The Gents | Songbook

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latest edit at 1:49 pm PDT, 4/3/2023

Sing of Spring (George & Ira Gershwin) — This is one of two faux madrigals written by the Gershwins for the 1937 musical film A Damsel in Distress, the other being “The Jolly Tar and the Milkmaid.” These are performed by a group of madrigal singers, with Fred Astaire joining in on the latter.

lyric: Genius.com, Lyrics.lol
sheet music, SATB choral octavo: Alfred.com (1), (2), JWPepper.com

From George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, by Walter Rimler, originally published in 2009, p. 144:

In a May 12 [1937] letter to Isaac Goldberg, George said that he and Ira had written [“The Jolly Tar and the Milk Maid” and “Sing of Spring”] “so the audience will get a chance to hear some singing besides the crooning of the stars.”

Excerpts from Ira Gershwin’s book Lyrics on Several Occasions, originally published in 1959 (1997 edition page numbers cited here), pp. 197 and 198, respectively:

The introduction of a group of madrigal singers in Damsel in Distress permitted the writing of a couple of pieces in the style, and with the flavor, of several centuries ago. In “The Jolly Tar and the Milkmaid” we tried for the feel of an English eighteenth-century light ballad.* The “With a hey and a nonny” and “With a down-a, down-a-derry” inclusions, though, are refrain phrases ordinarily associated with songs of an earlier period. These and similar sixteenth-century phrases were attached to the stanzas of many songs for jingle quality and singability.

The other piece we did was a short contrapuntal exercise originally called “Back to Bach”* and here newly worded to “Sing of Spring.” It contained imagined refrain lines like “Sing willy-wally-willo,” “Sing tilly-tally-tillo,” “Piminy mo,” and “Tra la la lo.”

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Unpar Choir (Parahyangan Catholic University Choir) – performance during a 1992 concert at Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, Indonesia

artist links:

The Gents — from the 2012 SACD album George Gershwin, Channel Classics Records bv CCS SA 33312

audio file (MP3) from the page Sing of Spring CTTBB A Cappella, at the site Jetse Bremer: Sheet Music for Choirs:

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University of California Irvine Choir — The Gershwin song is included as part of an event called “Sing of Spring” performed on 25 May 2013, at Winifred Smith Hall in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts Media Center, UCI.

audio player link — “Sing of Spring” begins at about 21:12
audio player link (player only)

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Chamberchoir of the Free University of Amsterdam — 21 June 2014 performance

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* “English eighteenth-century light ballad” and “Back to Bach” — In the 2006 book George Gershwin: His Life and Work, by Howard Pollack, the author questions the 18th-century historical roots suggested by Ira, in Lyrics on Several Occasions, on pages 197 and 198, respectively, of the music of the two choral songs in A Damsel in Distress.

Regarding “The Jolly Tar,” Pollack says that “the number seems more patently descended from Gilbert and Sullivan,” whose fourteen comic operas were created between 1871 and 1896. (p. 680)
Pollack praises “Sing of Spring” as “an exquisite idyll that contains, nonetheless, some wayward blue notes and whimsical nonsense refrains.” Yet he again finds Ira Gershwin’s historical reference — Bach lived 1685 to 1750 — off the mark, opining that the music “evokes nineteen-century British traditions–“the circumstance,” commented Oscar Levant, “if not the pomp of Elgar.”” (pp. 680 and 681)

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Ordinarily I like to include at least eight or ten recordings in a post focused on a single song. It’s not for want of trying that I’ve only collected three recordings of “Sing of Spring” that I was able to insert into a post, and one other located within audio players elsewhere that I could only provide links to. While happily engaged for several months in the hunt, however, I did notice that the song has been performed, often during events celebrating spring, by various chamber choirs, chorales, and other singing ensembles. Most of the groups listed below have performed the song after the year 2000, exceptions noted, and it is listed in the current repertoire of at least one of them.

Some singing groups not featured in this post that have performed “Sing of Spring”:

West End Chamber Choir – repertoire
Cantabile Chamber Chorale
Interlochen Arts Academy Choir
Chamber Singers of Iowa City
Vashon Island Chorale
University of Nevada, Las Vegas Chamber Chorale
Arizona Repertory Singers
Hendricks Chapel Choir – 1981 performance
Gregg Smith Singers — 1976 recording