The website for Dr Martin Shaw OBE FRCM (1875 –1958)

"Let me be! Let me be, for my lot is cast..."

Over the Sea

photograph of first page of sheet music. Instructions, 'Andante ma non troppo'.

 

5: Over The Sea

Recording Artists: Iain Burnside & Sophie Bevan

The song – not to be confused with Harold Boulton's Over the Sea with a Soldier – is made from one of Christina Rossetti's darker poems, to which Shaw has added this delicate, yet plangent, melody.

 

Dedication: To WA Aikin

W.A. Aikin was a voice and diction specialist who wrote books on voice and vowel production. He had in his youth composed songs.

Shaw was very interested in the way vowel sounds were produced, comparing the authentic cockney voice favourably against the unnatural voice of the middle classes in Up to Now - much as we find those same middle-class voices strained, awkward and rather funny when we watch old films today.

 

 

AUTHOR PUBLISHER DATE SHEET MUSIC
Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894) Curwen 1917 currently out of print