• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Andrew Ford

Composer, Writer & Broadcaster

  • Home
  • News
    • General news
    • Events
    • Audio & Video
    • The Music Show
  • About
    • Biography
    • High-resolution photos
  • Compositions
    • Stage
      • Opera
      • Children’s opera
      • Music theatre
    • Orchestral
      • Symphony orchestra
      • Orchestra with voice
      • Orchestra with solo instrument
      • Chamber orchestra
      • String Orchestra
      • Wind and brass
    • Chamber music
      • Strings
      • Winds
      • Brass
      • Percussion
      • Mixed instrumentation
    • Instrumental (solo and duo)
      • Piano
      • Strings
      • Wind
      • Brass
      • Percussion
    • Vocal
      • Voice and instrument
      • Voice and ensemble
      • Orchestra with voice
    • Choral
    • Radiophonic
    • Music for children
    • Arrangements
  • Writings
    • The Song Remains the Same
    • The Memory of Music
    • Earth Dances
    • Try Whistling This
    • The Sound of Pictures
    • Talking to Kinky and Karlheinz
    • In Defence of Classical Music
    • Speaking in Tongues: the Songs of Van Morrison
    • Undue Noise
    • Illegal Harmonies: music in the modern age
    • Composer to Composer
  • Performances
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search
Home / Compositions / Blood Red Roses: three shanties and a sea song

Blood Red Roses: three shanties and a sea song (2017)

10 mins
for 2 trumpets, French horn, trombone and tuba

1. Go Down, You Blood Red Roses
2. Sally Brown
3. Lowlands
4. Spanish Ladies

Commissioned by Sydney Brass

First performance by Sydney Brass, Bondi Junction RSL, Sydney, 1 July 2018


Program note

Andrew Ford: Blood Red Roses: three shanties and a sea song (2017)
for brass quintet

1. Go Down, You Blood Red Roses
2. Sally Brown
3. Lowlands
4. Spanish Ladies

Shanties (or chanties as Percy Grainger insisted) were work songs sung by sailors on merchant ships. Like cotton picking songs, the aim was to get the job done, and typically a shanty would involve a lead singer (or shantyman) with a strong voice calling a simple phrase, the other sailors answering him as they weighed anchor, hauled sail or turned the capstan.

The imagery of most shanties involves a certain amount of derring-do (there’s often a reference to rounding Cape Horn), to girls in various ports (‘Sally Brown is a white mulatto / She drinks gin and chews tobacco’) and to loss at sea (‘Lowlands away, my John’). Whaling was a common purpose of sailing trips. ‘Sally Brown’ mentions a ‘New Bedford whaler’, while the rather poetic phrase ‘blood red roses’, seems to refer (I’m sorry to say) to the plume of blood springing from a freshly harpooned whale.

‘Spanish Ladies’, another farewell to girls in port, is such a famous sea song (though not a work song, so not a shanty), that it spawned at least one non-nautical version. Warren Fahey has collected a Queensland drovers’ song entitled ‘Brisbane Ladies’. Blood Red Roses was commissioned by Sydney Brass and is dedicated to the group on its 60th birthday and to the memory of Danny Spooner (1936 – 2017), sailor and shanty singer.

© A.F.

Instrumentation: Chamber music - brass

Primary Sidebar

Latest News

‘Gone’ sung and arranged by Gian Slater

3 October, 2020

Ford on the txalaparta

13 July, 2020

Red Dirt Hymns

11 June, 2020

Follow Andrew

Newsletter

Get Andrew's quarterly newsletter sent to your inbox.

Subscribe

© 2021 Andrew Ford · Privacy & Copyright ·  Twitter ·  SoundCloud
Website built by Elated