I begin this essay epigrammatically with song, with a single song that came to tell an historical tale of the nineteenth century (Fig. 1, p. 3). We know this single song in many versions, though it is perhaps the second version that most musicians and scholars of the nineteenth century, more accustomed to playing or hearing the keyboard music of Johannes Brahms than singing Child ballads, know best (Ex. 1). In the Brahms setting, the first of his op. 10 Balladen for solo piano, it may perhaps no longer be a song at all, for its narrative has been stripped of words.

‘Invasion from the Orient’; ‘Young Violinists from Asia Gain Major Place on American Musical Scene’; ‘Suzuki's Pupils Learn Music First’: in the 1960s, headlines such as these drew attention to how successfully Asians had made Western art music their own; violinists from Japan were among the first. Observers have speculated on the reasons, but few know enough about Japanese history to realize that the phenomenon had its roots in developments during the Meiji period (1868–1912).

February 1912: The curtain of the Opéra-Comique rises to reveal medieval Brittany. Washerwomen gossip about lepers who walk among the healthy, in defiance of the law. The women hint to Maria that her son, Ervoanik, is in love with the beautiful Aliette, who, it is rumoured, is one of these freely roaming lepers. Ervoanik does love Aliette, and when he informs his parents of his decision to marry her, his father explodes in rage. Doesn't he know that she is the daughter of a leper? Ervoanik refuses to believe it. The hideous appearance of Aliette's mother, Old Tili, betrays her own leprosy as she attempts to lure young children with her singing to eat her infected breads. When Aliette and Ervoanik stop at Old Tili's cottage to rest before making a holy pilgrimage, Tili assumes that Aliette intends to infect him, just as she has infected so many others. When she realizes that Aliette truly loves Ervoanik and plans to live with him chastely, Tili lies, telling her that he already has a wife and children. Aliette confronts Ervoanik, and he claims it is true, as a joke. She immediately touches her lips to a cup of wine and offers it to him. He drinks. In the third act, Ervoanik, now a leper, awaits the procession of the dead, which leads him to his house of exile. Aliette joins him.

Congregational song occupies a central place in the history of Methodism and offers an insight into the theological, doctrinal, cultural and educational principles and practices of the movement. The repertoire, performance styles and musical preferences in evidence across Methodism at different points in its history reflect the historical influences that shaped it, the frequent tensions that emerged between local practices and the movement's hierarchy and the disputes that led to a proliferation of breakaway groups during the nineteenth century. The focus of this article will be the implicit tension between the evidence of local practice contained within the Illingworth Moor Singers' Book, which forms part of the archives at Mount Zion Methodist Church and Heritage Centre, near Halifax, UK, and the repertoire and performance practice advocated by John Wesley in the latter part of the eighteenth century. While the study of a single, locally produced collection cannot be regarded as representative of wider practices, it is nonetheless useful in highlighting the need for a more nuanced approach to the history of Methodist music, which takes account of local circumstances and practices.

To begin with two observations: (1) of the nine songs that eventually came to comprise Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel, two – Nos 4 (‘Youth and Love’) and 9 (‘I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope’) – quote material from earlier songs; and (2) in an article published in 1897, Vaughan Williams criticized some of his predecessors for lacking a ‘nice sense of proportion’ in their music, surely implying, therefore, that he valued it in his own music. And it is with the interaction of those recollections and that ‘nice sense of proportion’ in songs 4 and 9 that we will be concerned.