Description
The composer explains that the folk song The Flowers of the Forest is believed to date from 1513, the time if the battle of Flodden, in the course of which the archers of the Forest (a part of Scotland) were killed almost to a man. Bennett had already used the same tune in his Six Scottish Folksongs (1972) for soprano, tenor and piano, and it is the arrangement he made then that forms the starting-point for the brass-band piece.