Reading of Donald Swann last week reminded Eye of Donald's contribution to the founding of the The Leaveners, an idea taken from his musical play The Yeast Factory, written with the Quaker librettist Alec Davison. The central song from this was seminal at street theatre events during residential Yearly Meeting at Lancaster in 1978.

Donald became a patron of the new Quaker Youth Theatre and opened the first Leaveners Arts Base in Highbury. It was from QYT's musical and choral work that the Quaker Festival Orchestra and Chorus were inaugurated at the Royal Festival Hall in 1985 with Tony Biggin's oratorio, The Gates of Greenham.

As a result of this public declaration that the Society of Friends could break with over 300 years of antipathy to music and the arts, Donald became a Quaker. Even though he had been in the Friends Ambulance Unit during the war, he had remained an Anglican, feeling that no spirituality rejecting song could be his. Living in Battersea, he joined Wandsworth meeting.

Sheila Hancock was one of the two narrators in the oratorio. She was a Greenham woman on a spiritual quest herself and, prompted by the event to go to an enquirers' gathering at Charney Manor, also became a Friend soon after.

Eye also hears that Barry and Gill Wilsher were sad that there was no mention in our profile of the six-year-long run of Soundings by Swann which preceded Swann with Topping by several years.

In Soundings Donald explored new forms of church liturgy and its attendant music. The show toured churches and cathedrals throughout the UK and also had a three-week run in the USA. It went out about once a month during the six years following its opening at the Edinburgh Fringe in the mid-1960s.

Barry's main contribution was to narrate a half-hour-long Jewish tale to which Donald had set music for his Swann singers (mentioned by Simon Risley) and a locally recruited children's choir.

Gill Wilsher marshalled these forces and directed the show. Donald's name was good enough to bring in large audiences from these various congregations of mainly Anglicans and United Reformed churches. Sidney Carter joined the group on the American trip, and he and Donald gave several concerts together in that time.

Barry Wilsher continued: 'One memorable performance was given at Selly Oak to a triennial conference of European and Near East Friends. This came in late 1969 and was instrumental in bringing us into Friends. We had hitherto no "religious" leanings being a lapsed Anglican and Methodist respectively, but exposure to people of faith softened us up so that we were primed and ready for Quakerism.'

Labels: davison, musical, swann, wilsher