Music Research Seminar: Christopher & Morag Butler

Event abstract

My wife Morag and myself had always had an interested in the English folk music scene. She has sung in the folk tradition ever since she was a girl in Newcastle-on-Tyne. I have supported her in this since we met in 1978, having an interest in traditional ballads derived from studying Classics, an interest in working-people’s music from being a carpenter for much of my working life and an interest in the social and healing aspects of community music derived from working latterly as a psychotherapist and welfare manager in various setting including Royal Holloway College.  When Morag and I retired from full-time work, we thought a worthwhile project would be to open a folk music venue somewhere that does not currently have one. So we bought Rosslyn Court, an old run-down 10 bedroom hotel in Cliftonville, Margate, Kent. Cliftonville was in Edwardian times a highly affluent holiday resort serving wealthy Londoners, but it had fallen on extreme hard times, becoming one of the most deprived parts of the country. Immediately we started, it became obvious that the project had the potential to be a worthwhile piece of research. It spanned the fields of management, of sociology, of human geography, of psychology and of music My former colleagues in the Royal Holloway Music Department were most welcoming when I proposed researching the project, so I am now working on a thesis that involves the investigation of some of the key factors involved in running a progressive contemporary English folk music venue in a deprived area by studying the founding and growth of this new venue, Rosslyn Court, for the six year period between its inception in 2018 and 2024. The venue has been remarkably and unexpectedly successful, given the pressures under which grassroots venues are currently labouring.

I am researching within the tradition of applied ethnomusicology as, in addition to encompassing the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding, it also seeks to be guided by principles of social responsibility in solving concrete problems and toward working beyond typical academic contexts, two areas in which our work at Rosslyn Court has particularly addressed .We are aware that there is much debate in the field, not least at this year’s BFE conference in Cork which we attended and addressed as part of Sheffield University’s Access Folk presentation, about how interventive applied ethnomusicologists can be, given that any form of observation necessarily affect the field. This piece of research is at the extreme end of participative intervention, as I have not merely observed and documented a typical folk English folk music venue but rather have been, with Morag, party to the creation of a whole new venue and to furnishing it with a new approach to the definition and promotion of English folk music, actively supported by Arts Council England, the English Folk Dance and Song Society and by Sheffield University and Royal Holloway.

Morag has kindly agreed to accompany me and to enliven the presentation with relevant snatches of both traditional and contemporary English folk.

About Christopher Butler 

Christopher graduated from Royal Holloway in 1972 with a degree in Classics. Having spent a few years teaching in a Tottenham comprehensive, he regretfully concluded that there were more useful skllls to be imparted to young people in a deprived area than Latin and Ancient Greek , so he retrained as a carpenter and worked in a community workshop in North London teaching carpentry to disadvantaged young people. He also trained and worked voluntarily as a psychotherapist with RELATE. In 1994 when he and Morag adopted three children, he transferred to working full time as a salaried psychotherapist, firstly with RELATE where he co-authored the first handbook of the RELATE therapeutic method (Counselling Couples in Relationships: A guide to the RELATE approach, Wiley 1998), then as Head of Student Counselling at Royal Holloway and thereafter as Head of Student Welfare. Retiring at 65 in 2017, having had a lifelong interest in English folk music, he supported his wife Morag in setting up Rosslyn Court, an English Folk Music venue. He is now researching this venue for a PhD at Royal Holloway and has worked with Access Folk at the University of Sheffield and is awaiting publication of an article on running a folk venue in the International Journal of Traditional Arts.