A very different approach to polyphony marks the astonishingly original “Sumer Is Icumen In,” the one piece of music from this whole period that is still sung regularly by student choirs and others. This piece is a canon or round, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Frère Jacques,” but the melody is much longer. It survives in one manuscript, with no author’s name. Its words, a bucolic celebration of the arrival of summer, form one of the earliest lyric poems in English — Middle English, that is, a much earlier stage of today’s English. Here is a free translation of it:
| Summer is a- |
Cow after calf makes moo; |
| Loudly sing cuckoo! | Bullock stamps and deer champs, |
| Groweth seed, bloometh the meadow, | Merry sing cuckoo! |
| And springs the wood anew; | Cuckoo, cuckoo, |
| Sing cuckoo! | Well singest thou, cuckoo, |
| Ewe bleateth after lamb, | Be never still, cuckoo! |
Four voices carry the tune; two more voices below them repeat “sing cuckoo” over and over again. Our recording starts with them and goes on to add the main melody sung by one voice, then, in staggered fashion, by two, then by four. Written sometime after 1250 in the major mode, not one of the medieval ones, the song packs an infectious swing that sounds like five (or eight) centuries later.