Music Review: "MacCunn, Hamish (1868-1916.) Complete Songs for Solo Voice and Piano. Part 1: Individual Songs; Part 2: Songs from Collections," Edited by Jennifer Oates

MacCunn, Hamish (1868-1916.) Complete Songs for Solo Voice and Piano. Part 1: Individual Songs', Part 2: Songs from Collections. Jennifer Oates, editor. A-R Editions, Inc., 2016.Last year (2016) marked the centenary of the death of the Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn, who was an important link between the songs of British composers Hubert Parry ( 1848-1918) and Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) and the flowering of British composition in the 20th century, seen in the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), George Butterworth (1885-1916), and Roger Quilter (1877-1953.) A-R Editions has released an impressive new scholarly edition of all MacCunn's songs for solo voice and piano, part of their series, Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. These are the first modern editions of his songs, and include thorough biographic information and detailed discussions of the songs. The composer was quite free with his use of verse and prose, often omitting stanzas or even altering the texts, and so the editor has provided notes explaining the provenance of each text. Part 1 includes the fifty-one songs, published as single offerings, and Part 2 includes his song collections and sole song cycle.MacCunn grew up in a musical home, and knew many talented singers, among them his own mother and his wife. His knowledge of the voice, and all that writing for it entails, informs the compositional gifts seen in his songs. Trained at the Royal College of Music, he left before acquiring his degree, believing that he had learned all that he could at an institution that left him feeling unappreciated. He went on to gain prominence as a conductor as well as a composer, and as a champion of Scottish culture. His early promise seemed to fail, and his relatively early demise ended any further hopes of his inclusion in the 20th century resurgence of English music. But by the end of the 19th century, he had already strongly self-identified with Scottish culture, music, and literature, dem- onstrated by his choice of poets, such as the Caledonian (Scottish) writers George MacDonald (whose fabulous fairy tales later influenced C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien), Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, and William Black. MacCunn's other choices for song texts included the works of estimables like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harold Boulton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. …