Reviving music heritage with the National Youth Folk Ensemble

The National Youth Folk Ensemble brings together young musicians aged 12–18 to co-create and perform new folk arrangements. Participants come from around the country to explore music drawn from archives and traditions of the British Isles, alongside global folk and vernacular repertoires. Flourishing under the experienced, sensitive guidance of Artistic Director Jo Freya, Core Tutor Miranda Rutter, and their team of creative workshop leaders, these talented young players are encouraged to breathe new life into old pieces and make them uniquely their own. Through access to the Music, Heritage, Place materials and via our project partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society, I have been privileged to join NYFE as a guest tutor on three occasions, to uncover together some of the gems from the English county archives.

Easter residential 2024

NYFE members attend several courses and other events throughout the year, working with tutors representing music making from many continents. Educator, singer and multi-instrumentalist Jo Freya invited me to their Easter 2024 course, somewhat prior to my official start on the Music, Heritage, Place project. This was a welcome chance to see how the ensemble worked in-person.

Guided by tutors past and present, NYFE players have conceived and honed an arrangement methodology called “beehives”. To begin, the whole group learns a tune by ear, bouncing single phrases from the teacher to the group and back (“tennis”), until everyone is confident with the base melody. Then they break into smaller student-led groups, each exploring creative ideas for harmonic and rhythmic interpretation and creating a mini-arrangement. The final group performance is constructed from ideas that arise in the beehives. I love this organic and democratic way of working, the young players’ evident enthusiasm for it, and the collective ownership it affords them over the finished creative product.

The Easter 2024 course, which culminated in a youth-led performance at London’s Cecil Sharp House, also offered me a chance to engage the young musicians with materials arising from our pilot project in Hampshire (funded by the Hampshire Archives Trust). Project lead Stephen Rose guided me to Richard Pyle’s 1822 tune book from Nether Wallop, from which I chose the beautiful 3-part Belvidere Waltz for the young players to explore. Their multiple small beehives surfaced a host of creative ideas, most of which were incorporated into the final arrangement. In the concert (video below), listen for the interweaving of The Pace Egging Song (Roud 614), whose melody resembles Pyle’s waltz and which gave a nod to the time of year. I was delighted that the NYFE members chose to open their London concert with this piece, and I am grateful to have collaborated with such great young musicians for this unofficial launch of the project’s creative engagement.

February 2025 residential

In 2025 I began officially working with NYFE in their role as project partner, with AHRC support enabling me to tutor on their February residential in snowy Co. Durham. By now, I was getting a sense of the scale and breadth of our project, as I worked through the sources gathered and catalogued by our researchers. How to choose from over 600 collections each containing tens to hundreds of pages of music, to arrange, transmit and perform? A selection methodology was essential, and NYFE played an active part in devising one.

With the advice of Artistic Director Jo Freya, I was able to narrow down to a region or county of interest, and the type of music required to fit the function for the ensemble’s upcoming performances, as priorities for repertoire choice. Jo suggested:

Regions: The North East and Shropshire, to connect with NYFE’s scheduled performances at the Sunderland Fire Station (directly following the residential) and Shrewsbury Folk Festival (Summer 2025);

Functions: 3/2 or 6/4 rhythms, which would be new to some players in the ensemble context. Jo and I knew that “triple time” or “Old English” hornpipes (as they are known) may be commonly (although not exclusively) found in Northumbrian collections. Additionally, NYFE were booked to play their first social dance (“bal” or “ceilidh”) so the Shrewsbury repertoire should incorporate both dance and song elements, and jig-time would be welcome.

From David Parkes’s 1786 manuscript (Shropshire), I chose the tune which Parkes appears to have transcribed for the ballad Tomalin. Those familiar with Cotswold Morris may recognise this as a version of Lumps of Plum Pudding – a handkerchief dance associated with the Bledington tradition and collected by Cecil Sharp from Jinky Wells (1868-1953), fiddler from the village of Bampton, Oxfordshire. I decided to teach this 6/8 tune as a sung piece with partly non-lyrical “vocables”, which would work well when singing for dancing – something I very much enjoy doing with my colleagues in our Melrose Ceilidh Band. Although not geographically connected, this paired very well with the slip-jig quality of Danse Canadienne, from Louisa Winn’s music book manuscript (Wakefield). The ensemble specialises in instrumental music and not song, but I nevertheless spent a relaxed session with them exploring these pieces and using our voices as instruments for dance music.

 You can hear Melrose Quartet’s arrangement of Danse Canadienne as recorded for BBC Radio 3’s The Song Detectorists in the video below.

For the triple-time hornpipes, I turned to the manuscript of Henry Atkinson. Atkinson was a hostman, a middleman in the Tyneside coal trade. Born in Gateshead, he began writing his book of fiddle melodies in 1694. This manuscript is well known to many traditional folk musicians in the North East and contains the earliest written examples of repertoire such as Bobby Shaftoe and The Flower of Yarrow / Sir John Fenwick. His transcription of Portsmouth in F major seems to be a unique version which predates Playford’s publication of the tune. The collection is wonderfully diverse, with tunes by Purcell and other known composers, alongside Elizabethan grounds and vernacular materials.

NYFE debuted their co-created arrangement of Atkinson’s Camp Jigg at Sunderland Fire Station in February 2025, and also played it as part of their May 2025 concert at Cecil Sharp House (see video below).

Henry Playford published almost the same version of this tune in 1688, and William Vickers called it Hey to the Camp in his collection of c.1770. As well as articulating the 6/4 time signature as written, a folk-informed player might also emphasise 3/2 in either the melody or backing, breaking the bars into implicit minims—an interesting and novel rhythmic niche for NYFE to creatively explore.

To make their arrangements, the players separated into 3 larger “beehives”, with the following guidance:

Beehive 1 — arrange the tune in 6/4 with a fast waltz-time feel;

Beehive 2 — arrange the tune with a 3/2 emphasis (as in a triple-hornpipe);

Beehive 3 — devise an ending (they also arranged an introductory section to begin the piece).

Here, as in the Easter 2024 sessions, I was deeply impressed by the musicians’ fluent use of the beehive method and their intuitive, flexible interpretation of the parameters given. Both the manuscript source and the orally transmitted performance traditions can be heard feeding into NYFE’s historically informed but ultimately re-composed 21st-century version.

Summer Auditions: Hymns into Dances

 Midsummer 2025 offered me a bonus trip to Cecil Sharp House, home of the EFDSS, where I ran the creative workshop which forms part of NYFE’s audition weekend. I was eager to support this process and for the chance to work for the first time with established, new and prospective NYFE members, since the ensemble evolves its lineup every year within its age range. Between the Easter sessions, the February course and this gathering, I was able to explore project materials in collaboration with multiple cohorts.

Elsewhere within the project, the Melrose Quartet and I had been devising creative responses to the ubiquity and range of religious music found in the collections of county record offices, and especially the close relationship between sacred and secular repertoires, often within the same source: dance tunes at the front, hymns and psalms at the back of the book. This reflects the practical lived experience of many musicians through the centuries. Using the Easter Hymn—specifically as notated in Somerset and Lincolnshire sources but found very commonly in 18th-century sources—I geared the workshops towards exploring overlaps between hymn-tune structure and dance music. 

The Notes Between the Notes

 Violin-violist and NYFE core tutor Miranda Rutter has perfected the transmission of a playing technique she calls “quaverizing” or, vernacularly among the NYFE cohorts, “Ticky Tocky”. This is an excellent method for demonstrating the internal rhythms implied within an otherwise “simple” dance tune, with passages transformed from a legato, one-bow-per-written-note approach, to every bar broken into its composite quavers. The technique opens up possibilities for subtle internal rhythms, adding colour for the listener and momentum for dancing feet.

 Easter Hymn’s solid but malleable structure worked very well as a basis for this practice, which forms a core articulation skill for NYFE members on all instruments. In the course of three 1.5 hour workshops with existing and prospective members, we created three completely different mini-arrangements of a new Easter Hymn-Schottische, which preserved the sanctity of the source material while unlocking some of the essence of what makes a melody danceable.

My thanks to our research team, our funders the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and the English Folk Dance & Song Society for facilitating these creative discoveries.

Find out more about NYFE.

More information on the music of Jo Freya and Miranda Rutter.

List of archival materials used:

The Belvidere Waltz from Richard Pyle’s tunebook, 1822 (Hampshire Archives)

Lumps of Plum Pudding (Tomalin) from David Parkes’s notebooks, 1786 (Shropshire Archives) 

Danse Canadienne from Louisa Winn’s music book, c.1815-20 (West Yorkshire Archive Service - Wakefield)

The Camp Jigg, from Henry Atkinson’s tunebook, 1694 (Northumberland Archives)

Easter Hymn, from Miss Baylis’s music book, 1783 (Somerset History Centre) and Thomas John Dixon’s tunebook, c.1798 (Lincolnshire Archives)

Disclaimer: I do not claim any ownership of the playing or transmission methodologies detailed here. They are either collective techniques drawn from contemporary folk music culture, or associated with the professionals named and other key practitioners. If you think I have misrepresented or misappropriated any of the creative tools above, please get in touch via our website so that I can correct this.