A school-gate chat led to the rediscovery of the late composer Dolly Collins’ Missa Humana, as her folk star sister, the writer Maureen Duffy and medieval academic Lawrence Warner explain
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.
