Summer Is Icumen In is the title of a piece of music I have arranged which got handed out to the choir this evening and, I expect, will get a try out in the next couple of weeks. As you might have guessed, the core is the old folk song Sumer Is Icumen In, which celebrates signs of the coming summer, like cuckoos singing, plants springing up and animals giving birth to and nursing their young. It is a fairly simple melody and often sung in a round.

My twist is the idea of starting with a modern translation of the words and then, gradually, switching the different voices to sing in the original Middle English. The thought is that this will create a time travelling effect and bring the audience into enjoying the original words with greater understanding than they might just hearing it immediately in a ‘foreign’ tongue. After all, “the past is a foreign country” but this should smooth the journey there!

I’m looking forward to hearing it with actual voices rather than just my mock up in MuseScore.