Maud Karpeles
[2] Her father, Joseph Nicolaus Karpeles, was a German immigrant who was born in Hamburg, and naturalised as a British subject in 1881.
[1] Like her sisters, Karpeles went to boarding school in Tunbridge Wells, where she learned to play the violin and piano, and studied German.
[3] Started by workers at the Bermondsey Settlement, the guild's mission was to teach girls "vigorous happy dances for recreative purposes on educational lines.
"[4][5] According to founder Grace Kimmins, songs and dances from "Merrie England" would help to counteract the negative influences of urbanisation.
[5] Maud's piano skills were useful in teaching music and movement,[1] and after a while, her younger sister Helen started to help as well.
[2] Sharp had been working with Neal and the Espérance Club in teaching Morris dances and folk songs to girls employed in the dressmaking trade in London, and had had considerable success.
[9][10] In 1910, the Karpeles sisters formed an informal Folk Dance Club, together with a group of girls who had been practicing every week at their parents' house.
[7][8] At the Shakespeare Festival that summer, the Folk Dance Club gave performances each week in the Memorial Theatre Gardens.
[1] In May 1914, Karpeles was involved in Harley Granville-Barker's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Savoy Theatre, which featured folk music and dancing.
[10] With the outbreak of World War I, folk dancing activities were put on hold,[7] and Sharp decided to seek work in the United States to support his family.
[12][10] At first, Sharp and Karpeles were accompanied by John C. Campbell, who introduced them to numerous key contacts and singers, including Edith Fish, a teacher at a Presbyterian mission school, who was a song collector herself.
[7] In May 1924, Karpeles traveled with Sharp through Torquay, Sheffield, Cardiff, Newport, Bath, Birmingham, Lincoln, Norwich, and Ilkley.
[7] Maud Karpeles became Sharp's literary executor after his death, and fought legal battles on behalf of his estate, concerning the legacy of his collections.
[7] The EFDSS elected Karpeles to its Board of Artistic Control in 1932,[7] together with Douglas Kennedy and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
[10] In 1936, she traveled to Yugoslavia to watch dances; the team had been unable to attend the festival the year prior due to costs.
[10] Cecil Sharp's "English Folk Song: Some Conclusions" was considered to be a classic on the subject and Karpeles added material to the second, third and fourth editions.
In 2000, the English Folk Dance and Song Society issued as set of 55 trading cards with a "flicker book" celebrating the heroes of the folk-song revival.
The flicker book shows a Morris dance being performed by Cecil Sharp, Maud and Helen Karpeles.
This Kinora Spool can also be seen on the DVD "Here's a Health to the Barley Mow: A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games" released by the British Film Institute and the EFDSS in 2011, and on YouTube.
