The Banks of Green Willow – All Classical Research

The Banks of Green Willow, composed in 1913 is an orchestral idyll.¹
- An idyll is a musical work “evoking the quality of pastoral or rustic life” (Harvard Dictionary of Music), the name derived from a pastoral literary genre.²
The Banks of Green Willow quotes two different English folk songs that Butterworth collected in 1907: “On the Banks of Green Willow” (the first melody in the piece) and “Green Bushes.”³
- Here’s Butterworth’s manuscript for the Green Bushes melody
- Here’s Butterworth’s manuscript for “On the Banks of Green Willow”

Stephen Banfield, “Butterworth, George,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed August 14, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000004467.
Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4^th ed., s.v. “Idyll” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Stephen Connock, liner notes to Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Hickox, Chandos 9902, CD, 2001.

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