шарп: Англия халық музыкасын зерттеушісі және жинаушысы

English folklorist and song collector (1859–1924)

Cecil James Sharp (22 November 1859 – 23 June 1924) was an English collector of folk songs, folk dances and instrumental music, as well as a lecturer, teacher, composer and musician. He was a key figure in the folk song revival in England during the Edwardian period. According to Roud's Folk Song in England, Sharp was the country's "single most important figure in the study of folk song and music." Sharp collected over four thousand folk songs, both in South West England and the Southern Appalachian region of the United States. He published an extensive series of songbooks based on his fieldwork, often with piano arrangements, and wrote an influential theoretical work, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. He notated examples of English Morris dancing, and played an important role in the revival both of the Morris and English country dance. In 1911, he co founded the English Folk Dance Society, which was later merged with the Folk Song Society to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Cecil Sharp's musical legacy extends into English orchestral music, and the classroom singing experienced by generations of schoolchildren. Many of the most popular musicians of the British Folk Revival from the 1960s to the present day have used songs collected by Sharp in their work. Scores of Morris dance teams throughout England, and also abroad, demonstrate the resilience of the revival he played a large part in sustaining. In the US, the Country Dance and Song Society was founded with Sharp's support, and dancers there continue to participate in styles he developed. Over the last four decades, Sharp's work has attracted heated debate, with claims and counter claims regarding selectivity, nationalism, appropriation, bowdlerisation and racism.

Sharp decided to emigrate to Australia on his father's suggestion. and two light operas, Sylvia, which was produced at the Theatre Royal on 4 December 1890, and The Jonquil. The libretto in each case was written by Guy Boothby. Sharp also wrote the music for some nursery rhymes which were sung by the Cathedral Choral Society.

In 1892 Sharp returned to England and on 22 August 1893 at East Clevedon, Somerset, he married Constance Dorothea Birch, also a music lover. They had three daughters and a son. After his marriage in 1893, Sharp became a vegetarian for health reasons and took interest in spiritualism and theosophy. From 1896 Sharp was Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, a half time post which provided a house.

Sharp identified with the political left of his day. He joined the Fabian Society, a Socialist organisation, in 1900, and in later years became a supporter of the Labour Party. In his younger days he was considered a radical and, according to a teaching colleague, liked to “pull the legs off the Tories”. He wrote of his anger about the ‘injustice of class distinctions’, He also believed in democracy over totalitarianism, holding that “any form of collectivist government must also be democratic if it is to function properly”, and expressing scepticism about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Sharp was an opponent of capital punishment. He was not, however, a supporter of the Suffragette movement, although according to his colleague and biographer Maud Karpeles this probably reflected a disapproval of their methods rather than the principle. Sharp was a nationalist, and believed that exposure to English folk song would engender a spirit of patriotism.

Sharp died of cancer of the upper respiratory system at Hampstead on 23 June 1924.

Sharp’s ideas held sway for half a century after his death, thanks in part to an uncritical and rose tinted biography co authored by his disciple Maud Karpeles, who also enshrined his thinking in the 1954 definition of folk song drawn up by the International Folk Music Council. A. L. Lloyd, a Marxist and the chief theoretician of the second folk song revival during the 1960s, affected to repudiate Sharp’s ideas but in fact followed much of his thinking. A more radical Marxist analysis was offered in the 1970s by David Harker, questioning the motivations and methods of folk revivalists, and accusing Sharp of having manipulated his research for ideological reasons. According to Harker:
"'[F]olk song' as mediated by Cecil Sharp, [is] to be used as 'raw material' or 'instrument', being extracted from a tiny fraction of the rural proletariat and imposed upon town and country alike for the people's own good, not in its original form, but, suitably integrated into the Conservatoire curriculum, made the basis of nationalistic sentiments and bourgeois values." Harker expanded this thesis in the influential Fakesong in 1985, dismissing the concept of folk song as "intellectual rubble which needs to be shifted so that building can begin again", and attacking scholars from Francis James Child to A. L. Lloyd. while Vic Gammon commented that Fakesong had taken on "the status of an orthodoxy in some quarters of the British left", and represented "the beginning of critical work" on the early folk music movement although he stated later that, "this does not mean that Harker got it all right." English folk songs, collected and arranged with pianoforte accompaniment by Cecil J. Sharp, London: Novello (1916). This volume has been reprinted by Dover Publications under and is in print. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (originally published 1907. London: Simpkin; Novello). This work has been reprinted a number of times. For the most recent (Charles River Books), see The Morris Book a History of Morris Dancing, With a Description of Eleven Dances as Performed by the Morris Men of England by Cecil J. Sharp and Herbert C MacIlwaine, London: Novello (1907). Reprinted 2010, General Books; .