In the liner notes for her 1969 folk album Anthems in Eden, Shirley Collins wrote about the musician with whom she made it: her big sister, Dolly. Dolly had arranged the ambitious song cycle about changes in rural England, weaving rare early music instruments such as sackbuts, crumhorns and viols around her sister’s stark English voice.
Anthems in Eden was a landmark album but Dolly’s next project was to be bigger. “Now she lives in a cottage in Hastings and is currently working on a full-scale secular Mass,” Shirley wrote. Dolly finally finished it decades later – not long before her sudden death in 1995 aged 62. Having gone nearly three decades unheard, the mass – titled Missa Humana – finally gets its world premiere next Saturday at London’s Conway Hall.
The story of how Missa Humana was made, lost and found is a touching one. It begins with a friendship fostered in the early 1960s Hastings folk scene between Dolly and the poet, novelist and pioneering LGBTQ+ rights activist Maureen Duffy. Missa Humana was originally a poem in her 1968 collection Lyrics for the Dog Hour, following the parts of a Catholic mass from Kyrie to Amen, but forgoing religion for allusions to contemporary events and nature. Here were men walking in the stars and petals of light scattering from what could be an atomic explosion.
Dolly had recently returned to making music with Shirley at this time. She was born two years before Shirley in 1933, and the sisters had performed together as teenagers before going their separate ways in their 20s. Shirley headed to London to become a folk singer, then to the US with Alan Lomax to collect traditional music. Dolly studied composition at the Workers’ Music Association under radical English composer Alan Bush, and lived in a doubledecker bus parked in a field in East Sussex with a piano squeezed inside.
After 1967, the Collins sisters made four albums together, Dolly arranging the songs in a stark, plaintive style, often playing on a recreation of an early-music portative organ. Dolly also arranged music for the Incredible String Band and Spirogyra, as well as for Duffy. She continued making music around work as a gardener, when she realised touring and gigging weren’t for her.
She finished Missa Humana in the early 1990s. “I would travel up from my awful job at the Brighton jobcentre to where she lived in Lincolnshire and hear her play it,” Shirley remembers. “It was very lovely music, often beautiful, but it also had a toughness about it. It was never sentimental.”
Around the same time, Shirley became friends with Current 93 musician David Tibet, who was gently encouraging her to try singing again. (Shirley suffered from dysphonia from 1978, when she made her last studio album with Dolly, For As Many As Will; she finally sang on stage with Tibet in 2014, later releasing two critically acclaimed albums, Lodestar and Heart’s Ease). Tibet also met Dolly in Lincolnshire and recorded her playing Missa Humana on the piano. Having moved back to Sussex for the last few years of her life, Dolly died of a heart attack in September 1995, the morning after one of her regular country walks with her sister on which she taught Shirley the names of wildflowers.
Twenty years later, Maureen Duffy, then 82, attended a medieval studies conference at King’s College London and mentioned to Lawrence Warner, co-director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, that her 1966 play The Silk Room was inspired by the folk scene of her native Sussex, of which Shirley and Dolly were part. She added: “Dolly was a great friend of mine who died young, and Dolly set a whole text of mine to music, which I’ve never been able to hear.” This was an animating force for Warner: “That felt like something that had to be put right,” he says.
At a school concert some time later, Warner was speaking to a parent about one of Duffy’s novels when a third parent overheard. He turned out to be the conductor John Andrews. “John was interested in neglected English composers, and talk turned to Missa Humana,” Warner recalls. “He was very excited, saying: ‘Are you able to find the score?’ And that’s where the hunt started.”
Duffy didn’t know if one existed. One eventually turned up in her house after much searching by friends and family. Warner tracked down Shirley Collins and “nearly collapsed” when she sent him an email about Tibet’s recording, which helped Andrews immensely.
An excerpt of it can be heard on Spotify, on the soundtrack to the 2017 film The Ballad of Shirley Collins. In the clip Dolly, not usually a singer, is singing the Amen of the mass and playing it on the piano, its pastoral melody leaping and falling, holding resonances of Delius and Virginia Astley.
Warner finds Tibet’s recording “haunting and very poignant, partly because of the unusual melodies on the piano, but also knowing she would die a few years later, never being able to hear it fully formed”. On Saturday it will be performed in full, as will another song that was discovered, with Lisa Knapp singing. Maureen Duffy will also be in attendance.
Shirley is delighted about the premiere, she says, “although of course, I’m also so heartbroken that Dolly won’t be there to hear it”. But when she thinks of Dolly playing it, she always returns to an image from the last years of her life in Sussex: “in the cottage where she lived, on this beautiful little piano she had made of wood that was painted golden. The sunlight would fall through the window on to her, and Dolly would just gleam and glow. That’s what her mass being played means to me.”