Be’s One album (G2, 8 February), featuring the sound of 40,000 honey bees, is an exciting reminder of a musical experiment first conducted 400 years ago by the Rev Charles Butler. “The father of English bee-keeping” was an accomplished musicologist, and in the seclusion of his Hampshire vicarage, he composed a four-part bees madrigal, which was published in his bees manual, The Feminine Monarchie. Like Kev Bales, Butler was fascinated by the magical sound of bees in the hive – he kept them in straw skeps in his garden – and his composition tries to capture that quality by using the unaccompanied human voice. A choir from two Oxford colleges sang the madrigal at the dedication of a Butler memorial window in Wootton St Lawrence church in 1954. It has been performed publicly in recent years, including Vancouver in 2013. Presumably the bees again waived their copyright fees on those occasions.
Rev John Owen
Steep, Hampshire
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