About the Research

‘Sing you now after me’: Catch-Singing and Community in Britain, c.1550-1650 is led by Dr Katherine Butler and funded by the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship scheme. This project aims to fundamentally reshape our understanding of popular, communal, polyphonic singing in early modern society through the first comprehensive, book-length study of rounds and catches in Britain c.1550-1650, and a public engagement programme of participatory catch-singing workshops (see ‘Singing‘ above).

Rounds, catches, and canons are simple songs where the same melody is sung starting at different times, thereby creating harmony (e.g., songs like London’s Burning, Frere Jacques, Campfire’s Burning – listen to some here). The different terms were used interchangeably in this period, though canons tended to be more serious and catches lighter. Easily learnt by ear and accessible to a wide. Easily learnt by ear and accessible to a wide spectrum of society, rounds/catches were ubiquitous, encompassing the pastoral, urban or maritime; bawdy, alcoholic, and religious; theatrical and domestic; work and play. Although largely shared orally, they also began to be printed and copied in this period. Despite their ubiquity in early modern society, these songs are peripheral in modern scholarship: musicologists have focused on more complex polyphonic song (e.g., madrigals, lute ayres, consort songs), while historians and literary scholars on monophonic ballads/psalms. Catches, however, straddle art and popular musics, oral and literate traditions, challenging preconceptions of part-singing as an exclusively elite practice.

This lack of attention to catch-singing is a significant blind spot in our understanding of everyday, recreational music-making and its significance for community building in early modern Britain. Predominantly merry in disposition, catches spotlight elements of musical life, that are not commonly the primary subject of study, but are crucial to the pleasures of social music-making: the role of singing in drinking culture , the workings of musical humour, songs as forms of play, and singing as an act of forging communal identities. Moreover, catch-singing highlights understudied singing communities including tradesmen, itinerant workers, soldiers, and sailors. Rounds/catches are distinct in their brevity and tight construction, which both controls the interplay of voices and bodies thereby regulating social interactions and provides a framework in which conventions can be played with. They are distinctively self-reflective, articulating the experiences and values of their singers and dictating communal physical and musical acts in their lyrics.

Straddling history, musicology, and literature, this study is a ground-breaking reappraisal of singing in harmony as a practice inextricably woven through early modern everyday life. Its objectives are to:

1. unpack the diversity of catch-singing communities and their intersecting characteristics of age, gender, class, and trades – demonstrating catch-singing’s widespread practice and significance. In particular this survey will challenge the common assumption that catch-singing was an exclusively male activity in this period;
2. analyse the circulation of songs, understanding the co-dependency of oral and literate transmission, and tracing processes of adaptation and contrafacta (i.e., new texts to old tunes);
3. situate catch-singing within wider song culture: investigating quotations (street cries, popular tunes) and intersections with other canonic genres, ballads, and stage songs;
4.  assess the functions of these songs in life and on stage: as games, jests, and rituals combining singing with drinking, movement, and other noise-making;
5. demonstrate how singing together in harmony created communities of work, drinking, good fellowship, prayer, and learning – its impact extending beyond the merely musical;
6. trace changes in the nature, functions, and social status of catch-singing across the period, as influenced by increasing musical literacy among the upper classes, the development of tavern culture, expansion of the printed music market, and impacts of the civil war/interregnum.