Green Bushes: Passacaglia on an English Folksong

• Grainger composed this work between 1905-6. Scored for orchestra, it is based on the English folk song Green Bushes and cast in the neo-Baroque form of a passacaglia, an ostinato form built on a repeating bass line.¹
• Percy Grainger included copious program notes (replete with idiosyncratic hyphenations) in the work’s published edition. 

“Among country-side folksingers in England ‘Green Bushes’ was one of the best known of folksongs – and well it deserved to be, with its raciness, its fresh grace, its manly, clear-cut lines. The tune has also been noted in Ireland…and in the United States…”

Percy Grainger, program note to Green Bushes (1930)²

“ ‘Green Bushes’ strikes me as being a typical dance-folksong – a type of song come down to us from the time when sung melodies, rather than instrumental music, held country-side dancers together. It seems to breathe the lovely passion for the dance that swept like fire over Europe in the middle ages – seems brimful of all the youthful joy and tender romance that so naturally seek an outlet in dancing.”

Percy Grainger, program note to Green Bushes (1930)³

“The work is in no sense program-music – in no way does it musically reflect the story told in the verses of the ‘Green Bushes’ song text. It is conceived, and should be listened to, as dance music (it could serve as ballet music to a ballet performance) – as an expression of those athletic and ecstatic intoxications that inspire, and are inspired by, the dance – my new-time harmonies, voice-weavings and form-shapes being lovingly woven around the sterling old-time tune to in some part replace the long-gone but still fondly mind-pictured festive-mooded country-side dancers, their robust looks, body actions and heart-stirs.”

Percy Grainger, program note to Green Bushes (1930)⁴

1. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, “Grainger, (George) Percy,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed November 30, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000011596.
2. Percy Aldridge Grainger, Green Bushes: Passacaglia on an English Folksong (Mainz: B. Schotts Söhne, 1931), i.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.,ii.