News about the forums activities and interests
Deadline: Tuesday 7 DecemberBroadside Day: Saturday 20 FebruaryCecil Sharp House, London NW1 Organised by the Traditional Song Forum and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the Broadside Day is the annual one-day conference for people interested in in street literature in all its fascinating aspects – broadsides, chap books, songsters, woodcuts, engravings, last dying speeches, catchpennies, … Read more
Saturday 24 Oct 2026 9:30am-5:00pmCecil Sharp House, London£40 | £30 concession (tickets include buffet lunch) This one-day conference organised by the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (EFDSS), explores the current place of folk arts in England in relation to the UK-wide implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage This will be … Read more
Fourteen Fleeting Weeks: Maud Karpeles and Newfoundland Folk Songby Anna Kearney Guigné and Glenn David Colton Published jointly by The Ballad Partners (London) and Memorial University Press (Newfoundland) Thursday 12 November 7-9pm Cecil Sharp House, London NW1 Free (but please email to reserve a place – steveroud@gmail.com) Between 1929 and 1930, Maud Karpeles, one of the … Read more
An interesting new book from Michael Bell, one of our regular speakers, available from Amazon.
If you are a subscriber to Stepping It Out (and if not, why not!) please remember that subscriptions do not automatically renew. If you want to continue to receive this excellent magazine, go to https://veteran.co.uk/magazine/. Alternatively you can pay by bank transfer (a/c Megan Wisdom 20-92-08 53701220) or PayPal (paypal.me/MWisdom631) then email your name and address … Read more
New to Irish Traditional Music Archive’s Shop is The Song Collector: The Writings of Tom Munnelly, a new book gathering key writings on the English-language song tradition by ITMA’s first Board Chair, Tom Munnelly. Edited by Terry Moylan, Jerry O’Reilly, and ITMA Director Emeritus Nicholas Carolan, copies are available exclusively from ITMA’s shop, with all proceeds … Read more
The Irish language broadcast channel, TG4, broadcasts a range of television programmes about traditional music and singing. Whilst it is obviously mostly in Irish, non Irish speakers can turn on subtitles, although song lyrics are not translated. On 11th June TG4 celebrated its 30th anniversary by launching a permanent online archive of programmes. The following … Read more
In November last year, The Times Literary Supplement carried an article headed “Who Controls the Past” which highlighted the terrible news that the BBC was planning to restrict access to its written archives house at Caversham near Reading. Even before that point, gaining access to these archives had not been easy, as there is no catalogue accessible … Read more
Frank Kidson (1855-1926) was a key player in the explosion of interest in traditional song and music in late Victorian and Edwardian England, and his pioneering book Traditional Tunes (1891) was one of the three founding works of what became the first Folk Song Revival. As well as collecting songs in the field, he amassed … Read more
The Ballad Partners are delighted to announce the publication of Arthur Knevett’s new book, The Folk-Song Society, 1898-1932: A History. This is the first book to explore the interweaving, and sometimes competing, strands that established the Folk Song Society, sustained it through the troubled decades from the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, through the First World War, and into … Read more