Summer song discovery: five free songs to sing into summer

This month of June: five free songs to sing your way into summer.

We actively invite contributions to a video showcase featuring these songs later in the summer. We can’t wait to see what you come up with. Here are five brainteaser clues to lead the way.

Song 1

Written in 1840, our first summer song, from a well-known cycle based on selections from Heinrich Heine. In it, the narrator who is wandering silently gets a message from the flowers: do not be angry with our sister.

Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen,
ich aber wandle stumm…
…Sei uns’rer Schwester nicht böse,
du trauriger, blasser Mann.

REVEAL: High / original – B Flat | Low – A

Song 2

The second is a 1934 song by a member of that well-known Music Hall composer genus pseudonymus pseudonymus, “Harry Tilsley”, this not-so-well-known “east coast melody” depicts a mockney day at the sea-side.

REVEAL

Song 3

For the third, we’re off to Ireland for a traditional folk song, in which the narrator describes the feeling of being brave in love:

I shall tell her all my love, All my soul’s adoration;
And I think she will hear me, And will not say me nay.
It is this that fills my soul, With its joyous elation…

REVEAL: High – F | Low – D

Song 4

Our fourth is popular in choral settings, a Finnish traditional song, set as an art song by Gabriel Linsen, it’s sometimes called by its first line “I am at the top of a branch”. The song is connected with a cholera epidemic in Helsinki, the Pirkanmaa region and a Lieutenant Colonel’s farm.

REVEAL: Original – E flat | Low – B flat

Song 5

The fifth song was written in 1878 by one of the great Romantic composers. It depicts a sighting of a solitary nymph bathing in a brook, shimmering in the moonlight:

Dorten, an dem Bach alleine,
Badet sich die schöne Elfe;
Arm und Nacken, weiß und lieblich,
Schimmern in dem Mondenscheine.