08/03/2026
With three weeks to go until we sing at Cecil Sharp House, Kate Brook - writer and alto with Vox Holloway - talks us through the evolution of our folk programme, and how it all started with three notebooks of songs she inherited from her father, Tim.
“Because folk music is for everybody - it’s the music of the people, there are no barriers to entry, you don’t have to be of a certain standard to sing folk music, you don’t have to pay any money to sing traditional songs. Folk music is kind of public property, a sort of musical commons, and what’s great about a musical commons, as opposed to a physical commons, is that you can’t put a fence around it. You can’t enclose a musical commons, you can’t privatise a musical commons. The only thing that really endangers it is if people don’t sing these songs.
Folk music is made for community, and Vox Holloway is a really really special community, and it’s also a politically-engaged community. So I think it’s very appropriate for us to be singing folk music. The idea came from these notebooks, but we’ve taken songs that other people in the choir have suggested, and the resulting programme is this collection of songs that no one person could have come up with on their own.”
📆: Sunday 29 March, 5pm
🎟️: cecilsharphouse.org
