This afternoon I spent a thoroughly enjoyable hour with my family recording Thomas Ravenscroft’s catch about Brentford for a colleague who is going to give a talk there next month. The term catch is interchangeable with what is now the more familiar name, ’round’ – the word used to describe simple, popular songs like Frere Jacques or London’s Burning where different voices sing the same tune at the same pitch but beginning at different times. There is a good wikipedia introduction to catches if you’re interested…

The music is from Thomas Ravenscroft‘s early seventeenth-century collection of catches Pammelia Musicks Miscellanie, a book that I last looked at in detail when I was writing my PhD on mid-Tudor ballads. So step one was to transcribe the music, which I did using MuseScore. Although Ravenscroft’s music just gives the single melody line with an instruction as to where the next voice comes in, I decided to score it for all three voices so that I could see how it fits together. It also meant that I could listen through it to make sure that it worked,

Step two was to persuade The Hyde Travelling Family Band (the nickname given to us by my nephew when he asked us to perform at his wedding some years ago) to reform for the afternoon. Nick and I taught Anne and James the tune, and then we decided on who was going to sing which part. After a couple of attempts, we decided to transpose it down from C to B flat and eventually into A, to make it less high. It took a little bit of practice to keep it together, but we got there, and great fun was had by all.