Let me live in Buckinghamshire

A light-hearted song for solo voice and piano in praise of Buckinghamshire.

I wrote this song while at university. The story behind it is a conversation I had with friends about songs that celebrate particular cities or counties. I was explaining that Adge Cutler, founder of the Wurzels, had written the song Drink up thy Zider for use in Somerset pub sing-alongs since he was fed up of having to sing Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner and I Belong to Glasgow, being neither a Londoner nor Glaswegian.

My friend James recalled that he'd been made to sing Sussex by the Sea as part of a county-wide schools event, but another of my friends, Paul McClarty, could not think of any similar song for Buckinghamshire. What a shame. Well, we couldn't have that, so I wrote him one and this is it.

Summary information

• Voicing: Solo voice

• Notes on ambitus: 1 octave, E flat to E flat, though brave singers might attempt a top A flat for the last note.

• Instrumentation: Piano

• Approximate performance length: 3:30

• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Releases

Version 1.0

Initial release:

• Sheet music (PDF, A4) for solo voice and piano.

• MIDI preview; this is as it comes from Lilypond, so do not expect too much from it.

MP3 rendering of the MIDI preview.

Source code

This piece was written using Lilypond. The source code for it is available from my GitLab repository. To compile it yourself, you will also need my house style files.