Jazz. Rock’n’roll. Heavy Metal. Rap. Every new music has been met by critics who feared it would corrupt our souls. For a reminder that it was ever thus, let’s zip back to the 13th century, when John of Salisbury (English-born Bishop of Chartres) first encountered polyphony. Although experiments in multiple melodies date back to the 10th century, almost all European music of the period had followed one simple melodic line (possibly augmented by a harmony sung up a fourth or a fifth). But composers of the Notre Dame School (among others) popularised the mingling of independent melodies in a way that the prelate found a little overwhelming.
“When this goes to excess it is more fitted to excite lust than devotion,” he fretted, before conceding that, used in moderation, the new sound “transports the soul to the society of angels”.
Reflecting the earthy/sacred response to the new sound, the oldest recorded six-part round in English comes complete with religious lyrics in Latin and secular lyrics in a Wessex dialect of Middle English. “Sumer is Icumen In” is written down in an illuminated manuscript dating from the early 1260s and found at Reading Abbey. The Latin words (written in red ink and now seldom sung) tell the tale of God sacrificing his only son. The English version (written in black and still popular with schoolchildren) describes the native flora and fauna responding to warmer weather.
“The seed is growing/ And the meadow is blooming/ And the wood is coming into leaf now/ Sing, cuckoo!” it begins to a jaunty tune that goes on to echo the call of the bird it celebrates.
There’s some rather intense scholarly debate over what happens in the second verse, which moves from the wild world to focus on livestock. “The ewe is bleating after her lamb/ The cow is lowing after her calf/ The bullock is prancing…” Then either a deer or a billy goat is cavorting or farting, depending on how we translate the words “bucke uerteþ”. If “uerteþ” is farting (as the majority of medievalists believe), then this is the earliest known use of the verb “to fart” in English.
Whether about frolics or flatulence, the song has echoed, cuckoo-esque, down through the centuries. There has been a little fuss about whether we can classify it as a “folk” song. One school of purists argues that because its melody was written down and might have an official composer (perhaps the cleric W. de Wycombe), it does not qualify as part of a collective, oral tradition.
But it has the familiarity of folk, making it ripe for parody. In 1916 the American poet Ezra Pound reworked it as “Winter Is Icumen In”: “Sing: Goddamm./ Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,/ An ague hath my ham./ Freezeth river, turneth liver, / Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.”
Early music specialists The English Singers made the first recording of it in 1927 with “six noses crowded into a single horn”. Little John (Alan Hale Sr) hums it in the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood. In 1949 Benjamin Britten worked it into the climax of his choral Spring Symphony: children sing the song in 2/4 time while the rest of the ensemble continues in 3/4 waltz time. Another composer with a soft spot for Merrie England, Ralph Vaughan Williams, wove it into his Folk Songs of the Four Seasons (1950): the first music commissioned by the Women’s Institute for their choir of 3,000 to perform at the Royal Albert Hall. Vaughan Williams turned the work into an orchestral suite in 1952.
It was performed at the opening ceremony of the ill-fated Munich Olympics in 1972, timpani thumping and xylophone plinking as a running track full of solemn children held aloft paper-decked arches. The following year it soundtracked the terrifying climax of The Wicker Man: the pagan inhabitants of Summerisle sing it, cloaked in portentous brass, as they prepare to burn the hero alive in a ritual sacrifice. Cardiacs side project Mr and Mrs Smith and Mr Drake gave it a quirkily textured treatment in 1984, fluttering with woodwind and saxophone. Folk hero Richard Thompson gave hearty voice to it in the original Middle English on his 2009 album 1,000 Years of Popular Music. Post-punk quartet The Futureheads delivered it with vim on their 2012 a cappella album, Rant.
Alas, the number of cuckoos in the UK has fallen by 65 per cent since the early 1980s. According to the British Trust for Ornithology, their decline is most likely caused by a reduction in the numbers of the caterpillars on which they prefer to feed and a deterioration in the route from which they fly from Africa to herald British summers. Soon the only cuckoos we hear may be the ones imitated by humans in songs such as this.
What are your memories of hearing, and singing, ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Chandos; Albion; Beeswing Records; Nul Records
Picture credit: Alamy