Maud Karpeles

Maud Karpeles (12 November 1885 – 1 October 1976) was an English collector of folksongs and dance teacher.

Maud Pauline Karpeles was born in London in 1885 to Jewish parents. After leaving school, she studied piano for six months at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. In 1892 a women's settlement had been created in Cumberland Road, Canning Town, the purpose of which was to enable the poorest girls to take part in sport and cultural activities. Karpeles became a Fabian, joined the settlement as a social worker and began look for "something creative for a girls' club to do".

Together with her sister Helen Karpeles (1887–1976) she went to the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival in 1909, where they first encountered folk dances and songs. This inspired Maud to create a folk dance club at the Canning Town Settlement. When Cecil Sharp gave lectures on folk dance, it was her folk dance club that demonstrated them. The English Folk Dance Society (EFDS) was founded in 1911, with Karpeles' dancers at the heart of it. Karpeles became as much interested in the songs as the dances, and joined Sharp on collecting expeditions. Sharp, a married man with children, allowed Karpeles to share his house for long periods.

In 1914 Sharp went to the USA to a Shakespeare production to teach choreographed folk dances to the actors, and to give lectures. Later in 1914, all folk dancing lectures and classes ceased during the First World War. Sharp's first collaborator had been Mary Neal. She had formed another dance group, the Espérance Club of Morris Dancers. When Mary Neal moved in the direction of Women's Suffrage, Sharp distanced himself from her, and instead made Maud Karpeles his colleague and assistant. Sharp returned to the Appalachian Mountains in 1916, this time together with Maud Karpeles, who was then 31. They collected over 1,500 tunes (over 500 different songs and variants) in a period of 46 weeks in isolated communities often reached only by mule. Many of these songs were clearly and importantly related to songs they had encountered in England. This strengthened their conviction that folk songs were subject to a kind of Darwinian selection over generations, and diffusion across the sea. These songs and tunes were published in 1932.

At the end of the war in 1918, neither Mary Neal's Espérance Guild nor Maud's group reformed. Effectively the folk dance movement changed from being working class to being middle class. Sharp arranged for teachers to give classes in country dance and Morris to members of the society, using his books for guidance. Choirs were created to sing folk songs in unison, even though all the singers who had provided the songs, had normally sung solo. After about 1920, Sharp ceased to collect dances - he was then in his 60s - but Karpeles was only 45 in 1920, and continued to collect.. She collected clog-Morris dances from the north-west of England, in Royton and Abram. She continued to collect English country dances in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 Cecil Sharp House opened and William Kimber and Maud Karpeles laid the foundation stone.

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