"Forget Not Yet"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 496, 24 December 1948, Page 20

"Forget Not Yet"

| | (From London — Written for

"The Listener’ by

FRANK

CALLAWAY

YNSFORD, a small Kentish village within an hour of London, is situated on the Darent in one of the loveliest of |English valleys. And Eynsford has most of the things that English villages are supposed to have-the ruins of an ancient castle, an 800-year-old church (still in use), a rare and wellpreserved Tudor house and many Tudor cottages, a 15th Century bridge, numerous winding lanes and old paths. But it is doubtful if, in all its long history, Eynsford has had a more picturesque inhabitant than the enigmatic, highly-gifted composer Philip Heseltine -better known under his assumed name of Peter Warlock. The cottage in the High Street which had previously been occupied’ by another musician, Hubert Foss, Warlock shared with one of the’ most picturesque of his equally erratic friends, a New Zealander, Hal Collins, and with the English composer, E. J. Moeran. Collins, or Te Auke, was a half-caste Maori who, after fighting with the Anzacs in the 1914-18 war, remained in England and as a pictorial artist contributed to many important London journals. It was while living at Chelsea that he made the acquaintance of Warlock. Collins was a remarkable fellow.

He knew nothing at all of the theory of music yet his improvisation at the piano earned the admiration even of the cynical Warlock, and at other times he would delight his friends with an Original style of musical caricatures. One day in 1925, in the small Eynsford cottage, Warlock discovered Collins laboriously setting out on paper alphabetical and other symbols in g seemingly unintelligible fashion. The Maori was wrestling with a self-devised method of transcribing a song he had composed. Warlock intervened and, on a piece of music manuscript paper, took down the song as Hal Collins played it. He recognised it as a composition of real merit and soon brought it to the notice of the Oxford University Press, who forthwith published it. The song, "Forget Not Yet" (a setting of a poem by Sir ‘Thomas Wyatt), is thus preserved as an example of the inspirations of this unusually gifted Maori. Collins died in 1929, and when on his death bed listened to his song broadcast by John Goss. Recently it was again heard on the BBC sung by the tenor Rene Soames, in a programme introduced by E. J. Moeran entitled "Musical Curiosities." Certainly "Forget Not Yet" is unique in that, while it was a composer’s sole composition to appear on paper, it should have been worthy of publication. But is it not possible, too, that this is the only published piece of serious European music by a Maori composer?